/author/Eric%20Berne

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A flyer looks at his map and sees a telephone pole and a silo. He looks at the ground and sees a telephone pole and a silo. He says: 'Now I know where we are,' but he is actually lost. His friend says: 'Wait a minute. On the ground are a telephone pole, a silo, and an oil derrick. Find those on the map.' 'Well,' says the flyer, ' the pole and the silo are there, but the derrick isn't. Maybe they left it out.' So his friend says: 'Lend me the map.' He looks over the whole map, including sections that the flyer ignored because he thought he knew where he was. The friend finds, twenty miles off their charted course, a pole, a silo, and a derrick. 'We're not here,' he says, 'where you had your pencil mark, but away over there.' 'Oh, sorry,' says the pilot. \r\n\r\nThe moral is, look at the ground first, and then at the map, and not vice versa. \r\n \r\nIn other words, the therapist listens to the patient and gets the plot of his script first, then he looks in Andrew Lang or Stith Thompson, and not vice versa. In that way he will get a sound match, and not just a bright idea. Then he can use the fairy tale to predict where the patient is headed, verifying from the patient (not from the book) all the way.

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It may be pointed out that Freud himself was a script-ridden person, a fact which he openly acknowledged. His heroes were military ones, and he passionately admired Bonaparte. His metaphors were often taken from the battlefield, and so was some of his vocabulary. His slogan is given in the epigraph to his book on dreams, which in my edition reads: 'Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo,' roughly translated as 'If I can't bend the heavens, I'll raise Hell,' which he did.

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The unconscious has become fashionable, and hence grossly overrated. That is, by far the larger percentage of what is called unconscious nowadays is not unconscious, but preconscious. The patient, however, will oblige the therapist who is looking for 'unconscious' material by advancing preconscious material with a spurious label. This is easily verified by asking the patient, 'Was it really unconscious, or was it just vaguely conscious?' True unconscious material (for example, the original castration fear and the original Oedipal rage) is truly unconscious, and not vaguely conscious.

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Nearly all anger is part of a game of 'Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch' (NIGYSOB). ('Thank you for giving me an excuse to get angry.') Jeder is in fact pleased at being wronged, since he has been carrying around a bag of anger since early childhood and it is a relief to vent some of it legitimately. ('Who wouldn't get angry under such conditions?') The question here is whether abreaction is beneficial. Freud long ago said it didn't do the job. Nowadays, however, for most group therapists it is the mark of a 'good' group meeting , and leads to lively staff conferences. Everybody is delighted and exhilarated and relieved when a patient 'expresses anger.

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The commonest breathing sounds and their usual meanings are as follows: coughs (nobody loves me), sighs (if only), yawns (buzz off), grunts (you said it), and sobs (you got me).

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Script analysis is then the answer to the problem of human destiny, and tells us (alas!) that our fates are predetermined for the most part, and that free will in this respect is for most people an illusion. For example, R. Allendy points out that for each individual who faces it, the decision to commit suicide is a lonely and agonizing and apparently autonomous one. Yet whatever vicissitudes it goes through in each individual case, the 'rate' of suicide remains relatively constant from year to year. \r\n \r\nWhat, then, is the responsibility of the parents? Script programming is not their 'fault,' any more than an inherited defect is, such as diabetes or clubfoot, or an inherited talent for music or mathematics. They are merely passing on the dominants and recessives they got from their parents and grandparents. The script directives are being continually reshuffled, just as the genes are, by the fact that the child requires two parents. \r\n \r\nOn the other hand, the script apparatus is much more flexible than the genetic apparatus and is continually being modified by outside influences, such as life experience and the injunctions inserted by other people. It is only rarely possible to predict when or how an outsider will say or do something that alters a person's script. It may be a casual remark accidentally overheard at a carnival or in a corridor, or it may be the result of a formal relationship such as marriage, school, or psychotherapy.

