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 psychiatric residency at the Psychiatric Clinic of Yale University School of Medicine, where he worked for two years. In 1939, Berne became an American citizen and shortened his name from Eric Lennard Bernstein to Eric Berne. In 1949, he was admitted as a Fellow in the American Psychiatric Association. From 1938-40, Berne was an assistant physician at Ring Sanitarium, Arlington Heights, Massachusetts. From 1940-43 he was employed as a psychiatrist in a sanitarium in Connecticut, and concurrently as a clinical assistant in psychiatry at Mt Sinai Hospital in New York. He also maintained a private practice. In 1943, during World