Games People Play By Dr. Eric Berne

Games People Play
The Psychology of Human Relationships

In this book Games People Play, Dr. Eric Berne has put into context the unthinkable issues underlining the psychology of human relationships. He started the book by over viewing the human brain function, the ego states of mind, and different components of each individual’s personality before proceeding to the main menu “Games” or Transactions.

The human brain is the organ or organizer of the psychic life, and its products are organized and stored on the form of Ego States.

Psychic Attitudes: in a given individual a certain set of behaviour patterns correspond to one state of mind, while another set is related to a different psychic attitude, often inconsistent with the first. These changes give rise to the idea of the Ego States.

There are three categories of Ego states: Parent, Adult and Child

-Ego States, which resemble those of parental figure.

-Ego States which are autonomously directed toward objective evaluation of the reality.

-And Ego States, which represent archaic relics, still-active ego states which were fixated in early childhood.

These observations give rise to certain diagnostic statements, according to Dr. Berne

The complete personality of any person includes his/her Parental, Adult and Child ego states. They are carefully separated from each other, because they are often very inconsistent with each other.

Once the above roots of human behaviour are understood, the game playing or the situational part is much easier and fun to absorb. It is an excellent book, never went out of print for 40 decades straight.