Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis of Life Scripts

Claude Steiner

Nov 2018 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

About this ebook

A "stimulating and thought-provoking" guide to help you make productive and autonomous choices toward rewriting your life ( Los Angeles Times).

We choose a "life script" at an early age. But you can change its course. Whether born into wealth or poverty, into nurturing families or damaged abusers, fostered by strict parents or careless and undisciplined ones, each individual still has a spiritual core that exists independent of the environment and is equally crucial to his or her destiny.

Countering the fundamental principle of psychiatry which asserts that emotional and mental distress comes from within, Claude Steiner believes that people are innately healthy but develop a pattern early in life based upon negative or positive influences of those around them. Those influences can rule every detail of our lives until our death. Thus children decide, however unconsciously, whether they will be happy or depressed, winners or failures, strong or dependent, caring or cruel, and having decided, they spend the rest of their lives making that decision come true. For those who choose to live by their negative script, the consequences can be disastrous unless they make a conscious decision to change.

In Scripts We Live, Steiner tackles the puzzle of human fate. He reveals what determines our life scripts, and how each person's combination of spirit and circumstance contributes to the final path that life takes. And he offers hopeful advice and practical analysis so that we all can rewrite for ourselves more meaningful and fulfilling lives.

Ratings and reviews

"Scripts People Live" is one of the books that I have kept with me from the moment I discovered it. Steiner writes with clarity, compassion and good humor as he explains his theory of life scripts, and readers will immediately sense that he is unfailingly on the side of the "patient". His radical re-thinking of "mental illness" may still raise eyebrows, yet his passionate argument convinces even as it seduces. The anti-establishment tone is also recognizably "sixties" - love is the answer, psychiatrists help their patients in spite of their training, we are born princes and princesses... flower-power banners, maybe; but this, to me, is not a failing, simply a refreshing reminder and a point of reference. As the twenty-first century progresses, we need Steiner's voice more than ever to remind us that, indeed, WE are OK.