Eric Berne
Psychiatrist and author
Eric Berne was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who created transactional analysis, and the author of Games People Play.
1 summary 16 min of listening
Born 1910 in Montreal, Canada Died 1970
Influenced by Sigmund Freud
About Eric Berne
Eric Berne was born in Montreal in 1910 as Eric Lennard Bernstein, and he died in 1970. He studied at McGill University, graduating in 1931 and earning his medical degree in 1935. After that he completed a psychiatry residency at Yale, learning psychoanalysis from Paul Federn. His training was interrupted by World War II, when he served in the Army Medical Corps and reached the rank of Major. He was discharged in 1945, and in 1943 he had changed his legal name to Eric Berne. Berne developed the theory of transactional analysis to explain human behavior. It drew on ideas from Freud and Carl Jung but took its own direction, holding that insight comes more readily from examining people's social transactions. He wrote more than 30 books over his career.