Claude Steiner - Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis Of Life Scripts

SCRIPTS PEOPLE LIVE

ALSO BY CLAUDE STEINER

Games Alcoholics Play

Healing Alcoholism
The Other Side of Power
When a Man Loves a Woman

Transactional Analysis
of Life Scripts

Claude M. Steiner
With a New Foreword by the Author

Copyright 1974 by Claude M. Steiner
Foreword to the Second Edition copyright 1990 by
Claude M. Steiner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steiner, Claude, 1935

Scripts people live : transactional analysis of life scripts / Claude M. Steiner; with a new foreword by the author,

p. cm.

Reprint. Originally published: New York : Grove Press, 1974.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9680-4

1. Transactional analysis. I. Title.

RC489.T7S73 1990

616.89145dc20 90-47229

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com

I dedicate this book to Eric Berne,
teacher,
friend,
father,
brother.

Scripts People Live was written in the 1960s at a time decidedly different from the present. Our country was a large, uncluttered space with plenty of opportunity and room for growth. Today young, middle-class Americans who are deciding what to do with their lives face a hard-edged, competitive world, a world in which there is less elbowroom and a smaller margin of error. Scripts People Live is a book about the choices people make and why they make them. Now, as then, this book explores lifes enduring decisions and helps people choose wisely among the alternatives.

The boundless American optimism of the fifties and sixties has been squeezed into todays fearsome, self-seeking rat race. People entering the work force in the fifties could expect their real incomes to double over the next few years, while between 1973 and 1987 the median household income, in 1987 dollars, declined by $1,000. Images of plenty nonetheless linger in the collective unconscious, leaching disappointment and cynicism into peoples daily lives.

Our society is increasingly dividing into two large groups. For those who succeed in the race there is an endless supply of consumer goods and the opportunity to be insulated from the toxic condition in which those who fail must live. For the others the safety net is disintegrating, leaving a fearsome void. The poverty rate of families with parents under thirty is 35%. Where poverty resides, homelessness, drug addiction, madness, and despair hang on the gloomy horizon.

We are puzzled by the occasional example of children born in dismal, even terrifying conditions who grow up to be functioning, happy members of society while others born to wealth and ease cannot cope with life and die in defeat. We read in the same newspaper the story of a once-homeless woman who graduates with honors from Stanford University while a dead homeless man turns out to be the firstborn of a wealthy San Francisco family. These real life stories are seized upon by the hopeful on one hand and the cynical on the other and taken to mean that ones environment, whether ghetto or upper class, is not relevant to ones fate.

There is no doubt that the conditions we encounter in life limit our range of options. Some people are born into riches, some into poverty; some have large, nurturing families; others live with frightened, isolated mothers; some have reliable, sober parents and teachers; some have to cope with infantile, addicted care givers. Some never see violence, death, and abuse, while others witness them daily. Some have strict, disciplining parents, while others are left alone to do as they please.

Yet each young person still has to decide whether to take life lying down or seize it by the horns. Each individual has a spiritual core that exists independent of the environment and is equally crucial to his or her destiny. It is this spiritual core that is capable of withstanding agonizing hardship, struggling through adversity, making unfathomably wise decisions or inexplicable sacrifices and that propels and carries its owner through the worst of times. It is this books task to tackle the puzzle of human fate and to reveal what establishes peoples life scriptshow they are determined, and by what components, and how each persons peculiar combination of spirit and circumstances contributes to the final path that life takes.

Some twenty years after it first appeared, this reprinting of Scripts People Live will be read by a new generation born into difficult fin de sicle realities. It speaks of the pressures we all have to deal with in our life journeys and the coping mechanisms passed down the generations by our elders. The theory in this book states that peoples scripts, or life paths, are fairly well decided upon early in life and then held to in what appears to be an inexorable manner unless an active process of redecision is undertaken. Children come to the conclusion that they will be happy or depressed, optimistic or miserly, winners, spendthrifts, or failures, healthy or alcoholic, lawyers, models, or blue-collar workers, unemployed or overworked, long-lived, sickly, or suicidal, and having decided, they will spend the rest of their lives endeavoring to make their decisions come true. Unless a conscious decision to modify ones life in an active way occurs, the script will hold sway to the end. Psychotherapy, explored in this book, can serve to help people free themselves to make productive, autonomous, optimistic life plans based on the most up-to-date reality.

Since Scripts People Live appeared, it has helped millions of people understand their lives. The times have changed, but the fundamentals remain the same; I believe that Scripts People Live can help you make the choices that will maximize the quality of your life.

Claude Steiner
1990

When I began writing this book, I intended it to be a revision of my previous book, Games Alcoholics Play, updated with respect to the therapy of alcoholics and expanded with respect to script theory. As the work proceeded, it quickly lost its intended character and became, instead, a whole new book on the Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts. I have reused some sections of Games Alcoholics Play, but this book is mostly an extensive and concise statement of recent developments in script theory. Where I have used sections of Games Alcoholics Play, I have carefully weeded out two words which I no longer feel the necessity to use. The two words that Ive taken out and which occurred hundreds of times in that previous book were the words cure and patient, both of which are, in my opinion, inextricably tied in with medical practice which, as I take pains to explain later, has nothing to do with the practice of psychotherapy, and the use of which perpetuates the notion that medicine and psychotherapy are in some way legitimately tied together when they are, in fact, not.