Games People Play_ The Psychology of Human Relationships - Eric Berne [72]
The aware person is alive because he knows how he feels, where he is and when it is. He knows that after he dies the trees will still be there, but he will not be there to look at them again, so he wants to see them now with as much poignancy as possible.
Spontaneity. Spontaneity means option, the freedom to choose and express one’s feelings from the assortment available (Parent feelings, Adult feelings and Child feelings). It means liberation, liberation from the compulsion to play games and have only the feelings one was taught to have.
Intimacy. Intimacy means the spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware person, the liberation of the eidetically perceptive, uncorrupted Child in all its naïveté living in the here and now. It can be shown experimentally3 that eidetic perception evokes affection, and that candidness mobilizes positive feelings, so that there is even such a thing as ‘one-sided intimacy’ – a phenomenon well known, although not by that name, to professional seducers who are able to capture their partners without becoming involved themselves. This they do by encouraging the other person to look at them directly and to talk freely, while the male or female seducer makes only a well-guarded pretence of reciprocating.
Because intimacy is essentially a function of the natural Child (although expressed in a matrix of psychological and social complications), it tends to turn out well if not disturbed by the intervention of games. Usually the adaptation to Parental influences is what spoils it, and most unfortunately this is almost a universal occurrence. But before, unless and until they are corrupted, most infants seem to be loving,4 and that is the essential nature of intimacy, as shown experimentally.
REFERENCES
1. Berne, E., ‘Intuition IV: Primal Images & Primal Judgments’, Psychiatric Quarterly, 29: 634–658, 1955.
2. Jaensch, E. R., Eidetic Imagery, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1930.
3. These experiments are still in the pilot stage at the San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars. The effective experimental use of transactional analysis requires special training and experience, just as the effective experimental use of chromatography or infra-red spectrophotometry does. Distinguishing a game from a pastime is no easier than distinguishing a star from a planet. See Berne, E., ‘The Intimacy Experiment’, Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 3: 113, 1964; ‘More About Intimacy’, ibid., 3: 125, 1964.
4. Some infants are corrupted or starved very early (marasmus, some colics) and never have a chance to exercise this capacity.
17 · The Attainment of Autonomy
PARENTS, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, think, feel and perceive. Liberation from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply ingrained and are necessary during the first two or three decades of life for biological and social survival. Indeed, such liberation is only possible at all because the individual starts off in an autonomous state, that is, capable of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy, and he has some discretion as to which parts of his parents’ teachings he will accept. At certain specific moments early in life he decides how he is going to adapt to them. It is because his adaptation is in the nature of a series of decisions that it can be undone, since decisions are reversible under favourable circumstances.
The attainment of autonomy, then, consists of the overthrow of all those irrelevancies discussed in Chapters 13, 14 and 15. And such overthrow is never final: there is a continual battle against sinking back into the old ways.
First, as discussed in Chapter 13, the weight