 
Message-ID: 
Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 15:22:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Jon C. Slenk" 
To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu,
    The Dan & Eric Mailing List 
Subject: Some thoughts
Fred: is Not

While this might not interest everyone, I thought it was poignant
and well worth reading. So there.

:-)

----------------------------------------

Games People Play Eric Berne, M.D.

Copyright 1964 Eric Berne

Copied without permission.

Each individual seems to have available a limited repertoire of such ego
states, which are not roles but psychological realities. This
repertoire can be sorted into the following categories: (1) ego states
which resemble those of parental figures (2) ego states which are
autonomously directed toward objective appraisal of reality and (3)
those which represent archaic relics, still-active ego states which
were fixated in early childhood. Technically these are called,
respectively, exteropsychic, neopsychic, and archaeopsychic ego
states.  Colloquially their exhibitions are called Parent, Adult and
Child, and these simple terms serve for all but the most formal
discussions.

"That is your Parent" means: "You are now in the same state of mind as
one of your parents (or a parental substitute) used to be, and you are
responding as he would, with the same posture, gestures, vocabulary,
feelins, etc." "That is your Adult" means: "You have just made an
autonomous, objective appraisal of the situation and are stating these
thought-processes, or the problems you perceive, or the conclusions you
have come to, in a non-prejudicial manner." "That is your Child" means:
"The manner and intent of your reaction is the same as it would have
been when you were a little boy or girl."

The attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of
three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy.

Awareness. Awareness means the capacity to see a coffee-pot and hear
the birds sing in one's own way, andnot the way one was taught. It may
be assumed on good grounds that seeing and hearing have a different
quality for infants than for grownups, and that they are more esthetic
and less intellectual in the first years of life.

Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the
elsewhere, the past or the future. A good illustration of
possibilities, in American life, is driving to work in the morning in a
hurry. The decisive question is: "Where is the mind when the body is
here?" and there are three common cases.

1. The man whose chief preoccupation is being on time i sthe one who is
furthest out. This is the Jerk, whose chief concern is how it will look
to the boss. If he is late, he will take pains to arrive out of breath.
The compliant Child is in command, and his game is "Look How Hard I've
Tried." While he is driving, he is almost completely lacking in
autonomy, and as a human being he is in essence more dead than alive.
It is quite possible that this is the most favorable condition for the
development of hypertension or coronary disease.

2. The Sulk, on the other hand, is not so much concerned with arriveing
on time as in collecting excuses for being late. Mishaps... are
secretly welcomed as contributions to his rebellious Child or righteous
Parent game of "Look What They Made Me Do." He, too, is oblivious to
his surroundings except as they subscribe to his game, so that he is
only half alive. His body is in his car, but his mind is out searching
for blemishes and injustices.

3. Less common is the "natural driver," the man to whom driving a car
is a congenial science and art. As he makes his way swiftly and
skillfully through traffic, he is at one with his vehicle. He, too, is
oblivious of his surroundings except as they offer scope for the
craftsmanship which is its own rewarad, but he is very much aware of
himself and the machine which he controls so well, and to that extent
he is alive. Such driving is formally an Adult pastime from which his
Child and Parent may also derive satisfaction.

4. The fourth case is the person who is aware, and who will not hurry
because he is living in the present moment with the environment which
is here: the sky and the trees aas well as the feeling of motion. To
hurry is to neglect that environment and to be conscious only of
something that is still out of sight down the road, or of mere
obstacles, or solely of oneself.

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 teh assortment available (Parent feelings,
Adult feelings, Child feelings). It means liiberation, liiberation 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 naivete living in the here and now. It can be shown
experimentally that eidetic perception evokes affection, and that
candidness mobilizes positive feelings.

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 will 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 univeral
occurrence. But before, unless and until they are corrupted, most
infants seem to be loving, and that is the essential nature of
intimacy, as shown experimentally.

The attainment of autonomy, then, consists of the overthrow of all
those irrelevancies. And such overthrow is never final: there is a
continual battle against sinking back into the old ways.

First, the weight of a whole tribal or family historical tradition has
to be lifted, as in the case of Margaret Mead's villagers in New
Guinea; then the influence of the individual parental, social and
cultural background has to be thrown off. The same must be done with
the demands of contemporary society at large, and finally the
advantages dericed from one's immediate socail circle have to be partly
or wholly sacrificed. Then all the easy indulgences and rewards of
being a Sulk or a Jerk have to be given up. Following this, the
individual must attain personal and social control, so that all the
classes of behavior, except perhaps dreams, become free choices subject
only to his will. At this point he may be able to develop his
capacities for autonomy. In essence, this whole preparation consists of
obtaining a friendly divorce from one's parents (and from other
Parental influences) so that they may be agreeably visited on occasion,
but are no longer dominant.

The somber picture presented in [the early parts of] this book, in
which human life is mainly a process of filling in time until the
arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of
what kind, of what kind of buisness one is going to transact during the
long wait, is a commonplace but not the final answer. For certain
fortuante people there is something which transcends all
classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something which
rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and
something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But
all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the
unprepared. Perhaps they are better off as they are, seeking their
solutions in popular techniques of social action, such as
"togetherness." This may mean that there is no hope for the human race,
but there is hope for individual members of it.

----------------------------------------------------
Jon Slenk          Carnegie Mellon    EVERYTHING is
angst+@cmu.edu     Pittsburgh PA      Disclaimed

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