Games People Play_ The Psychology of Human Relationships - Eric Berne [69]
NOTE
The reader should now be in a position to appreciate the basic difference between mathematical and transactional game analysis. Mathematical game analysis postulates players who are completely rational. Transactional game analysis deals with games which are un-rational, or even irrational, and hence more real.
14 · The Players
MANY games are played most intensely by disturbed people; generally speaking, the more disturbed they are, the harder they play. Curiously enough, however, some schizophrenics seem to refuse to play games, and demand candidness from the beginning. In everyday life games are played with the greatest conviction by two classes of individuals: the Sulks, and the Jerks or Squares.
The Sulk is a man who is angry at his mother. On investigation it emerges that he has been angry at her since early childhood. He often has good ‘Child’ reasons for his anger: she may have ‘deserted’ him during a critical period in his boyhood by getting sick and going to the hospital, or she may have given birth to too many siblings. Sometimes the desertion is more deliberate; she may have farmed him out in order to remarry. In any case, he has been sulking ever since. He does not like women, although he may be a Don Juan. Since sulking is deliberate at its inception, the decision to sulk can be reversed at any period of life, just as it can be during childhood when it comes time for dinner. The requirements for reversing the decision are the same for the grown-up Sulk as for the little boy. He must be able to save face, and he must be offered something worthwhile in exchange for the privilege of sulking. Sometimes a game of ‘Psychiatry’ which might otherwise last several years can be aborted by reversing a decision to sulk. This requires careful preparation of the patient and proper timing and approach. Clumsiness or bullying on the part of the therapist will have no better result than it does with a sulky little boy; in the long run, the patient will pay the therapist back for his mishandling just as the little boy will eventually repay clumsy parents.
With female Sulks the situation is the same, mutatis mutandis, if they are angry at father. Their Wooden Leg (‘What do you expect of a woman who had a father like that?’) must be handled with even more diplomacy by a male therapist. Otherwise he risks being thrown into the wastebasket of ‘men who are like father’.
There is a bit of Jerk in everyone, but the object of game analysis is to keep it at a minimum. A Jerk is someone who is overly sensitive to Parental influences. Hence his Adult data processing and his Child’s spontaneity are likely to be interfered with at critical moments, resulting in inappropriate or clumsy behaviour. In extreme cases the Jerk merges with the Toady, the Show-off, and the Cling. The Jerk is not to be confused with the bewildered schizophrenic, who has no functioning Parent and very little functioning Adult, so that he has to cope with the world in the ego state of a confused Child. It is interesting that in common usage ‘jerk’ is an epithet applied to men only, or in rare cases to masculine women. A Prig is even more of a Square than a Jerk; Prig is a word usually reserved for women, but occasionally it is said of men of somewhat feminine tendencies.
15 · A Paradigm
CONSIDER the following exchange between a patient (P) and a therapist (T):
P. ‘I have a new project – being on time.’
T. ‘I’ll try to cooperate.’
P. ‘I don’t care about you. I’m doing it for myself…. Guess what grade I got on my history test!’
T. ‘B+.’
P. ‘How did you know?’
T. ‘Because you’re afraid to get an A.’
P. ‘Yes, I had an A, and I went over my paper and crossed out three correct answers and put in three wrong ones.’
T. ‘I like this conversation. It’s Jerk-free.’
P. ‘You know, last night I was thinking how much progress I’ve made. I figured I was only 17 per cent Jerk now.’
T. ‘Well, so far this morning it’s zero, so you’re entitled to 34 per cent discount on the next round.’
P. ‘It all began six months ago, that time I was looking at