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There are two requirements for the transmission of the script. Jeder must be able, ready, and willing or even eager to accept it, and his parents must want to pass it on. \r\n \r\nOn Jeder's side, he is able because his nervous system is constructed for the purpose of being programmed, to receive sensory and social stimuli and organize them into patterns which will regulate his behavior. As his body and his mind mature, he becomes readier and readier for more and more complex types of programming. And he is willing to accept it because he needs ways to structure his time and organize his activities. In fact he is not only willing, he is eager, because he is more than a passive computer. Like most animals, he has a craving for 'closure,' the need to finish what he begins; and beyond that, he has the great human aspiration for purpose. \r\n \r\nStarting off with random movements, he ends up knowing what to say after he says Hello. At first he is content with instrumental responses, and they become goals in themselves: incorporation, elimination, intrusion, and locomotion, to use Erikson's terms. Here we find the beginnings of Adult craftsmanship, his pleasure in the act and its successful completion: getting the food safely off the spoon and into his mouth, walking on his own across the floor. Initially his goal is to walk, then it is to walk to something. Once he walks to people, he has to know what to do after he gets there. At first they smile and hug him, and all he has to do is be, or at most, cuddle. They expect nothing from him beyond getting there. Later they do expect something, so he learns to say Hello. After a while, that is not enough either, and they expect more. So he learns to offer them various stimuli in order to get their responses in return. Thus he is eternally grateful (believe it or not) to his parents for giving him a pattern: how to approach people in such a way as to get the desired responses. This is structure hunger, pattern hunger, and in the long run, script hunger. So the script is accepted because Jeder is script hungry. \r\n \r\nOn the parents' side, they are able, ready, and willing because of what has been built into them through eons of evolution: a desire to nurture, protect, and teach their offspring, a desire which can only be suppressed by the most powerful inner and outer forces. But beyond that, if they themselves have been properly 'scripted,' they are not only willing, but eager, and derive great enjoyment from child-rearing.

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Two other slogans common among therapists are also common among the general population: 'You can't tell people what to do,' and 'I can't help you, you have to help yourself.' Both of these are outright falsehoods. \r\n\r\nYou can tell people what to do, and many of them will do it and do it well. And you can help people, and they don't have to help themselves. They merely have to get up, after you have helped them, and go about their business. But with slogans such as those, society (and I mean all societies) encourages people to stay in their scripts and carry them through to their often tragic endings. A script merely means that someone told the person what to do a long time ago and he decided to do it. This demonstrates that you can tell people what to do, and are in fact telling them all the time, especially if you have children. So if you tell people to do something other than what their parents told them, they may decide to follow your advice or instructions. And it is well known that you can help people get drunk, or kill themselves, or kill someone else; therefore, you can also help them stop drinking, or stop killing themselves, or stop killing other people. It is certainly possible to give people permission to do certain things, or to stop doing certain things which they were ordered in childhood to keep doing. Instead of encouraging people to live bravely in an old unhappy world, it is possible to have them live happily in a brave new world.

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Besides the biological and psychological characteristics of the human organism which allow the preprogrammed script to become the master of personal destiny, societies are set up in such a way as to encourage this lack of autonomy. This is done by means of the transactional social contract, which reads: 'You accept my persona or self-presentation, and I'll accept yours.' Any abrogation of this contract, unless it is one specifically permitted in a given group, is regarded as rudeness. The result is a lack of confrontation: confrontation with others and confrontation with oneself, for behind this social contract lies a hidden individual contract between the three aspects of the personality. The Parent, Child, and Adult agree among themselves to accept each other's self-presentation, and not everyone is courageous enough to change such a contract with oneself when it is advisable.

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It is important to realize that certain genocidal aspects of human nature have remained unchanged during the past five thousand years regardless of any genetic evolution which has taken place during this period; they also remain immune to environmental and social influences. One of these is the prejudice against darker people which has persisted unchanged since the dawn of recorded time in ancient Egypt, whose 'miserable people of Cush' are still represented in oppressed Negro populations throughout the world. The other is 'search and destroy' warfare. For example: '234 Viet Cong ambushed and killed' and '237 villagers slaughtered in Viet Nam' (Both from US Army reports, 1969). Compare: \r\n \r\n>800 of their soldiers by my arms I destroyed; their populace in the flames I burned; their boys, their maidens, I dishonored. 1000 of their warriors' corpses on a hill I piled up. On the first of May, I killed 800 of their fighting men, I burned their many houses, their boys and maidens I dishonored... \r\n (From the Annals of Assur-Nasir-Pal, Cloumn II, about 870 B.C.E.) \r\n \r\nThus for at least 2800 years there have been willing and eager corpse-counters. The good guys end up as 'casualties;' the bad guys as 'bodies,' 'dead,' or 'corpses.

