SECTION V: BOOK REVIEW
SCRIPTS PEOPLE LIVE(?):
A Critical Book Review
Stephen Frye, MD
This review expresses some thoughts I
have about Steiner's book, Scripts People
Live (1974). My primary quarrels with the
book are these: 1) It suggests such life
scripts as it describes are typical of people
in general; 2) it offers little documenta-
tion of its general statements; 3) it does
what it accuses others of doing; 4) it
discounts nearly everyone in the helping
professions, except Steiner himself.
My initial disagreement is in Steiner's
taking the word "patient" out of the title.
What he describes in the book are not
what most people without patient status
live, but rather only those scripts that a
significantly ill person might live. Since
only 2.5070 of the American people use
mental health services, banal scripts
would seem to be those of a minority.
Throughout, he has failed to adequate-
ly substantiate either his claim of the
universality of banal scripting or his other
claims. There are very few references
from outside T A literature and the
literature of radical therapy. There are
only two references in the bibliography to
what would even remotely be considered
standard reference journals in psychiatry,
psychology, or sociology.
In the first paragraph on page 98, we
are told:
Many of us are proudest when we
feel that we are living "good" lives,
where "good" means normal, aver-
age, as others would want it to be -
Trans. An. J., 6:3, July 1976
others whom we respect and admire
and who have told us what a good
life is. Being married, successful in
business, and a good father, a good
housewife, a businessman, a civic
leader, a "real" man or a "real"
woman are all defined for us long
before we are born; we are given the
illusory "freedom" to choose from
those different ways of living. Once
we choose we are forced to keep to
the directives of that particular life
plan, lest we become "failures" in
living.
Isn't it possible that this illusory
freedom is in fact a choice and that many
of the people described are in fact happy
and not following banal life scripts? Is
there any Adult evidence that the majority
of Americans feel that they are following
banal life scripts or that banal scripts are
the rule in terms of frequency (p. 104) -
or is this just Dr. Steiner's impression?
On page 105 he states:
The basic training of life includes a
systematic attack on three primary
human potentials: the potential for
intimacy, namely the capacity for
giving and receiving human love: the
potential for awareness, namely the
capacity to understand the world
and its people, and the potential for
spontaneity, which is the capacity of
free and joyful expression of the
Natural Child. I have called the end
result of this three-part basic training
Lovelessness, Mindlessness, and
Joylessness.
329
STEPHEN FRYE
What Adult evidence is there that this is
in fact the basic training of life in most
American homes? Where is the evidence
for his statement on p. 114 that "because
people are forced to live in a state of
stroke scarcity, the procurement of
strokes fills every moment of their waking
hours"?
He describes the three main kinds of
scripting as Lovelessness, Mindlessness,
and Joylessness" (depression, madness,
and drug abuse). Then, without any
substantiating evidence, he states that
these "cover the range of emotional
disturbances that present themselves to
psychiatrists." (He himself is a psycholo-
gist.)
He further proposes that "these three
categories of scripts adequately substitute
for all of the categories in the American
Psychiatric Association Diagnostic
Manual, exclusive of those involving
damage to the central nervous system.
The suffix "-less," according to
Webster, means "without, lacking." I
have rarely seen a patient who is totally
without love, without mind, or without
joy. Occasionally a patient will have
deficits in these areas, but rarely total
lacks. Moreover, there are diagnoses
which are not covered by his three terms.
Three that quickly come to mind are
anxiety reaction, a situational reaction
following a life crisis, and phobia.
Another common presenting problem,
not covered by these areas is that of the
person, currently unassertive, who wants
to become more decisive and effective.
On several occasions throughout the
book, Dr. Steiner is doing what he himself
objects to (p. 8):
Transactional analysis is in the
process of being homogenized,
reinterpreted, and thus destroyed by
the mass market which is using it so
as to make the largest amount of
profit without regard for its scien-
tific integrity.
330
Steiner "homogenizes" the term "Pig
Parent" in two different ways. First, he
describes Pig Parent as the "Parent ego
state which is the enemy of the Natural
Child." He later refers to the Pig Parent
and diagrams it as the Parent in the Child,
variously known already as "the elec-
trode," or the bad' 'witch." What need is
there for an additional and redundant
term in TA's ever-expanding vocabulary?
He further complicates matters by
"reinterpreting" Dr. Dusay's original
egogram by substituting Little Professor
for Adapted Child, thus changing Dr.
Dusay's concepts. He again distorts the
egogram by using the term "Pig Parent"
where Dr. Dusay has used the term
"Punitive Parent."
Steiner begins his long and continuous
discounting of almost every professional
group in existence on page 8 where he
discounts psychologists and psychiatrists.
In support of his attitude, he states that if
four diagnosticians agreed on a diagnosis,
they could not agree on a therapeutic
strategy. What this means is not that the
disagreement is of paramount importance
or that there are no therapeutic strategies,
as Steiner implies, but that there may be
more than one effective therapeutic
strategy.
On page 119, psychiatrists are again
discounted without documentation:
One of the pressures against self-
understanding comes from the
medical profession. Psychiatrists,
by and large, prevent us from
understanding ourselves by telling
us we can't and discounting those
who feel they can without their help.
Certainly this is a discount of Eric Berne,
the psychiatrist who founded TA, as well
as a discount of the many others who have
helped to create the fields of psychiatry
and psychotherapy. Later, after discount-
ing Berne by hypothesizing his script, he
further disagrees with him (p. 99) by
Trans. An. J., 6:3, July 1976

feeling that it is important to mix politics
with psychiatry. It would be too easy to
interpret Steiner's own script and ego-
gram from this and other parts of the
book, but that would be no fairer to him
than he was to Berne.
