Eric Berne

Eric Berne (1910 to 1970) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who created transactional analysis, a theory that explains human behavior through the analysis of people's social transactions. Born in Montreal as Eric Lennard Bernstein, he took his medical degree at McGill University in 1935, trained in psychiatry at Yale and became an American citizen in 1939. After army service in World War II he settled in Carmel, California, and studied under Erik Erikson. His theory began from the ideas of Freud and Carl Jung but differed from them: it mapped relationships onto three ego states, Parent, Adult and Child, and used the word games for patterns of transaction that recur in everyday life. After the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute declined to admit him as a full psychoanalyst in 1956 he left psychoanalysis, and his papers of 1957 and 1958 made transactional analysis a permanent part of the psychotherapeutic literature. His seminar group grew by 1964 into the International Transactional Analysis Association.