What Do You Say After You Say Hello  (English, Paperback, Berne Eric)

Eric Berne seeks out the secrets behind the scripts of the lives of the successful and the unsuccessful in What Do You Say After You Say Hello? He explains how childhood determines the path for every child in the future but also how accepting and willing change into the screenplay is completely possible with his guidelines.

Summary Of The Book

Many pockets consider this book as a sequel to Berne’s bestseller, Games People Play since the subject matter handled here relates to the layman in addition to psychotherapists. What Do You Say After You Say Hello? pays tribute to transactional analysis and looks into the states of ego, rituals pastimes and games along with structural analysis. The term, “Scripts” is introduced by Berne here in this book to everyone not intimate with psychotherapy for the first time.

The topic of “Script” was developed by Berne himself and he develops it here in a chronological fashion. He draws analogies from fairy tales like Cinderella and Red Riding Hood to explicate the scripts present in them to explain the premise of parental programming, adolescent rebellion and therefore the significance of the “Script” itself.

After this is when this book takes on the more exciting road of explaining the phenomenon of script-breakers. This is Berne’s solution to the mires of parental programming and he therefore places a vehicle for his readers to seek out a change in their very destinies. The idea behind the premise of “Script” stems from the pattern that can be discerned across samples of the successful as also with failures.

With What Do You Say After You Say Hello? readers have a chance at looking at the environment of which he is a product and also modify their own condition by breaking the script that has been dealt to them. However, there is always exceptions to the rule and Berne is a distinguished analyst who understands this. Therefore he buffers this theory by rounding a fair and unbiased critique that points out the flaws along with the inherent elegance of the script in theory and practice.

This book was published in 1973. In the preface, Berne makes it explicitly clear that this book is primarily intended for professionals but he also tried to make it accessible because he didn’t want to deter non-professionals from intimating themselves with the content.

About Eric Berne

Dr. Eric Berne was a Canadian psychiatrist who was the architect of transactional analysis.

His other books include The Mind in Action, Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy, Sex in Human Loving and The Happy Valley.

He was born on May 10, 1910 in Montreal. He attended McGill University in Montreal before relocating to Yale and studied psychiatry. At Yale, he studied psychoanalysis under Paul Federn. He became an American and resumed his studies after the war at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He broke away from traditional psychoanalytic thought and developed the theory of transactional analysis. Games People Play was a huge hit and went on to sell more than 5 million copies. He has also written a number of technical papers on subjects related to psychoanalysis, especially on the matter of intuition. He died in 1970 at the age of 60.