Amy’s Winehouse Part III - Playing Games
The Role of the Substance Abuser
If all behavior is goal-oriented and all behavior (including substance abuse) serves a purpose, we can view the individual who abuses substances as playing a particular role in a game. Eric Berne, founder of Transactional Analysis, believed that all games have an important and probably decisive influence on the destinies of the players under ordinary social conditions; but some offer more opportunities than others for lifelong careers and are more likely to involve relatively innocent bystanders. This group is called Life Games and includes the game of “Alcoholic.”
In game analysis, as in Choice Theory, there is no such thing as alcoholism or “an alcoholic” but there is a role called Alcoholic in a certain type of game. Because it has not been proven that biochemical or physiological abnormality is a prime mover in excessive behavior its study belongs in the field of internal medicine. No behavior is disease – including compulsions or addictions. Game analysis interested in something quite different – the kinds of social interactions that are related to such excesses, hence the game “Alcoholic.”
The treatment of a substance abuser lies in getting her to stop playing the game altogether, rather than simply change from one role to another. In some cases this is feasible, although it can be a difficult task to find something else as interesting to the substance abuser as continuing her game. Because she is classically afraid of intimacy, the substitute may have to be another game rather than a game-free relationship. The criterion of a true game cure is that former substance abuser should be able to drink socially without putting herself in jeopardy. The usual total abstinence cure will not satisfy the game analyst – or the Choice Theorist.
From a transactional point of view, after careful preliminary groundwork, the correct therapeutic procedure is to take the “Adult” contractual position and refuse to play any of the roles, assuming that the client will be able to tolerate a new game. The therapist’s role in playing “Adult” is to break up the game rather than play “Rescuer” with the client.
In the “Adult” contractual position, the therapist can guide the client toward awareness, spontaneity and intimacy. Awareness requires living in the here and now and not in the elsewhere i.e., the past or future. Spontaneity means option, the freedom to choose and express one’s feelings from the assortment available. It means liberation from the compulsion to play games. Finally, intimacy means the spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware person, the liberation of living in the present moment.
For a clever and witty introduction to Transactional Analysis, please read Berne’s Games People Play.
Thanks for reading “Is It Just Me Or…?”
Best,
Rae
This post is interesting.
ReplyDeleteIt starts with a conditional! If all behavior is not goal-orientated it questions the foundation of Transactional Analysis and game theory. Romantic poets were once writing on Idleness, Martin Heidegger writes on Angst and Boredom as existential moods that precisely do not have a goal or object in mind...We seem to be boxed into a certain way of thinking that can only see activity in terms of goals. One activity, one goal can only replace another.
However, the position of the therapist as one who refuses to play certain games (although also playing the therapist's game) appears to break the obsession with one type of goal-orientated play yet seems to fail in that the relation is one of transaction or contract which reasserts a materialist, object-orientated, model of exchange (more objects and goals). This could break one obsession only by introducing another contract.
Also, for me the definition of awareness seems odd. Awareness requires seeing things as they really appear here and now and not elsewhere. Why? This ties the "client" (Roman language of dependency "a plebeian under the patronage of a patrician")into not seeing future possibilities. Awareness has a greater range than this. Spontaneity too is not just will, voluntarism or options but teh philosopher Immanuel Kant also uses it to describe the unknown foundations of consciousness itself! To be liberated into the purely present moment is mythical. There is no present moment to hide in. To be, according to some philosophers, is to be timely, in time, projecting into the past and future. That is the gift of mortality. The present moment beset by many options but with no past or future structure to guide the client appears to me like a very strange idealized state, unlikely to provide support for long. But I am a philosopher not a therapist...
Maybe we need to find new ways to describe these situations, new language as well as new behaviours.