Author: Eric Berne

A psychiatrist who wanted therapy to be explicable to the person receiving it, and built Transactional Analysis around three states anyone can recognise in themselves: Parent, Adult and Child.Games People Play catalogues the repeating social manoeuvres people run without admitting to them, each with a deliberately flippant name. It was a runaway bestseller through the 1960s and pushed that vocabulary into ordinary conversation. Clinical psychology has since moved past most of the model, but the underlying instinct, that patients should be able to follow the theory being applied to them, has aged well.