Eric Berne's Politics: “The Great Pyramid”

Abstract

Eric Berne's politics have been an enigma to many in transactional analysis. His responses to political statements in the San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars were decisively unsympathetic, and the author's assumption has been that Berne was avowedly apolitical. However, recently unearthed information invites reevaluation of that assumption and reveals, hidden in plain sight, that Berne's strong preferences were populist, in favor of equality, individual freedom, and open discussion. These views have profoundly influenced the collective attitude of transactional analysis as a democratic, egalitarian, and cooperative movement, which transactional analysis tools are ideally suited to implement. These qualities of transactional analysis, in addition to its cutting-edge theory and methods, explain its attractiveness around the world.

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Notes on contributors

Claude M. Steiner

Claude M. Steiner was born in 1935 in Paris, France. He has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. He met Eric Berne in San Francisco in 1956 and from then to the time of Berne's death in 1971 was his disciple and, later, his colleague, friend, and collaborator. Claude was also a founding member of the International Transactional Analysis Association. Since 1975, he has been lecturing and teaching on five continents on the subject of stroke-centered, TA-based emotional literacy training. His latest book is The Heart of the Matter: Love, Information and Transactional Analysis. He can be reached at 2901 Piedmont Ave Berkeley, CA 94705 U.S.A.; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.claudesteiner.com/cs.htm.