Book Bearings
Games People Play
- 192 pages · about 3 hours
- First published 1964
- 57 editions
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1 About this book
Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, published in 1964, is the psychiatrist Eric Berne's popular account of transactional analysis, his method for interpreting everyday social behavior. In the first half he sets out the theory: each person moves between three ego states, the Parent, the Adult and the Child, and exchanges go wrong when the roles are mismatched. The second half is a catalog of games, repeated patterns of behavior with a hidden motive and a predictable payoff, which Berne sorts by where they are played, from marriage and parties to the consulting room, and to which he gives wry names of his own.
- Social psychology
- Political
- Psychology
- Relationships
- Social interaction
- Social role
- Journalists
- Psychological fiction
2 What to expect
An early work of popular psychology that reads social life as a set of games: repeated exchanges in which people say one thing and seek another. The first half explains the theory of Parent, Adult and Child roles, and the second is a catalog of named games from marriage, parties and therapy. It is short and often witty, drier in the theory chapters, and dated in its 1960s view of men and women.
Good for readers who want: popular psychology, how people behave with each other, and a short classic of its kind.
3 About Eric Berne
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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