Wider Influence
Eric Berne in his best-selling Games People Play readily acknowledges Potter's Gamemanship as a precursor: 'Due credit should be given to Stephen Potter for his perceptive, humorous discussions of manoeuvres, or "ploys", in everyday social situations'. Elsewhere he calls Potter 'the chief representative of the humorous exposition of ulterior transactions'.
What has been termed Potter's "blend of flat and serious tone (reminiscent of a gentlemanly sports handbook) united with a sceptical judgement of the values of the English middle-class social scene" would thus seem to have fed into Berne's own "sardonically humorous Games People Play ... con-games of daily life that Dr Berne describes with desperately penetrating gallows-wit".
Potter's ' Game Leg..."Limpmanship", as it used to be called, or the exact use of minor injury' precedes Berne's "Wooden Leg"; Potter's 'Nice Chapmanship ... Being a Nice Chap in certain circumstances is valuable' precedes Berne's "Good Joe"; Potter's "Advicemanship", whereby 'if properly managed, the mere giving of advice is sufficient' to win, precedes Berne's "I'm Only Trying to Help You", where 'the damage is done while being helpful'. And 'Just as there are O.K.-words in conversationship', so too in transactional analysis there are "O. K. Words: Words rewarded by parental approval ... those approved by the Parental part of the patient's father, mother, therapist, or other parental person".
Where Potter noted that "each gambit has its answer or 'counterlife'", Berne would note how everyone has positive forces in them "counter to the plot of script – a counterscript"; where Potter offered 'Counter Psychiatry, which is, of course, a huge subject', Berne explored how "Psychiatry as a procedure must be distinguished from 'Psychiatry' as a game".
The sociologist Erving Goffman also profited from Potter's work, in the sense that it "disclose an elaborate code of conventions which operated in everyday social intercourse, which was nevertheless tacit", and could be exploited by the sociologist: "what Potter's articles perhaps did, by their oblique but recognisable affinity with Goffman's own ideas, was to provide the kind of licence or mandate" Goffman needed to find his own creative approach.
Read more about this topic: Stephen Potter
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