#69 Social Intercourse
This post provides a summary of the theory of social intercourse - as explained in Eric Berne's book - Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.
Physical intimacy is the most favoured form of stimulus by humans. This is also called as stimulus hunger. After an infant's period of close intimacy with the mother is over, the individual is confronted with various social, psychological and biological forces which stand in the way of continued physical intimacy in the infant style. It was found that infants who were deprived of handling over a long period tend to sink into an irreversible decline.
As the craving for physical contact cannot be fulfilled due to various forces which stand in the way, humans learn to do with more subtle and symbolic forms of handling. This transformation of stimulus hunger (or settling for other forms of handling) is called recognition hunger. As the complexities of compromise increase, each person becomes more and more individual in his quest for recognition, and it is these differentia which lend variety to social intercourse and which determine the individual’s destiny. Acknowledging someone's presence is one of the simplest forms of 'stroking'. A movie actor may require hundreds of strokes each week, while a scientist may require only one stroke a year from a respected master. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse.
After stimulus hunger and recognition hunger come structure-hunger. The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. The operational aspect of time-structuring may be called programming. It has three aspects: material, social, and individual. Material programming arises from the vicissitudes encountered in dealing with external reality; which 'stroking' recognition or other forms of complex social intercourse to use. Social programming results in traditional ritualistic or semi-ritualistic interchanges. The chief criterion for it is local acceptability, popularly called ‘good manners’. As people become better acquainted, more and more individual programming creeps in - where the sequence of interaction is circumscribed by unspoken rules and regulations.
Intimacy begins when individual (usually instinctual) programming becomes more intense, and both social patterning and ulterior restrictions and motives begin to give way. It is the only completely satisfying answer to stimulus-hunger, recognition-hunger and structure-hunger.
Stimulus-hunger and recognition-hunger express the need to avoid sensory and emotional starvation, both of which lead to biological deterioration. Structure-hunger expresses the need to avoid boredom. Boredom becomes synonymous with emotional starvation if the persists over time and can have the same consequences.
The solitary individual can structure time in two ways: activity and fantasy. When one is a member of a social aggregation of two or more people, there are several options for structuring time. In order of complexity, these are:
Rituals
Pastimes
Games
Intimacy
Activity, which may form a matrix for any of the others.
The advantages of social contact revolve around somatic and psychic equilibrium. They are related to the following factors:
Relief of tension
Avoidance of noxious situations
Procurement of stroking
Maintenance of an established equilibrium