Scripts People Live by Claude Steiner

Author:Claude Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1974-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

Power Plays

The basic interpersonal operation with which individualism and competition are brought into practice is the power play. A power play is a transaction whereby a person obtains from another person something that he wants against that other person’s will. (See Chapter 17 for a full description of power plays.)

Power plays can be crude and involve actual physical coercion or they can be subtle ways in which people talk or manipulate each other out of things that they want.

The most crude power play is simply one in which a person grabs from another her loaf of bread and then harms her if she tries to get it back. The same effect, namely the taking away of bread, can be obtained by mental, psychological means, which are, however, equally power plays and which have the same outcome. In any case, power plays have the effect of taking away what is rightfully one person’s and putting it in another person’s hands. Relationships based on power plays immerse people in a miserable, unhappy series of skirmishes, battles, and major wars in which everyone loses.

Power plays are a constant, daily occurrence in the lives of children and an integral part of their banal scripting for the one-up/one-down way of life.

The stroke economy, discounts, body splits, Rescue, competitiveness, power plays, and sex roles (to be discussed next) are the basic banal curriculum which interferes with the full autonomous development of children. How to defeat these will be discussed in Section V on “The Good Life” later in this book.

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