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Imprinting has been mainly studied in birds, who will mistake for their mothers whatever objects are shown to them during the early days of their existence outside the egg. Thus ducks can be 'imprinted' or turned on by a piece of colored cardboard, and will follow it around a track as though it were their mother. Sexual fetishes, which also develop very early in life, exert a similar influence on men, while women may become devoted to counter fetishes which they discover are sexually exciting to the men around them.\r\n \r\nFascinations and fetishes are very deep-seated, and may seriously disturb the smooth course of living in those who are afflicted with them, very much as drug addiction does. In spite of all attempts at rational Adult control, the Child is almost irresistibly repulsed or attracted to the specific object, and as a result may make sacrifices all out of proportion to the situation in order to avoid or attain it.\r\n \r\nThe remedy for fascinations is to become aware of them, to talk them over, and to decide whether they can be lived with. After that, the Parent can be allowed its say. If the person decides in his head that he can live comfortably with a negative fascination, well and good. He cannot realize, without considerable analysis of his thoughts and feelings, how much such a single item may be affecting his reactions, usually as a result of his own early experiences. On the other hand, a positive fascination may enslave him beyond the bounds of reason, and should be just as carefully considered.

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The position after a PAC [Parent/Adult/Child] trip is usually one of bland disclaimer. 'I'm OK. My own Parent didn't notice me doing anything, so I don't know what you're talking about.' In these cases there is a clear implication that the other person is not OK for reacting to any objectionable behavior. \r\n \r\nThere is a simple remedy for this common lack of awareness, in one ego state, for what the other ego states have done. That is for the Adult to remember and to take full responsibility for the actions of all the real Selves. This will stop the cop-outs ('You mean to tell me I did that? I must have been out of my mind!') and replace them with face-ups ('Yes, I remember doing that, and it was really I myself who did it,' or even better, 'I'll see that that doesn't happen again.').

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The feeling of 'Self' is a mobile one. It can reside in any of the three ego states at any given moment, and can jump from one to the other as occasion arises. Whenever one of the ego states is fully active, that ego state is experienced at that moment as the real Self.

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How is it that the members of the human race, with all their accumulated wisdom, self-awareness, and desire for truth and self, can permit themselves to remain in such a mechanical situation, with its pathos and self-deception? We are more aware of ourselves than apes are, but not really very much. Scripts are only possible because people don't know what they are doing to themselves and to others. In fact, to know what one is doing is the opposite of being scripted. There are certain aspects of bodily, mental, and social functioning which happen to man in spite of himself, which slip out, as it were, because they are programmed to do so. These heavily influence his destiny through the people around him, while he still retains the illusion of autonomy. But there are remedies which can be applied.

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Richard Schechner has made a careful and scholarly analysis of time patterns in the theater which also applies to the dramaturgy of real-life scripts. The two most important types he calls 'set time' and 'event time.' Set time runs by a clock or calendar. The action begins and ends at a certain moment, or a certain time is given for its performance, as with a football game. For script analysis, we can call this clock time (CT). In event time, the activity is to be completed, like a baseball game, no matter how long or short a time it takes by the clock. We will call this goal time (GT). There are also combinations of these. A boxing match can terminate either when all the rounds are completed, which takes a set time or clock time, or when there is a knockout, which is event time or goal time.\r\n \r\nSchechner's ideas are useful to the script analyst, particularly in dealing with 'Can' and 'Can't' scripts. A child doing homework can be given five different instructions. \r\n \r\n*Clock Time Can* \r\n* 'You need plenty of sleep, so you can stop at nine o'clock.' \r\n\r\n*Clock Time Can't* \r\n* 'You need plenty of sleep, so you can't work after nine o'clock.' \r\n \r\n*Goal Time Can\r\n 'Your homework is important, so you can stay up and finish it.' \r\n \r\n*Goal Time Can't\r\n Your homework is important, so you can't go to bed until you finish it.' \r\n \r\nThe two Cans may relieve him, and the two Cant's may irritate him, but none of them box him in. \r\n \r\n 'You have to finish your homework by nine o'clock so you can get to sleep.' \r\n \r\nHere Clock Time and Goal Time are combined, which is called a 'Hurryup.' It is evident that each of these instructions can have a different effect on his homework and on his sleep, and when he grows up, on his working habits and his sleeping habits.

