Synopsis: A book about psychology, chiefly how people play games to feel alive and how to transcend the need to play games.
Key Takeaways
Page 14 – This process of compromise may be called by various terms, such as sublimation; but whatever it is called, the result is a partial transformation of the infantile stimulus-hunger into something which may be termed recognition-hunger
Page 15 – Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse.
Page 15 – The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In his existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project
Page 17 – Past times and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy
Page 33 – A procedure is a series of simple complementary Adult transactions directed towards the manipulation of reality
Page 44 – Every game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting, quality
Page 158 – The attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy
Page 158 – Awareness, means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing on one’s own way and not the way one was taught
Page 158 – Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future
Page 158 – Where is the mind when the body is here? Three common cases
- The man whose chief preoccupation is being on time is the one who is furthest out. This is the Jerk, whose chief concern is how it will look to the boss. It is quite possible that this is the most favourable condition for the development of hypertension or coronary disease
- The Sulk, on the other hand, is not so much concerned with arriving on time as in collecting excuses for being late. He is the rebellious Child or righteous parent game of “Look What They Made Me Do”
- Less common is the “natural driver”, the man to whom driving a car is congenial science and art. He is very much aware of himself and the machine which he controls so well and to that extent he is alive.
- The fourth case is the person who is aware, and who will not hurry because he is living in the present moment with the environment which is here, to hurry is to neglect. The aware person is alive because he knows how he feels, where he is and when it is. He knows that after he dies they will still be there, but he will not be there to look at them again, so he wants to see them now with as much poignancy as possible
Page 159 – Spontaneity means options, the freedom to choose and express ones’ feelings from the assortment available. It means liberation, liberation from the compulsion to play games and have only the feelings one was taught to have.
Page 159 – Intimacy means the spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware person, the liberation of the eidetically perceptive, uncorrupted Child in all its naivete living in the here and now. Most infants seem to be loving, and that is the essential nature of intimacy as shown experimentally.
Page 161 – In essence, this whole preparation consists of obtaining a friendly divorce from one’s parents (an other Parental influences) so that they may be agreeably visited on occasion, but are no longer dominant.
Page 162 – For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classification of behaviour and that is awareness something which rises above the programming of the past and that is spontaneity and something that is more rewarding than fame and that is intimacy
Final Thoughts: It is such a strange coincidence that all the books I am reading now are focusing on the need to stay present and aware and get caught up in the mind. This book is great. 8/10
Stranger in Sydney 