Games People Play

Belching at meals or asking after another man’s wife are each encouraged or forbidden by local ancestral tradition, and indeed there is a high degree of inverse correlation between these particular transactions. Usually in localities where people belch at meals, it is unwise to ask after the womenfolk; and in localities where people are asking after the womenfolk, it is unwise to belch at meals.

After stimulus-hunger and recognition hunger comes structure-hunger. The perennial problem of adolescents is : ‘What do you say to her (him) then ? And to many people besides adolescents, nothing is more uncomfortable than a social hiatus, a period of silent, unstructured time when no one present can think of anything more interesting to say than: ‘Don’t you think the walls are perpendicular tonight ?’ The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In this existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project.

These all have their analogues in conversation, so that it seems one might predict how an individual would handle a baby by listening to him talk.

ego state may be described phenome-nologically as a coherent system of feelings, and operationally as a set of coherent behaviour patterns.

Translated into terms of social psychiatry, they may be stated as (1) the primary internal advantages; (2) the primary external advantages; (3) the secondary advantages; and (4) the existential advantages.

In order of complexity, these are: (1) Rituals; (2) Pastimes; (3) Games; (4) Intimacy; and (5) Activity, which may form a matrix for any of the others.

One horn is the social, psychological and biological forces which stand in the way of continued physical intimacy in the infant style; the other is his perpetual striving for its attainment.

THE attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and

intimacy.

PARENTS, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, drink, feel and perceive. Liberation from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply ingrained and are necessary during the first two or three decades of life for biological and social survival. Indeed, such liberation is only possible at all because the individual starts off in an autonomous state, that is, capable of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy, and he has some discretion as to which parts of his parents' teachings he will accept. At certain specific moments early in life he decides how he is going to adapt to diem. It is because his adaptation is in the nature of a series of decisions that it can be undone, since decisions are reversible under favorable circumstances.

The attainment of autonomy, then, consists of the overthrow of all those irrelevancies discussed in Chapters 13, 14 and 15. And such overthrow is never final: there is a continual battle against sinking back into the old ways.

the data before him that a scalpel is now the instrument of choice, holds out his hand. The respondent appraises this gesture correctly, estimates the forces and distances involved, and places the handle of the scalpel exactly where the surgeon expects it. Next in simplicity are Child-Parent transactions. The fevered child asks for a glass of water, and the nurturing mother brings it.