Games People Play

Introduction 
1 SOCIAL INTERCOURSE 
THE theory of social intercourse, which has been outlined at some length in Transnational Analysis 
may be summarized as follows. 
Spitz has found that infants deprived of handling over a long period will tend at length to sink into 
an irreversible decline and are prone to succumb eventually to intercurrent disease. In effect, this 
means that what he calls emotional deprivation can have a fatal outcome. These observations give 
rise to the idea of stimulus-hunger, and indicate that the most favored forms of stimuli are those 
provided by physical intimacy, a conclusion not hard to accept on the basis of everyday experience. 
An allied phenomenon is seen in grown-ups subjected to sensory deprivation. Experimentally, such 
deprivation may call forth a transient psychosis, or at least give rise to temporary mental 
disturbances. In the past, social and sensory deprivation is noted to have had similar effects in 
individuals condemned to long periods of solitary imprisonment. Indeed, solitary confinement is 
one of the punishments most dreaded even by prisoners hardened to physical brutality, and is now a 
notorious procedure for inducing political compliance. (Conversely, the best of the known weapons 
against compliance is social organization.) 
On that biological side, it is probable that emotional and sensory deprivation tends to bring about or 
encourage organic changes. If the reticular activating system8 of the brain stem is not sufficiently 
stimulated, degenerative changes in the nerve cells may follow, at least indirectly. This may be a 
secondary effect due to poor nutrition, but the poor nutrition itself may be a product of apathy, as in 
infants suffering from marasmus. Hence a biological chain may he postulated leading from 
emotional and sensory deprivation through apathy to degenerative changes and death. In this sense, 
stimulus-hunger has the same relationship to survival of the human organism as food-hunger. 
Indeed, not only biologically but also psychologically and socially, stimulus-hunger in many ways 
parallels the hunger for food. Such terms as malnutrition, satiation, gourmet, gourmand, faddist, 
ascetic, culinary arts, and good cook are easily transferred from the field of nutrition to the field of 
sensation. Overstuffing has its parallel in overstimulation. In both spheres, under ordinary 
conditions where ample supplies are available and a diversified menu is possible, choices will be 
heavily influenced by an individual's idiosyncrasies. It is possible that some or many of these 
idiosyncrasies are constitutionally determined, but this is irrelevant to the problems at issue here. 
The social psychiatrist's concern in the matter is with what happens after the infant is separated 
from his mother. in the normal course of growth. What has been said so far may be summarized by 
the "colloquialism":7 "If you are not stroked, your spinal cord will shrivel up." Hence, after the 
period of close intimacy with the mother is over, the individual for the rest of his life is confronted 
with a dilemma upon whose horns his destiny and survival are continually being tossed. One born 
is the social, psychological and biological forces which stand in the way of continued physical 
intimacy in the infant style; the other is his perpetual striving for its attainment. Under most 
conditions he will compromise. He learns to do with more subtle, even symbolic, forms of handling, 
until the merest nod of recognition may serve the purpose to some extent, although his original 
craving for physical contact may remain unabated. 
This process of compromise may be called by various terms, such as sublimation; but whatever it is 
called, the result is a partial transformation of the infantile stimulus-hunger into something which 
may be termed recognition-hunger. As the complexities of compromise increase, each person 
becomes more and more individual in his quest for recognition, and it is these differentia which 
lend variety to social intercourse and which determine the individual's destiny. A movie actor may 
require hundreds of strokes each week from anonymous and undifferentiated admirers to keep his 
spinal cord from shriveling, while a scientist may keep physically and mentally healthy on one 
stroke a year from a respected master. 
"Stroking" may be used as a general term for intimate physical contact; in practice it may take 
various forms. Some people literally stroke an infant; others hug or pat it, while some people pinch 
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it playfully or flip it with a fingertip. These all have their analogues in conversation, so that it seems 
one might predict how an individual would handle a baby by listening to him talk. By an extension 
of meaning, "stroking" may be employed colloquially to denote any act implying recognition of 
another's presence. Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An 
exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse. 
As far as the theory of games is concerned, the principle which emerges here is that any social 
intercourse whatever has a biological advantage over no intercourse at all. This has been 
experimentally demonstrated in the case of rats through some remarkable experiments by S. Levine 
8 in which not only physical, mental and emotional development but also the biochemistry of the 
brain and even resistance to leukemia were favorably affected by handling. The significant feature 
of these experiments was that gentle handling and painful electric shocks were equally effective in 
promoting the health of the animals. 
This validation of what has been said above encourages us to proceed with increased confidence to 
the next section.