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Portrait of Eric Berne

Unknown author · Public domain

Eric Berne

Canadian psychiatrist

1910 – 1970aged 60

Eric Berne broke from the Freudian tradition of talk therapy by arguing that a person's social transactions revealed more about their personality than introspection alone, and built that idea into transactional analysis, a theory of human behavior distinct from both Freud and Jung. His model of people relating to one another through learned scripts and roles reshaped how a generation of therapists and, eventually, popular readers thought about everyday relationships.

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