Transactional Analysis and the College Classroom

Sixty years ago, Eric Berne, a Canadian-born psychiatrist, published a literary blockbuster that has served as the template for many subsequent books of pop psychology. The best-selling nonfiction book of the 1960s, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, exposed “the secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives.”

Berne’s basic argument is that people substitute game playing for real intimacy. Blind to the psychological dynamics that underlie their social interactions, people engage in repetitive patterns of interpersonal behavior that are unhealthy and ultimately self-destructive. These games “construct walls” that are “rooted in the fear of being intimate (not necessarily sexually intimate, but genuinely honest about what you’re thinking and feeling and expressing to and about your life and others that you interact with).”

Berne is certainly right when he argues that much of our social intercourse is highly ritualized, consisting of little more than generic greetings and brief, formulaic conversations on prosaic topics.  He’s no doubt correct when he claims that much of our communication is dishonest, reflecting unconscious psychological motivations and various ulterior motives. And his argument that many of our interactions with romantic and marriage partners or parents and siblings or bosses, colleagues and subordinates are, under the surface, competitive struggles for status and power, strikes me as spot on.

Six decades later, many of the games Berne enumerates remain unnervingly familiar. People who interact by venting and complaining. Or who ask for advice, only to invariably reject any suggestions as unworkable. Or who embrace a role—the confession taker, the rescuer, the abuse victim—and then grumble about being typecast.

It’s all too easy to dismiss Games People Play as psychology lite—“shallow and pandering.” The book does substitute anecdotes for data and makes no attempt to use serious psychological research rigorously. The book is cynical to the nth degree. But Berne’s transactional analysis can nevertheless “help us navigate our relationships and understand people better.”

For all its weaknesses, Bern’s book speaks to a truth that we should all recognize:  That mind games and power trips—double binds, emotional blackmail, gaslighting, guilt-tripping, moving the goalposts, one-upmanship, passive aggression, silent treatment, victim blaming—are forms of psychological manipulation and abuse that we need to recognize and avoid.

People do manipulate one another in ways that are destructive and divisive. Many of our actions are designed not to solve a problem but to gain attention or win sympathy and admiration. Adults do embrace roles learned when they were young: behaving like a child—brooding, grumbling, pouting, sulking or acting helpless—or imitating an irritating parent: admonishing, criticizing, rebuking, reproaching, reprimanding or scolding.

It’s a shame that pop psychology exists in a kind of netherworld, embraced by a broad reading public but despised and largely disregarded and dismissed by serious scholars, for some works of pop psychology do lay bare certain essential psychic truths.

What are some of the games that Berne identified?

1. Status games
   • Nitpicking: Spelling out a co-worker’s faults behind that person’s back.
2. Passive-aggressive games
   • Indirection: Expressing negative emotions, such as anger, annoyance, hostility or resentment obliquely or deviously, for example, by procrastinating or withholding vital information or offering backhanded complements.
3. Playing the victim games
   • Misdirection: Absolving oneself of responsibility by attributing fault to another person’s actions or inaction.
4. Hard-to-get games
   • Teasing: Pretending to be uninterested or acting coy or fickle in order to get another person’s attention.
5. Office politics games
   • Backstabbing: Using blackmail, gossip, malicious alliances or rumors to advance a personal agenda.
   • Credit-hogging: Claiming credit beyond one’s due.

The games that Bernes describe are Machiavellian. They seek to deceive, manipulate or sabotage. They’re amoral. They’re marked by marked by cunning, duplicity and bad faith. But however cynical, shady or even sadistic these games might be, they’re not necessarily the product of conscious strategizing. They’re all the more powerful because the perpetrators are often unaware of what they’re doing or the trouble they’re causing. Often, the offender is simply seeking a sympathetic response from a listener. In general, these stratagems are moves that individuals deploy in an attempt to resolve their own psychological problems.

Berne asked one of his disciples to apply the techniques of transactional analysis to the classroom. Ken Ernst’s 1972 volume, Games Students Play (and What to Do About Them), was the result.

