This study will compare Eric Berne's Games People

This study will compare Eric Berne's Games People Play and Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. Berne's book is about transactional analysis, which is based on the idea that there are three kinds of ego states, and that these ego states are expressed by the Parent, Adult and Child parts of the personality (23). Tannen's book describes and give examples of how men and women have very different ways of conversing. Berne and Tannen approach failures in human communication using different theories and foci, but the similarities between the two books are great. Both authors believe that human beings are generally unaware of what brings about failures in communication, and because they are unaware of the problems, they are helpless to fix them. The harder they try, the greater the communication failure.

Tannen wants to suggest that once we come to understand the different ways of communicating used by men and women, one can begin to make allowances for the opposite gender's communications and as a result both will experience more successful exchanges of information, ideas and feelings in conversation. The "games" Berne describes are designed to show how people take the roles of parent, adult or child in encounters with other people. They follow "old scripts" which they have learned in childhood, usually from their parents, and they follow these scripts without even thinking about it, without even realizing that they have choices other than the ones set forth by the old sc

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are to be effectively communicating and understanding. Berne does not want people to abandon their Child role, for example, and Tannen does not want people to radically change their ways of conversing. She wants to show why men and women misunderstand one another so frequently. Men basically believe that women in conversation want to take away their freedom, that there is something threatening about the way women converse. Women, on the other hand, basically believe that men deliberately want to deny them the intimacy they seek in conversation and in a relationship. In fact, the two genders simply have different styles of conversing, of listening and talking, and have different purposes at stake in most conversations. Tannen summarizes her objectives: I make sense of seemingly senseless misunderstandings that haunt our relationships, and show that a man and a woman can interpret the same conversation differently, even when there is no apparent misunderstanding. I explain why sincere attempts to communicate are so often confounded, and how we can prevent or relieve some of the frustration (13). The games described by Berne are designed to show people how to get in touch with the specific part of the personality a pers

Category: Psychology - T