Based on comments on page 213, one
could easily conclude that Dr. Steiner is
the only therapist who is aware of the use
and abuse of power in therapy and
interpersonal relationships. Is it a fact
that because therapists "would have to
take sides with the powerless against the
powerful, they are not too eager to
become aware of such power factors"?
What scientific experiments have been
conducted to support his statement that
when a man and a woman are equal in
power, it is unlikely that the equality will
remain?
He also discounts the relevance of
medicine to psychotherapy by stating that
there is "no justification whatsoever for
thinking of the banal or extreme forms of
tragic scrips, depression, madness, or
drug abuse as having any relation to
physical illness." He seems unaware of
some of the brilliant studies in genetics
and biochemistry (Wyatt & Gillin, 1976;
Snyder, 1976; Mendels et aI., 1976) that
have been reported the last quarter
century. He states that "at present no
drug has proven effective to cure
depression, madness or drug abuse and no
drug is ever likely to have that effect."
This is a massive discount, not only of
current knowledge and science (David,
1976; Fieve, 1975), but also of potential
future developments.
He then states:
Since neither physical medicine nor
drugs are directly relevant to
emotional disturbance or unhappi-
ness, it also follows that physicians
are in no way uniquely qualified to
be therapists and that when they
attempt to exclude other capable
Trans. An. J., 6:3, July 1976
BOOK REVIEW
therapists from helping people they
reserve for themselves a function
which is not theirs."
Since physicians have not excluded
other therapists from helping people
(otherwise there would not be licensed
psychologists, social workers, family
therapists, etc.) and since physicians do
have some unique contributions to make
and have made same, both his premise
and his conclusion are invalid.
Nowhere is there any factual data,
controlled or uncontrolled, on any of his
cases to indicate what number have been
cured, helped, or alleviated by him.
What Dr. Steiner does show is that it is
certainly easier to discount others than to
prove in any Adult way the effectiveness
of his own work.
Notes:
(1) These references were added by Dr.
Frye subsequent to Dr. Steiner's reply.
Frye notes, "Although many of these
references are dated after Dr. Steiner's
book, they are review articles with exten-
sive bibliographies of material published
prior to 1974.
REFERENCES
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 2nd
ed., 1968.
Davis, J. "Overview: Maintenance Therapy of
Psychiatry, II, Affective Disorders." American
Journal of Psychiatry, January 1976,1-13.
Dusay, J. "Egograms and the Constancy Hypo-
thesis," Transactional A nalysis Journal, 1972,
2, 37-41.
Fieve, R. "The Lithium Clinic: A New Model for
the Delivery of Psychiatric Services." American
Journal of Psychiatry, October 1975, 1018-
1022.
Freedman, D.X. "The Alma Mater is Smoking -
This is Dangerous to Your Health!" Archives
of Psychiatry, April, 1976, 407-410.
Ket y , S. "Genetic Aspects of Schizophrenia,"
Psychiatric Annals,January 1976, 11-32.
May, P. et al. "Schizophrenia - A Follow-up
Study of Results of Treatment." Archives of
Psychiatry, April 1976,474-488.
331
STEPHEN FRYE
Mendels, J. et. al. "Biochemistry of Depression,"
Diseases of the Nervous System, March 1976,
3-9.
Snyder, S. "Dopamine and Schizophrenia,"
Psychiatric Annals, January 1976, 53-70.
Steiner, C. Scripts People Live. New York: Grove
Press, 1974.
BOOK REVIEW?
Reply
Claude Steiner
I am flattered to see a book review
of such unprecedented length dedicated to
me in the valuable pages of the
Transactional Analysis Journal.
I also appreciate Dr. Frye's presenting
in a series of succinct arguments a view of
psychiatric issues which I have long been
committed to oppose, and which I
specifically oppose throughout Scripts
People Live. For example, calling people
with problems "patients" and "ill,"
reifying professionals, their journals,
their research and diagnoses, and being
unwilling to consider the lies, power
abuses, and Rescues that go on all around
us (not just in our clients' lives but in our
own); the list is too long to enumerate
completely. Readers will have to choose
which view they prefer.
However, Frye's repeated incantations
of demands for scientific proof have
a pious and hollow sound. As far as
substantiation is concerned, his view is
not better supported by scientific research
than is mine, (1). Nor, on the other hand,
is it any less so. Readers who would like to
pursue some of the "brilliant studies in
332
Wyatt, R. and G. Gillan. "The Transmethylation
Hypothesis: A Quarter of a Century Later,"
Psychiatric Annals. January 1976,33-52.
Stephen Frye, MD, is a Regular Member
of the ITAA. He is in private practice
in San Francisco, California.
genetics" which he wishes I would refer
to, might find it interesting to read R.D.
Laing on the subject (Evans, 1976).
Laing's detailed fifty-seven page analysis
of the time-honored studies by Kellman
and Slater on the genetics of schizophre-
nia lead him to conclude that this
often-quoted research on which so much
psychiatric belief is based is invalid even
at the simplest scientific level. His
summary statement about the Kellman
and Slater studies is this: "You cannot
make a statistical silk purse out of a
clinical sow's ear."
As for my own scientific research, I
base my conclusions on the same method
used by Freud, Berne, and numerous
other respected behavioral scientists:
clinical observation substantiated by
consensus, followed by further observa-
tion and consensus, and ultimate con-
firmation or rejection based on long range
therapeutic success or failure.
The one thing about this review I resent
is the oblique implication that I discount
Eric Berne, or worse, that I treat him
unfairly. Eric was a brilliant scientist and
Trans. An. J., 6:3, July 1976