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Showing 2 similar quotes for quote #203 from What Do You Say After You Say Hello? by Eric Berne

Publisher: Grove Press (1972)

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.

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.