Book Review: The Games We Play by Eric Berne. What happened to transactional analysis?

There are few models of psychotherapy that have flared in popularity and waned as quickly as Transactional Analysis. Eric Berne introduced the world to Transactional Analysis as a model of psychotherapy with the publication of The Games People Play in 1964. TA was a deliberately post Freudian, or extra Freudian as Berne would point out, in that it expanded on Freud’s concepts that were the most popular in the early sixties and simplified them to be comprehensible to non professionals at the same time. Game theory, the idea that math models could explain interactions in biology and consciousness, had been developed in the early 1950s during the cold war. The fact that this theory was entering public consciousness during Bernes first papers theorizing TA cannot be discounted as a strong influence on the conception of TA and as a reason for its popularization.