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 script.
Therefore, both authors want to awaken individuals to the verbal, emotional and psychological roles they adopt without knowing what they are doing, and to break out of these roles and positions so they are free to make choices in communication with other human beings.
Berne seeks to show his readers the old scripts they have been following so that they can begin to stop acting out old child and parent roles and come from the perspective of the adu...