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The sexual potency, drive, and power of a human being are to some extent determined by his inheritance and his chemistry, but they seem to be even more strongly influenced by the script decisions he makes in early childhood, and by the parental programming which brings about those decisions.

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In general, the consequences of killing oneself are no more predictable than the consequences of killing someone else. Except for soldiers and gangsters, death, either suicide or homicide, is a poor way to try to solve life's problems.

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Death is not an act, nor even an event, for the one who dies. It is both for those who survive. What it can be, and should be, is a transaction. The physical horror of the Nazi death camps was compounded by the psychological horror, the prevention of dignity, self-assertion, or self-expression in the gas chamber. There was no brave blindfold and cigarette, no defiance, no famous last words: in sum, no death transaction. There were transactional stimuli from the dying, but no response from the killers. Thus, force majeure takes from the script its most poignant moment, the deathbed scene, and in one sense the whole human purpose of life is to set up that scene. \n \n In script analysis, this is brought out by the question: 'Who will be there at your deathbed, and what will your last words be?' An added question is: 'What will their last words be?' The answer to the first query is usually some version of 'I showed them' - 'them' being the parents, especially mother in the case of a man and father in the case of a woman. Thscript its most poignant moment, the deathbed scene, and in one sense the whole human purpose of life is to set up that scene. \n \n In script analysis, this is brought out by the question: 'Who will be there at your deathbed, and what will your last words be?' An added question is: 'What wille implication is either 'I showed them I did what they wanted me to,' or 'I showed them I didn't have to do what they wanted me to.' \n \n The answer to this question is, in effect, a summary of Jeder's life goal, and can be used by the therapist as a powerful instrument in breaking up the games and getting Jeder out of his script: \n \n >So your whole life boils down to showing them you were right to feel hurt, frightened, angry, inadequate, or guilty. Very well. Then that will be your greatest accomplishment - if you want to keep it that way. But maybe you would like to find a more worthwhile purpose in living.

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The cure for the scriptless aged is permission but they seldom use it. There are thousands of older men living in small rooms in every large city, each of them wishing there was someone to cook for him, talk to him, and listen to him. At the same time, there are thousands of older women living under the same circumstances, wishing they had someone to cook for, talk to, and listen to. Even if the twain do happen to meet, they rarely take advantage of it, each preferring to remain in his or her familiar drab surroundings hunched over a glass or a TV set, or sitting with folded hands, waiting for a riskless, sinless death. Those were mother's directives when they were little, and these are the directive they are following seventy or eighty years later.

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In order for the patient to get better, his illusion, upon which his whole life is based, must be undermined so that he can live in the world which is here today, rather than in his 'If Only' or 'Some Day.' This is the most painful task which the script analyst has to perform: to tell his patients finally that there is no Santa Claus.

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A woman came home from a group meeting one day where she had heard [the concept of psychological trading stamps] for the first time, and explained it to her twelve-year-old son. He said, 'Okay, mom, I'll be back soon.' When he returned, he had made a small roll of perforated paper stamps and a little dispenser to hold them, together with a paper book with the pages ruled off into squares. On the first page he had written: 'This page, when full of stamps, entitles you to one free suffer.' He understood perfectly.

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It is just as hard for a patient to give up a lifelong collection of hard-earned psychological trading stamps as it would be for a housewife to burn her commercial ones. This is one factor hindering recover, since, in order to be cured, the patient must not only stop playing games compulsively, but must also forgo the 'pleasures' of using the stamps he has collected previously. 'Forgiveness' of previous wrongs is not enough: they have to become truly irrelevant for the future course of his life if he truly gives up his script.

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People like to show their collections of feelings to others, and to talk about who has more or better angers, hurts, guilts, fears, etc. In fact, many saloons become showrooms where people can go to boast about their trading stamps: 'You think your wife is unreasonable - well, listen to this!' or 'I know what you mean. It takes even less than that to hurt (scare) me. Yesterday...' or 'Embarrassed (guilty, inadequate)? I coulda sunk through the floor!

