The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki
Eric Berne was the founder of Transactional Analysis.
A short biography is here.
The book Games People Play analyzes a lot of covertly nasty human behavior in terms of "games": patterned social interactions where people say one thing and mean another--and others play along.
For example, in the game of "Why Don't You, Yes But", a person brings up a problem they are having, seeming to invite others to brainstorm a solution. Each proposed solution, though, meets with a reason why it won't work or can't be done. After a while, the helpers give up. The real motive of the player is to get justification for a claim like, "See? I am helpless, nothing is my fault" or "See? Everyone who tries to help me is an idiot."
The people who play along are usually also doing something covert: the game of "I'm Only Trying to Help". Here, one offers advice in the hope it will be rejected, to get justification for a claim like, "See? No one listens to me."
Hypothesis: Berne's writing expresses a dominant Fe attitude and a richly developed secondary Ni attitude.
It's a predominantly Extraverted attitude because it interprets everything that people do as a move in social life--that is, as an attempt to negotiate with other people. A motive that does not relate to getting other people to cooperate or somehow place oneself in the social arena seems unthinkable in Berne's system of thought. Berne relentlessly relates every choice or action to achieving something for yourself that you can use and enjoy now. He dismisses things like an interest in politics as the game of "Ain't It Awful".
It's Fe because everything has to do with establishing social relationship in recognizable terms: creating bonds of loyalty, cooperation, guilt, blame, and so on. In "games", each person has a secret motive or need that they're trying to satisfy--a need that they would be ashamed to admit publicly, hence the covertness of the game. Games work by a sort of silent or "winking" contract between the players, each recognizing the other's secret need and playing along in order to fulfill their own secret need. They thus cast their lot together, though in a sick way.
Ni provides the Introverted side of the analysis. Berne continually analyzes the meaning of various "transactions" from a perspective outside the literal or conventional meaning of what is said. Asking for advice might really be asking for advice, or it might really be a bid to prove that no advice can help. The overt meaning of the sign is irrelevant. One would never, could never, state such a contract openly: "Won't you please pretend that I'm doing my best, so I can get rewarded without really contributing anything? If you do, I'll pretend I respect your opinions." What is really going on in these social interactions cannot be said in terms of the vocabulary of those interactions.
Here is another illustration of how Ni serves an extraverted approach in Berne's thought. Berne suspects nearly any claim of a necessary connection between one thing and another as a bid to play a game. For example, if someone were to say, "Oh, I'm not very good at sewing", Berne would see that as a bid to avoid responsibility. People who are consistently incompetent are playing the game of "Stupid": they are very intelligently maneuvering others into taking responsibility for them, or at least not blaming them for their failures. Berne cites facts like people in wheelchairs successfully learning to dance the jitterbug as evidence that people really can do all sorts of things. The only reason people don't do well is that in some way they sense they can benefit socially from failure.
Berne's recommendation for how to deal with games might be a classic example of Ni serving an extraverted perspective. When finding yourself in a game, he doesn't recommend putting an end to it by talking explicitly about what is going on or what the other person's motives are. He recommends playing an "antithesis" to the game: an act that simply does not play by the rules of the game, thus depriving the person of the covert support he was hoping to get from you. For example, if someone tries to hook you into "Why Don't You, Yes But" by mentioning some unsolvable problem they have, the antithesis is: "That sounds terrible. What are you going to do about it?" The antithesis offers no advice, and instead puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the person who started the game. Other antitheses are more painful, like refusing to pay or give aid to clients at a government job clinic if they don't find a job within a small but reasonable time frame.
Playing an antithesis can make you look like the bad guy. That's how games work: if you play along, you lose; and if you don't play, you also lose, because the game works by attaching a social cost to honest behavior. To get out of the game, you must pay the social cost.
However, Berne also recognizes, in a fashion perhaps typical of ENFJs in its practical cynicism, that games exist for a purpose and human life might not be able to happen without them. He even points out that you might well want to knowingly play along with a game, due to those social costs. Again relating to Feeling, Berne says that games exist as ways to avoid intimacy, and the reason people want to avoid intimacy is because intimacy makes you vulnerable. Games are thus a twisted form of self-protection, of keeping people at a distance while still getting things you need from them, like "strokes". Strokes are social recognitions that you exist, and Berne sees these as the primary thing that human beings seek. Dishonest and self-defeating as games are, they do get you strokes while protecting you from the dangers of intimacy.
As insightful as Berne's analyses of games are, they miss something critical: genuine empathy for the participants. By analyzing self-defeating or "playing to lose" behavior exclusively from the perspective of covert contracts for how to behave in the Extraverted arena, Berne misses reasons for the behavior that have nothing to do with attempts at negotiation. For example, a person might simply not know of another way to behave. Or they may know better but they are paralyzed by fear of trying something unfamiliar. There are all sorts of aspects of human nature and motives that simply cannot be understood in terms of Fe.
NFPs usually take the opposite approach to "antitheses": they try to bring the person's real needs to the surface, where they can be understood. Once understood without judging them against standards like whether they're socially acceptable, they can be weighed against other needs and pursued intelligently.
It seems that something more needs to be said. Despite the genuine insight in Games People Play, there is something icky about it. Perhaps Lenore's Extraverted/Introverted vocabulary makes it possible to describe that ickiness very precisely...something along the line of a too-relentless Extraverted point of view.
See also: Extraverted Feeling.
Compare Jo Coudert.