Games People Play

CHAPTER FOURTEEN 
The Players 
MANY games are played most intensely by disturbed people; generally speaking, the more 
disturbed they are, the harder they play- Curiously enough, however, some schizophrenics seem to 
refuse to play games, and demand candid-ness from the beginning. In everyday life games are 
played with the greatest conviction by two classes of individuals: the Sulks and the Jerks or Squares. 
The Sulk is a man who is angry at his mother. On investigation it emerges that he has been angry at 
her since early childhood. He often has good "Child" reasons for his anger: she may have 
"deserted" him during a critical period in his boyhood by getting sick and going to the hospital, or 
she may have given birth to too many siblings. Sometimes the desertion is more deliberate; she 
may have farmed him out in order to remarry. In any case, he has been sulking ever since. He does 
not like women, although he may be a Don Juan. Since sulking is deliberate at' its inception, the 
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decision to sulk can be reversed at any period of life, just as it can be during childhood when it 
comes time for dinner. The requirements for reversing the decision are the same for the grown-up 
Sulk as for the little boy. He must be able to save face, and he must be offered something 
worthwhile in exchange for the privilege of sulking. Sometimes a game of "Psychiatry" which 
might otherwise last several years can be aborted by reversing a decision to sulk. This requires 
careful preparation of the patient and proper timing and approach. Clumsiness or bullying on the 
part of the therapist will have no better result than it does with a sulky little boy; in the long run, the 
patient will pay the therapist back for his mishandling, just as the little boy will eventually repay 
clumsy parents. 
With female Sulks the situation is the same, mutatis mutandis, if they are angry at father. Their 
"Wooden Leg" ("What do you expect of a woman who had a Father like that/') must be handled 
with even more diplomacy by a male therapist. Otherwise he risks being thrown into the 
wastebasket of "men who are like father." 
There is a bit of Jerk in everyone, but the object of game analysis is to keep it at a minimum. A Jerk 
is someone who is overly sensitive to Parental influences. Hence his Adult data processing and his 
Child's spontaneity are likely to be interfered with at critical moments, resulting in inappropriate or 
clumsy behavior. In extreme cases the Jerk merges with the Toady, the Show-off, and the Cling. 
The Jerk is not to be confused with the bewildered schizophrenic, who has no functioning Parent 
and very little functioning Adult, so that he has to cope with the world in the ego state of a 
confused Child. It is interesting that in common usage "jerk" is an epithet applied to men only, or in 
rare cases to masculine women. A Prig is even more of a Square than a Jerk; Prig is a word usually 
reserved for women, but occasionally it is said of men of somewhat feminine tendencies.