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 said that ‘any social intercourse (…) has a biological advantage over no intercourse at all’, so, people need any form of ‘stroking’ (a physical contact, e.g., exchange) to live. In 1943 he changed his legal name from Eric Lennard Bernstein to Eric Berne. Berne had an irrepressible sense of humour, which was particularly evident in his writing. For example, in his article entitled "Who was condom?" Berne wrote about the contraceptive, the condom, and whether a man named "Condom" ever existed. While at McGill he wrote for several student newspapers using pseudonyms. He continued to write under pseudonyms such as