Sublime

In family therapy we call this redistribution. You take a quality that is supposedly lodged in one person—like badness—and you move it around.

The essential characteristic of human play is not that the emotions are spurious, but that they are regulated. This is revealed when sanctions are imposed on an illegitimate emotional display. Play may be grimly serious, or even fatally serious, but the social sanctions are serious only if the rules are broken. Pastimes and games are substitutes fo

A GAME is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively it is a recurring set of transactions, often repetitious, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare, or “gimmick.” Games are clearly differentiated fro

Pathological (e.g. delusional projection) ii. Immature (e.g. passive aggression) iii. Neurotic (e.g. hypochondriasis) iv. Mature (e.g. humour / altruism).

social world of ours is highly structured into a series of circles, or layers, that also have very distinct sizes, each of which is associated with very specific frequencies of contact,

What we are concerned with here, however, are the unconscious games played by innocent people engaged in duplex transactions of which they are not fully aware, and which form the most important aspect of social life all over the world.

PHILOSOPHER: By contrast, from the standpoint of Adlerian psychology, the basis of interpersonal relations is founded not on trust but on confidence.

As a couples therapist, I have three sources of information: what the partners report about themselves and each other, how they behave in front of me, and how I feel witnessing their behavior.

Freud believed the ego had defence mechanisms that were designed to deal with internal conflict. These devices were an outlet for the neuroses born from the constant tussle between the public face – the super-ego – and the id or inner rage. He argued that when id impulses (the desire to have sex or take revenge) come into conflict with the super-eg