Games People Play
Ego states which deal with the here and now in a nonemotional way are called Adult. When in Adult, we appraise reality objectively and make fact-based decisions, while making sure that Child or Parent emotions or ideas do not contaminate the process.
Each transaction has two parts: a stimulus and a response. Individual transactions are also usually part of a sequence. Analyzing such a series allows us to look at communication that is successful and communication that is not, and to examine in greater detail how people gain strokes, spend their time, and relate to one another. As will be discussed later, games are very specific ways of relating to and interacting with others.
One of the clearest ways of analyzing games was presented by Bob and Mary Goulding in the late 1970s. For them, a game consists of the following sequence of transactions. Person A gives an ostensible message while at the same time giving a hidden message. Person B responds to the hidden message. Person A then switches ego states and has a surprise bad feeling.
Games, the Gouldings noted, are usefully named by the feeling the initiator has or the conclusion he or she makes at the end. Since mother initiated the sequence and ended it feeling righteous anger at the discovery of an evil-doer, we call the game NIGYSOB. For his part, Johnny played “Kick Me,” a game that ended in his feeling kicked.
In 1977, Fanita English noted that games arise when people cannot get a living person to stroke them in the style to which they were accustomed in early childhood for expressing feelings that covered forbidden ones (“racketeering”).
This process of compromise may be called by various terms, such as sublimation; but whatever it is called, the result is a partial transformation of the infantile stimulus-hunger into something which may be termed recognition-hunger.
By an extension of meaning, “stroking” may be employed colloquially to denote any act implying recognition of another’s presence. Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse.
The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In this existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project.
The essential characteristic of human play is not that the emotions are spurious, but that they are regulated.
Pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy.
Intimacy begins when individual (usually instinctual) programing becomes more intense, and both social patterning and ulterior restrictions and motives begin to give way.
The most gratifying forms of social contact, whether or not they are embedded in a matrix of activity, are games and intimacy. Prolonged intimacy is rare, and even then it is primarily a private matter; significant social intercourse most commonly takes the form of games, and that is the subject which principally concerns us here.
In technical language, an ego state may be described phenomenologically as a coherent system of feelings, and operationally as a set of coherent behavior patterns. In more practical terms, it is a system of feelings accompanied by a related set of behavior patterns.
“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, feelings, 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 very little boy or girl.”
The implications are: That every individual has had parents (or substitute parents) and that he carries within him a set of ego states that reproduce the ego states of those parents (as he perceived them), and that these parental ego states can be activated under certain circumstances (exteropsychic functioning). Colloquially: “Everyone carries his parents around inside of him.” That every individual (including children, the mentally retarded and schizophrenics) is capable of objective data processing if the appropriate ego state can be activated (neopsychic functioning). Colloquially: “Everyone has an Adult.” That every individual was once younger than he is now, and that he carries within him fixated relics from earlier years which will be activated under certain circumstances (archaeopsychic functioning). Colloquially: “Everyone carries a little boy or girl around inside of him.”
The word “childish” is never used in structural analysis, since it has come to have strong connotations of undesirability, and of something to be stopped forthwith or gotten rid of. The term “childlike” is used in describing the Child (an archaic ego state), since it is more biological and not prejudicial. Actually the Child is in many ways the most valuable part of the personality, and can contribute to the individual’s life exactly what an actual child can contribute to family life: charm, pleasure and creativity.
In the Child reside intuition,3 creativity and spontaneous drive and enjoyment.
The Adult is necessary for survival. It processes data and computes the probabilities which are essential for dealing effectively with the outside world. It also experiences its own kinds of setbacks and gratifications.
The Parent has two main functions. First, it enables the individual to act effectively as the parent of actual children, thus promoting the survival of the human race.
Thus all three aspects of the personality have a high survival and living value, and it is only when one or the other of them disturbs the healthy balance that analysis and reorganization are indicated.