Eric Berne

Eric loved the pater familias role, relishing in his large group of offspring and tending to be, if anything, overly permissive, a nurturing parent more often than an authoritarian one. However, he also knew how to make time for his writing. He had an isolated study built at the far end of his large garden, well out of earshot of his youngsters. In that study he did most of his writing between 1949 and 1964, when he and Dorothy divorced on the friendliest of terms.

During these seminal years in Carmel, Eric kept up a demanding pace. He took an appointment in 1950 as Assistant Psychiatrist at Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco, and simultaneously began serving as a Consultant to the Surgeon General of the US Army. In 1951 he added the job of Adjunct and Attending Psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration and Mental Hygiene Clinic, San Francisco. These three appointments were in addition to his private practices in both Carmel and San Francisco.

Break with Psychoanalysis and the Creation of Transactional Analysis

Probably the most significant traces of the origins of transactional analysis are contained in the first five of six articles on intuition Berne wrote beginning in 1949. Already, at that early date, when he was still working to gain the status of psychoanalyst, he was daring to defy a rigid Freudian concept in stating "the word subconscious is acceptable since it includes both the pre-conscious and unconscious" (Berne, 1949a, p.1)

When he began training in 1941 at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and later when he resumed his training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, Berne obviously believed that becoming a psychoanalyst was important. However, in the end that coveted title was withheld; his 1956 application for membership was turned down with the verdict that he wasn't ready, but, perhaps after three or four more years of personal analysis and training he might reapply. For Eric the rejection was devastating but cathartic, spurring him to intensify his long-standing ambition to add something new to psychoanalysis. He set to work, determined to develop a new approach to psychotherapy by himself, without benefit of blessings or support from the psychoanalytic fraternity.

Before 1956 was out, he had written two seminal papers based on material read earlier that year at the Psychiatric Clinic, Mt. Zion Hospital, San Francisco, and at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Clinic, U.C. Medical School: "Intuition V: The Ego Image": and "Ego States in Psychotherapy." Using references to P. Federn, E. Kann, and H. Silberer, in the first article Berne indicated how he arrived at the concept of ego states and where he got the idea of separating "adult" from "child." In the next article he developed the tripartite schema used today (Parent, Adult, and Child), introduced the three-circle method of diagramming it, showed how to sketch contaminations, labeled the theory, "structural analysis" and termed it "a new psychotherapeutic approach."