Eric Berne on the ideas of Freud but were distinctly different. Freudian psychotherapists focused on patient’s personalities. Berne believed that insight could be better discovered by analyzing patients’ social transactions. Berne mapped interpersonal relationships to three ego-states of the individuals involved: the "Parent, Adult," and "Child" state. He then investigated communications between individuals based on the current state of each. He called these interpersonal interactions "transactions" and used the label "games" to refer to certain patterns of transactions which popped up repeatedly in everyday life. The origins of transactional analysis can be traced to the first five of Berne’s six articles on
Eric Berne sold more than five million copies. The book describes both functional and dysfunctional social interactions. The essence of games described by Berne are that they are not zero-sum games, (i.e. one must win at the other's expense), where the person who benefits from a transaction wins the game. On the contrary, the "games people play" usually pay all of the players off, even those who ostensibly are the losers, since they are about psychic equilibrium or promoting adopted self-damaging social roles instead of rational benefits. These payoffs are not consciously sought by the players but they are leading to the