Some students, Ernst argues, are attention seekers. Others are troublemakers. Still others are provocateurs. There are also the needy, the fawning and the visibly bored and distracted. Then there are those who, for lack of a better term, act stupid; they come across as disorganized and mixed up and plead for special help.

To these, we might add some other roles that students adopt: the know-it-all; the class clown; the inveterate rule breaker (who submits assignments late, often with a reasonable sounding excuse or who arrives to class consistently late); and the boundary pusher who won’t take no for an answer.

Many instructors respond to those modes of student behavior, Ernst argues, in counterproductive ways. Some suffer in silence. Others feel hurt. Still others are defensive or argumentative. A far better approach is to avoid taking part in the game. Here’s Ernst’s advice:

• Establish rapport with individual students; speak with them one-on-one before or after class if that is possible.
• Control your emotional reactions. Remember, you aren’t a student’s friend or mother or father. Your job is to model adult-like behavior.
• Engage the students in an adult-like conversation. Avoid acting like Mommy or Daddy. Engage the student as a professional.
• Describe your perception of the student’s behavior. “You look bored.” “You seemed confused.” “You seemed upset by something I (or a classmate) said.”
• Encourage the student to respond. It’s essential to get students to articulate their emotions.
• Spell out options, deadlines and consequences as politely as you can. Avoid “I” statements along the lines of “I want you to do this” because that shifts the burden onto the instructor.

It’s easy to think that classroom management is essentially a K-12 problem. After all, there are certain kinds of disruptive, argumentative or disrespectful behavior that are much more common in high school than in college. But the tide may be shifting in ways that will make many faculty members uncomfortable.

I, for one, see more students pushing boundaries or expressing a sense of entitlement or debating classroom rules or asking for certain kinds of adjustments or accommodations that go beyond prior norms.

Here’s my advice:

1. Be proactive. Talk with your students about the sociology and social psychology of the classroom—the roles and dynamics that regularly occur in the classes you teach.
2. Avoid acting like a parent. Don’t express displeasure or disappointment. Don’t tell the student what to do. Certainly, listen attentively. Surely, be adaptable within appropriate limits. But you mustn’t confuse mentoring with parenting.
3. Demystify childlike and adult-like modes of interaction. Children beg, whine, whimper and make excuses. An adult, in contrast, might reply, “That is quite a problem. What do you intend to do about it?”
4. Don’t look to your students for validation. Teaching’s goal isn’t to get students to agree with your opinions. Nor is it to get the students to say how much they enjoy the class or how your teaching has transformed their lives. Remember: your job is to produce knowledgeable adults who are able to think critically and independently.

A friend, a brilliant psychotherapist and a prolific author, recently published an essay on the growing problem of parent-child alienation in The Wall Street Journal. Entitled “For Estranged Dads, Father’s Day Is a Painful Reminder,” Joshua Coleman’s article discusses the cultural changes and communication problems that have made it hard for many fathers (and mothers, too) to repair damaged relationships with the children they love. According to a 2022 study by sociologist Rin Reczek and colleagues, over a quarter of fathers experience a period of estrangement from their adult children at some point. That’s about four times the rate for mothers and far higher than in the recent past.

In his essay and a 2021 book entitled Rules of Estrangement, Coleman discusses the many factors that contribute to interfamilial and intergenerational alienation as well as the intense pain such estrangement causes.

I mention this essay because our students are members of a psychologized generation, a cohort that has been encouraged to focus on their feelings, their inner life and the hurts, slights, invalidations, offensive behaviors and traumas they have experienced and who are far less willing to put up with such harms than their predecessors. I’d be the last to dismiss those emotions as petty or paltry. But, as Berne and Ernst make clear, it’s also essential not to project childhood needs or resentments or anger onto innocent bystanders.

I am convinced that professors, as the professionals who have the closest contact with undergraduates, have a pivotal role to play in helping students understand the unconscious factors and needs that drive human behavior and modeling how to interact with others in a more mature manner.

To paraphrase a memorable line from the 1983 science fiction techno-thriller WarGames, the only way to win is not to play the game.