I once dated a girl whose parents’ only form of interaction seemed to be yelling at each other. Any lull in their disputes only existed, as far as I could tell, in order for the combatants to reload their weapons. It was inconceivable to me how they could have made it through nearly twenty years of marriage, or why they continued to live under the same roof. Talking to my girlfriend about children, I expressed my fear of having the potential grandparents of my kids fight so much. She responded to my worry with a simple enough statement: “Some people have different ways of showing they love each other.”
I intuited at the time that there was something wrong with this rationalization of her parents’ behavior. I had not as yet, however, encountered Dr. Eric Berne’s book Games People Play. If I had, I might have been able to understand exactly what was going on in that house.
Games bills itself as “the basic handbook of transactional analysis,” a system of psychological study predicated on the concept of strokes. [The Strokes are a rock band from New York—this is a poor, tangential joke, by the way, inserted to make an essay written for Sociology class more interesting to my journal readers. Expect more of them. They'll all be in brackets. Some passages may be edited slightly in order to help me make more bad jokes.] Strokes as defined by Berne are, roughly, abstracted forms of the physical contact given by a mother to her child. According to Berne, the acquisition of strokes is one of the fundamental impulses of the human being. Not all individuals have abstracted their need in the same way, however, as Berne makes clear: “A movie actor may require hundreds of strokes each week from anonymous and undifferentiated admirers [...] while a scientist may keep physically and mentally healthy on one stroke a year from a respected master” (Berne 15). [This is why my brother is a breakdancer and I am sitting here at a desk, typing into a little box on my website, hoping desperately that someone will leave a comment.]
The exchange of strokes between two parties is called a transaction. The major forms of social intercourse [get your minds out of the gutter], which produce transactions, are according to Berne (in order of complexity): rituals; pastimes; games; and intimacy (Berne 18). Berne lists “activity” as well, but says it works as a framework for the first four.
Rituals are basically dead interactions; formalized procedures without much real meaning that nevertheless make up the bulk of what we would call “manners.” An example is saying “bless you” when someone sneezes—rarely is the blesser delivering a true benediction. Pastimes, on the other hand, are slightly more meaningful. The content of these semi-ritualized conversations are more real, but pastimes follow very specific scripts. Straying from the script tends to derail the conversation. It follows that pastimes aren’t very deep interactions. [The question is, how should the Tim-sneezes-three-times he's-going-to-hell script be categorized? You guys really seem to mean it, but it's highly formalized.]
The real meat, so to speak, of human interaction lies in games and intimacy. Here is where the most and the most impactful strokes are given. True intimacy, however, is notoriously difficult to achieve. It requires a level of personal risk that many people are loathe to undertake except under the most comfortable and secure conditions. It also requires a great deal of work. [Too lazy to love.] This leaves us with games, the form of interaction which Berne’s book takes its title from.
Games can be defined, in one way, as the feigning of intimacy. Another way to approach the concept of “game” is to say it’s an ongoing transaction that fulfills psychological needs on the part of the participants. Innate in the concept of a game is its duplicitous nature. While the overt content of a game may seem reasonable, the participants are at another level gratifying ulterior psychological motivations. Left unanalyzed, games have the potential to be crutches upon which relationships are based. Berne, indeed, fills his book with examples of married couples whose entire lives together are based on games.
Because of their duplicitous nature, games can never be as satisfying as honest interactions. Each player in the game is gaining his or her enjoyment covertly, as it were. The question arises, then, why anyone would waste time on such unsatisfactory engagements.
Berne has an answer for this. Given our overwhelming need for strokes, and given that our strokes in adult life come from our social interactions, it follows that people will seek out the transactions they can gain, even broken ones, rather than face a complete absence of them: “[...] the principle which emerges here is that any social intercourse whatever has a biological advantage over no intercourse at all” (Berne 15). Thus a married couple who no longer, for any of myriad reasons, have a real basis for connection with each other will turn to games to fill the void.
This of course is the answer to my question about my ex-girlfriend’s parents. At sometime in their history, her parents’ lives had taken an unhappy turn. Feeling bound in their situation, but still seeking strokes, they had turned to yelling at each other and nitpicking over each others’ activities. Negative attention is still attention.
It is easy to see that game-playing, as well as the other types of transactions, must be universal across human cultures. Given the stroke’s basis and abstraction from human biology, it would only not develop when that biology becomes profoundly alien. Science has not, as far as can be ascertained, documented any such anomalous entities. The content of any given ritual, pastime, game, or instance of intimacy would of course differ between cultures. Only ignorance could allow us to believe that the manners of African hunters are identical to those of Californian surfers. Despite the differences of appearance, however, the underlying transactional structures are recognizable.
Does this mean all of humanity is doomed to live as my ex-girlfriends parents, relying on well-worn, unsatisfying, broken patterns to fill the void in our souls? The answer has to be no. For the simplest and clearest counterexample I can, fortunately, look to my own parents, who have been married for over 30 years and who still approach each other honestly, intimately, and, yes, very lovingly. This anecdotal evidence need not suffice, however, because in the last two chapters of his book Berne details the possibilities of game-free living. Berne makes it clear that this is not likely to be an easy undertaking. For one thing, it takes a keen analysis to find the presence of entrenched games. It is doubly difficult to identify one’s own particular psychological niches. More than dealing with one’s own psychology, however, dealing with others’ games is the difficult task. As said before, games tend to be a crutch with which people prop up their lives. It would be unlikely, to say the least, to find someone with a broken leg happy to have his crutch kicked out from under him. [But it's so fun!] We can expect no less hostility from those whose games are exposed and resisted.
One possible interim solution for the individual dedicated to game-free living is the assumption of roles in games with awareness. That is, in the recognition that others might not be ready to give up their games, to go along for the ride, if you will. A relatively benign game, or one which will probably not affect the game-free individual significantly, does not necessarily merit confrontation.
I would be lying if I said the seemingly intractable situation of her family did not influence my decision to end the relationship with my ex-g
irlfriend. I could not see marrying into that family. With the knowledge I have gained from Berne’s book, I would have approached the situation differently. My relationship with that girl would not necessarily have come to a different end, but armed with the understanding I have now, I could have made a better go of it.
[Why do I feel the need to intersperse this essay with, ahem, "funny" comments when I put it on my website? Why can I not give you my thoughts seriously and unselfconsciously? Am I afraid of earnestness—of, is it, intimacy? Do I expose myself too greatly to ridicule, and so try to cover my insecurity by beating you to the punch? Or am I just trying to adapt a school essay to the web medium, which by its nature, I believe, is less formal? Am I analyzing my own motivations too much? Like the Tootsie Pop announcer says, the world may never know.]
This is an obituary for Satine, our guinea pig. She was put down yesterday at the veterinarian. Satine had been experiencing some problems lately, and this culminated with her having not eaten for twenty four hours. My sister took Satine to the vet, and the diagnosis was a likely ruptured tumor. Apparently, and inexplicably, guinea pigs are notorious for getting cancer. Satine is, no doubt, in guinea pig heaven now, where sunflower seeds are stacked a mile high and fresh cubes of grass are always there in your gilded feeding bowl.