Historians may well describe Eric Berne, M.D. (1910-1970) as the most outstanding contributor to psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychiatry since Freud. Berne's contributions were legion.  He is best known for his book "Games People Play" (1964).

 Berne developed a set of teachable principles for conducting psychotherapy.  He defined THE UNIT of social action, i.e., THE SOCIAL TRANSACTION as being one conversa­tional stimulus and the related (conversational) response of another person to it.  Social relationships were shown as developing within an extended series of transactions over intervals of time.  He described the sequencing of and complexity of time-structuring (time filling) social activi­ties between people in their relationships. 

 With Berne, contractual psychotherapy became an objective in treatment, i.e. a person would come to a psychotherapist to get-well of a symptom and the psychothera­pist would agree to treat the patient in order for the patient to get well of that "problem"; this might include treating the underlying psychopathology which was productive of the particular symptom.  Berne brought the practice of psychotherapy from being an art to being scientific.  This means that psycho­therapy and its results became measurable, could be accomplished by specific procedures; AND could be taught by the students of the original teacher to subsequent second generation students, who could then obtain the same treatment results as those gained by the original teacher.  

In 1955, the cornerstone paper of Transactional Analysis was first read.  Published in the “American Journal of Psychiatry”, April 1957 it was entitled "Ego States in Psychotherapy." Berne, for the first time, differentiated between the ALIVE SMALL PERSON (set of ego states) in the personality structure and the ALIVE GROWN-UP person. AND THEN  he went on to differentiate be­tween the TWO GROWN-UPS (two sets of ego states) inside this same person.  By using this diagrammatic representation in his treating and teaching Dr. Berne encouraged his patients and his students to personally apply these diagrams to their own lives. In so doing he placed the three stacked circle diagram into the public domain. This diagram enabled people to sort and organize for themselves large amounts of incoming and outgoing (people) information.  This “basic diagram” is the familiar Parent Adult Child set of stacked circles.

The 3-stacked circle diagram is very likely the single most used, useful and useable tool developed to date in the entire history of psychotherapy.  ...... ( more )