Scope and Contents
Provenance
Availability
Arrangement
Preferred Citation
Biography
Processing Information
Related Archival Materials
Separated Materials
Conditions Governing Use
Contributing Institution:
University of California, San Francisco Archives & Special Collections
Title: Eric L. Berne Papers
Creator:
Berne, Eric L., Dr. (Eric Lennard Berne)
Identifier/Call Number: MSS.2005.08
Identifier/Call Number: 20
Physical Description:
6.3 Linear Feet
(13 document boxes, one 11.25" square video box)
Date (inclusive): 1929-1970
Date (inclusive): 1950-1970
Abstract: The materials in this collection were created by Eric L. Berne (1910-1970), a San Francisco-based psychiatrist and author.
Records primarily document Berne's personal correspondence with friends and family, his studies at McGill University in Montreal,
his service as a military psychiatrist during World War II, his world travels and research in cultural psychiatry, and his
writings on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Fictional writings by Berne, notes and lecture materials, files relating to the
psychiatry organizations established by Berne (the San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars and the International Transactional
Analysis Association), patient notes, and audio-visual recordings are also present. Records include correspondence, diaries,
clippings, notebooks, reel-to-reel audio recordings, and videotape. Materials in the collection date from 1929-1970.
Language of Material:
English
Scope and Contents
The materials in this collection were created by Eric L. Berne (1910-1970), a San Francisco-based psychiatrist and author.
Records primarily document Berne's personal correspondence with friends and family, his studies at McGill University in Montreal,
his service as a military psychiatrist during World War II, his world travels and research in cultural psychiatry, and his
writings on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Fictional writings by Berne, notes and lecture materials, files relating to the
psychiatry organizations established by Berne (the San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars and the International Transactional
Analysis Association), patient notes, and audio-visual recordings are also present. Records include correspondence, diaries,
clippings, notebooks, reel-to-reel audio recordings, and videotape. Materials in the collection date from 1929-1970.
Provenance
This accession was donated in 6 boxes by Terry Berne on December 12, 2005. It included correspondence which was filed with
MSS 89-12.
Availability
Collection is open for research.
The UCSF Archives and Special Collections policy places access restrictions on material with privacy issues for a specific
time period from the date of creation. Access to records that contain personal and confidential information about an individual
or individuals is restricted for 75 years from date of creation or until the death of the individual mentioned in the records,
whichever is longer. Medical records are restricted for 50 years after an individual's date of death, if known. If the date
of death is unknown, access is restricted for 100 years from the individual's date of birth or 100 years from the date of
record creation, whichever occurs first. Access restrictions are noted at the file level. Please contact the UCSF Archivist
for information on access to these files.
Arrangement
This collection is arranged in eight series: Series I: Personal Files (1929-1970); Series II: Writings (1933-1970); Series
III: Lectures and Interviews (1946-1968); Series IV: Psychiatry Organizations (1947-1969); Series V: Patient Records and Research
Data (1951-1968 and undated); Series VI: Audio-Visual Material (1960-1968 and undated); Series VII: Artifacts (1940s-1960s
and undated). Series VIII: Restricted Material contains restricted files separated from the main collection.
Preferred Citation
Eric L. Berne Papers, 1929-1970, MSS 2005-08. Archives and Special Collections, University of California, San Francisco
Biography
Eric L. Berne (1910-1970) was a practicing psychiatrist, lecturer and author. Best known for his development of the theory
of Transactional Analysis, Berne published dozens of scholarly articles in the field of psychoanalysis and was the author
of eight major books, including the bestseller
Games People Play. He was a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, a Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association,
a Corresponding Member of the Indian Psychiatric Society, and a member of the American Medical Association and the American
Group Psychotherapy Association. He served as a consultant in psychiatry at Mt. Zion Hospital and at the McAuley Neuropsychiatric
Institute (St. Mary's Hospital) in San Francisco, and was an Associate Psychiatrist and Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University
of California, San Francisco Medical Center.
Berne founded the International Transactional Analysis Association in 1964 to advance his teachings and to organize a community
of fellow practitioners. The ITAA currently has approximately 1,000 members worldwide.
Eric Lennard Bernstein was born May 10, 1910 in Montreal, Quebec, to parents David Hillel Bernstein, M.D., and Sara Gordon
Bernstein. His father was a general practitioner and worked from an office in the family's home on Sainte Famille Street.
Sara Bernstein was a professional writer and editor. Both parents graduated from McGill University, which Berne later attended.
He had one sister, Grace, born in 1915. Dr. Bernstein died in 1920 of tuberculosis when Berne was only 9 years old; his mother
never remarried, and worked as a teacher and newspaper reporter to support the family.
Berne enrolled at McGill University to study English, and worked at the Royal Montreal Golf Club to help pay his tuition.
