Reflections and Opinions on the 'Games People Play' - Eric Berne

This book, 'Games People Play - The Psychology of Human Relationships' quantifies the interactions of humans and explains many encounters that we have. For example, is provides an explanation to why we are often bemused by over-friendliness, when surely being friendly is a positive trait, and we should like them more, surely not less? The book makes reference to the exchanges of 'strokes'.

On first impressions, the book is very much non-fiction and adopts a type of text-book style, packed with lots of definitions. In this way it is quite difficult to read, but is undoubtably very insightful. However, as I read on, I liked the colloquial expressions for the games that people play e.g. 'If it wasn't for him' and 'look ma no hands'.
The book claims that we have an inner child, adult and parent in which in certain situations different personas are brought out. This makes me think of the phrases: 'let out your inner wild child' and makes me question how many idiomatic and colloquial phrases have other Psychologists used/proved as 'behaviour mechanisms'.

I will  briefly give details of some examples given in the book:

The characteristics of schizophrenia, exhibited by suffers is broken down into: 'initially playing a flexible role, lose, easy game of first-stage 'ain't it awful' and progress to an inflexible, tenacious, hard-third stage'.

A game labelled as 'corner' provides an alternative reason for the onset of a child's asthma. I, myself, have witnessed a similar situation to this whereby the parent has answered philosophically to a yes/no question presented by a child:
 'Little girl: 'Mummy, d'you love me?' Mother: 'What is love?'
This exchange results with no direct recourse, the little girl wants to talk about mummy but she talks about philosophy which the little girl is not equipped to handle. So, the little girl in response breathes hard until mummy apologizes.

Things I like about the book include the structure and the familiarity. Although the book adopts an unusual stance on the social interactions, it is very easy to relate still to each cliche's are expressed such as: 'I'm under stress, I get all shock up' and 'my misfortunes are better than yours'. I like the way Berne has formulated the structure of the chapters; he paints the social setting and then breaks them down into thesis, aim, roles, dynamics and gives examples to the social situation explained. This enables me to look on into the familiar social settings in simplified quantifiable terms.