Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships

The foundation of the book is transactional analysis, a direction in psychotherapy that Eric Berne developed as a way to describe human communication through understandable models. The author explains how different ego states manifest in a person — Parent, Adult, and Child — and how they influence words, reactions, and choices in relationships. A separate focus is on the theme of life scripts: stable attitudes related to early experiences and family messages. In the second part, Berne moves on to psychological games — recurring hidden interactions in which people seem to follow a familiar pattern and repeatedly arrive at an unpleasant outcome.