Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis. Pdfdrive com


Download 1.12 Mb.
Pdf ko'rish
bet61/67
Sana31.01.2023
Hajmi1.12 Mb.
#1145460
1   ...   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   ...   67
Bog'liq
Games People Play The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis. ( PDFDrive )

14 · The Players
M
ANY
games are played most intensely by disturbed people; generally speaking,
the more disturbed they are, the harder they play. Curiously enough, however,
some schizophrenics seem to refuse to play games, and demand candidness from
the beginning. In everyday life games are played with the greatest conviction by
two classes of individuals: the Sulks, and the Jerks or Squares.
The Sulk is a man who is angry at his mother. On investigation it emerges
that he has been angry at her since early childhood. He often has good ‘Child’
reasons for his anger: she may have ‘deserted’ him during a critical period in his
boyhood by getting sick and going to the hospital, or she may have given birth to
too many siblings. Sometimes the desertion is more deliberate; she may have
farmed him out in order to remarry. In any case, he has been sulking ever since.
He does not like women, although he may be a Don Juan. Since sulking is
deliberate at its inception, the decision to sulk can be reversed at any period of
life, just as it can be during childhood when it comes time for dinner. The
requirements for reversing the decision are the same for the grownup Sulk as for
the little boy. He must be able to save face, and he must be offered something
worthwhile in exchange for the privilege of sulking. Sometimes a game of
‘Psychiatry’ which might otherwise last several years can be aborted by
reversing a decision to sulk. This requires careful preparation of the patient and
proper timing and approach. Clumsiness or bullying on the part of the therapist
will have no better result than it does with a sulky little boy; in the long run, the
patient will pay the therapist back for his mishandling just as the little boy will
eventually repay clumsy parents.
With female Sulks the situation is the same, mutatis mutandis, if they are
angry at father. Their Wooden Leg (‘What do you expect of a woman who had a
father like that?’) must be handled with even more diplomacy by a male
therapist. Otherwise he risks being thrown into the wastebasket of ‘men who are
like father’.
There is a bit of Jerk in everyone, but the object of game analysis is to keep
it at a minimum. A Jerk is someone who is overly sensitive to Parental
influences. Hence his Adult data processing and his Child’s spontaneity are
likely to be interfered with at critical moments, resulting in inappropriate or
clumsy behaviour. In extreme cases the Jerk merges with the Toady, the Show-
off, and the Cling. The Jerk is not to be confused with the bewildered
schizophrenic, who has no functioning Parent and very little functioning Adult,


so that he has to cope with the world in the ego state of a confused Child. It is
interesting that in common usage ‘jerk’ is an epithet applied to men only, or in
rare cases to masculine women. A Prig is even more of a Square than a Jerk; Prig
is a word usually reserved for women, but occasionally it is said of men of
somewhat feminine tendencies.



Download 1.12 Mb.

Do'stlaringiz bilan baham:
1   ...   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   ...   67




Ma'lumotlar bazasi mualliflik huquqi bilan himoyalangan ©fayllar.org 2024
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling