Eric Berne (May 10, 1910 – July 15, 1970) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who created the theory of transactional analysis as a way of explaining human behavior.
Berne's theory of transactional analysis was based on the ideas of Freud and Carl Jung but was distinctly different. Freudian psychotherapists focused on talk therapy as a way of gaining insight to their patient's personalities. Berne believed that insight could be better discovered by analyzing patients’ social transactions.
Background and education (1927–1938)
Eric Berne was born on May 10, 1910, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, as Eric Lennard Bernstein. He was the son of David Hillel Bernstein, MD, a general practitioner, and Sarah Gordon Bernstein, a professional writer and editor. His only sibling, his sister Grace, was born five years later. The family immigrated to Canada from Poland and RSFSR. Both parents graduated from McGill University in Montreal. Eric was close to his father and spoke fondly of how he accompanied his father on rounds, traveling by horse-pulled sleigh on cold Montreal winters to visit patients.
Berne's father died of tuberculosis when Berne was 11. His mother then supported herself and her two children working as an editor and writer. She encouraged her son to follow in his father's footsteps and to study medicine. and an M.D. and C.M. (Master of Surgery) from McGill University Medical School in 1935.
From 1940 to 1943 he was employed as a psychiatrist in a sanitarium in Connecticut, and concurrently as a clinical assistant in psychiatry at Mt Sinai Hospital in New York. He also maintained a private practice. From 1949 to 1964, Berne had a private practices in both Carmel and San Francisco and kept up a demanding pace of research, teaching in addition.
In 1956, after 15 years of psychoanalytic training, Berne was refused admission to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute as a fully-fledged psychoanalyst. He interpreted the request for several more years of training as a rejection and decided to walk away from psychoanalysis. The book describes both functional and dysfunctional social interactions.
The essence of games described by Berne are that they are not zero-sum games (i.e. one must win at the other's expense), where the person who benefits from a transaction wins the game. On the contrary, the "games people play" usually pay all of the players off, even those who ostensibly are the losers, since they are about psychic equilibrium or promoting adopted self-damaging social roles instead of rational benefits. These payoffs are not consciously sought by the players but they are leading to the ultimate unconscious life script of each as set by their parental family interactions and favored emotions.
Despite having been written for professional therapists, the book became a New York Times bestseller and made Berne famous.
Name and pseudonyms
In 1943 he changed his legal name from Eric Lennard Bernstein to Eric Berne.
Berne had an irrepressible sense of humour, which was particularly evident in his writing. For example, in his article entitled Who was condom? Berne wrote about the contraceptive, the condom, and whether a man named Condom ever existed.