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Children do things for someone. The boy is bright or athletic or successful for mother, and the girl is bright or beautiful or fertile for father. Or, on the other side, the boy is stupid or weak or clumsy for his parents, and the girl is stupid or ugly or frigid for hers, if that is what they want. It should be added that they have to learn from someone if they want to do it well. To do it for someone and to learn from someone is the real meaning of the script apparatus. As already noted, the children usually do it for the parent of the opposite sex and learn from parent of the same sex.

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In most cases the controls (or life script) come from the parent of the opposite sex, and the pattern (or life skills) from the parent of the same.

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It is already (after two years of a child's life) fairly predictable who the winners and the losers will be. 'Isn't He Amazing?' (during breast-feeding) reinforced two years later with 'That's a Good Boy' (during toilet-training) will usually do better than 'What's He Fussing About?' reinforced one year later by 'Enema Tube;' similarly, 'Lullaby,' first at nursing and later in the bathroom, will probably prevail over 'While Mother Smokes.

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The bedside manner of the actual impregnation may be called the conceptive attitude. Was it due to accident, passion, love, violence, deception, spite, or resignation? If any of these what was the background and preparation for such an event? If it was planned, was it planned coldly or warmly, simply or bookishly, with lots of talk, or by strong, silent communion? The child's script may have the same qualities. The offspring may be treated the same way. Was an abortion attempted? There is almost an infinite number of questions of varying degrees of subtlety possible here, and all these factors can influence the script of the still unborn baby.

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The typical human being, whom we will call 'Jeder,' represents nearly every member of the human race in every soil and clime. He carries out his script because it is planted in his head at an early age by his parents, and stays there for the rest of his life, even after their vocal 'flesh' has gone forevermore. It acts like a computer tape or a player piano roll, which brings out the responses in the planned order long after the person who punched the holes has departed the scene. Jeder meanwhile sits before the piano, moving his fingers along the keyboard under the illusion that it is he who brings the folksy ballad or the stately concerto to its forgone conclusion.

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These five are fixed for every man \r\nBefore he leaves the womb: \r\nHis length of days, his fate, his wealth, \r\nHis learning and his tomb

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Although men are not laboratory animals, they often behave as though they are. Sometimes they are put in cages and treated like rats, manipulated and sacrificed at the will of their masters. But many times the cage has an open door, and a man has only to walk out if he wishes. If he does not, it is usually his script which keeps him there. That is familiar and reassuring, and after looking out at the great world of freedom with all its joys and dangers, he turns back to the cage with its buttons and levers, knowing that if he keeps busy pushing them, and pushes the right one at the right time, he will be assured of food, drink and an occasional thrill. But always such a caged person hopes or fears that some force greater than himself, the Great Experimenter or the Great computer, will change or end it all.

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Parents program their children by passing on to them what they have learned, or what they think they have learned. If they are losers, they will pass on their loser's programming, and if they are winners, then they will pass on that kind of program.

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In script analysis, winners are called 'princes' or 'princesses,' and losers are called 'frogs.' The object of script analysis is to turn frogs into princes and princesses. In order to do this, the therapist has to find out who the good guys and the bad guys are in the patient's script, and also what kind of a winner he can be. The patient fights being a winner because he is not in treatment for that purpose, but only to be made into a braver loser. This is natural enough, since if he becomes a braver loser, he can follow his script more comfortably, whereas if he becomes a winner he has to throw away all or most of his script and start over, which most people are reluctant to do.

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In both the theater and in real life, the cues have to be memorized and spoken just right so that the other people will respond in a way that justifies and advances the action. If the hero changes his lines and his ego state, the other people respond differently. This throws the whole script off, and that is the aim of therapeutic script analysis. If Hamlet begins to use lines from Abie's Irish Rose, Ophelia has to change her lines, too, in order to make sense of it, and the whole performance will proceed differently. The two of them might then take off together instead of skulking around the castle - a bad play, but probably a better life.

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The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when he is confronted with what goes on outside his skull. Each person designs his own life.

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The Fascist Sneer is as old as history, and works as follows. The people are told that the enemy king or leader is filthy, incoherent, debased, and brutish, more animal than human. When he is captured, he is put in a cage with a few rags, no toilet facilities, and no eating utensils. After a week or so he is exhibited to the people, and sure enough, he is filthy, incoherent, debased, and brutish, and gets more and more so as time goes on. The conquerors smiles and say: 'I told you so.

35 quotes by Eric Berne