Games People Play. Eric Berne. Summary

This book is a shortened retelling of Eric Berne’s “Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis.” Using linguistic neural networks, we significantly reduced the volume of text while preserving all the main ideas. “Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis” revolutionized our understanding of what really happens during the most basic social interactions. Released in a print run of more than five million copies, Dr. Eric Berne’s classic book remains as striking and candid as it was on the day of its first publication.

We constantly play games—sexual games, marital games, power games with bosses, and competitive games with friends. By describing contests of status, such as “Martini” (I know a better way), deadly paired arguments like “If It Weren’t for You” and “The Scandal,” and popular flirting stories like “The Stocking Game” and “Let’s Have a Fight With You,” Dr. Berne reveals the secret tricks and unconscious actions that steer our lives. “Games People Play” has been recognized as the most original and influential book of popular psychology of our time.