Known as "Lennie" to his classmates, he earned scholarships in mathematics and psychology and wrote for the college literary
magazine under fanciful nom de plumes such as Ramsbottom Horseley, Lennard Gandalac, Cynical St. Cyr, Peter Pinto, and Count
Gandalac. He earned his B.A. in 1931 and continued at McGill to earn his M.D. and C.M. (Master of Surgery) degrees in 1935.
Berne came to the United States in 1935 for a one-year internship at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey, followed by a two-year
residency program in psychiatry at the Psychiatric Clinic of Yale University School of Medicine. After completing his residency
in 1938 he traveled to Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey to study psychiatric illnesses and mental hospital facilities in different
parts of the world. This research continued throughout his professional life, and he published studies including "Psychiatry
in Syria" (1939), "Some Oriental Mental Hospitals" (1949), "Difficulties of Comparative Psychiatry: The Fiji Islands" (1959),
"The Cultural Problem: Psychopathology in Tahiti" (1960) and "A Psychiatric Census of the South Pacific" (1960).
In 1938-1939 Berne became an American citizen and shortened his name to Eric Berne. He began practicing psychiatry at the
Wadsworth Sanitarium and at a private practice in Norwalk, Connecticut. He continued training at the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute under Dr. Paul Federn, an Austrian psychoanalyst whose research in "ego psychology" influenced Berne's development
of Transactional Analysis. Berne married Ruth Harvey in 1942, with whom he had two children. The marriage ended in divorce
in 1946.
In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps as a 1st Lieutenant and was assigned to Baxter General Hospital in Spokane,
WA and later to Fort Ord Regional Hospital near Monterey, CA. He advanced to the rank of Major before leaving the service
in 1946. After World War II Berne settled in nearby Carmel-by-the-Sea, a small community of artists and free-thinkers. He
began working on his first book,
The Mind in Action, which was published by Simon and Schuster in 1947. Berne continued his formal training as a psychoanalyst at the San Francisco
Psychoanalytic Institute, under the tutelage of prominent psychologist Erik Erikson.
In 1947 Berne met Dorothy de Mass Way, a recently divorced young woman with three children, at one of the intellectual salons
he hosted at his home in Carmel. They married on Christmas Eve, 1948. Berne and Dorothy had two sons, Eric Jr. and Terence.
Berne continued to write and publish articles, spending hours in his separate study. He accepted an appointment as Assistant
Psychiatrist at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco while simultaneously serving as a Consultant to the Surgeon General of
the U.S. Army. He also worked as Adjunct and Attending Psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration and Mental Hygiene Clinic
in San Francisco in addition to his private practices in San Francisco and Carmel.
By 1950 his approach to psychotherapy and analysis had diverged from more traditional practices, and he terminated his study
at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He began developing his own school of thought which eventually became Transactional
Analysis. Berne viewed social interactions as basic exchanges, or "transactions" between people, who acted from one of three
ego-states (Parent, Adult, or Child) in order to get what they want. Berne termed these common transactions "games" and analyzed
them using frank and often humorous titles like "Why Does This Always Happen to Me" (WAHM) and "Let's You and Him Fight" (LYAHF).
By 1958 he had published three seminal articles outlining the theory of Transactional Analysis: "Intuition V: The Ego Image"
(1957); "Ego States in Psychotherapy" (1957); and "Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy" (1958).
Beginning in 1950-1951 Berne led evening seminars in Carmel to bring friends and followers together to discuss and test his
new methods. In San Francisco he formalized this practice and organized the San Francisco Social Psychiatry Seminars (SFSPS),
which incorporated in 1962 and began publishing the
Transactional Analysis Bulletin with Berne as editor. Two years later the organization became the International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA)
to include practitioners from around the country and around the world.
In 1964 Berne published
Games People Play to share his theories and methods with psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. It achieved spectacular success
as a popular self-help book, selling over 2 million copies and spending 111 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Berne's
professional success took a toll on his personal life, and he divorced his second wife Dorothy in 1964. He continued writing
and publishing articles and books, including
Principles of Group Treatment (1966) and
Sex in Human Loving (1970), based on a lecture he presented at the Jake Gimbel Sex Lecture Series at the Langley-Porter Psychiatric Clinic at
the University of California, San Francisco. He married a third time in 1967, to Torre Peterson Rosenkranz, but divorced in
1970. Berne was completing the manuscript for his final book,
What Do You Say After You Say Hello? when he was hospitalized with chest pains. Eric Berne died from a massive heart attack on July 15, 1970. He is buried in
the El Carmelo Cemetery in Pacific Grove, California.
Processing Information
The collection was processed by Kate Tasker in 2013-2014. Detailed processing and digitization for these materials were made
possible by generous support from 17 TA Associations worldwide and many individual donors through the International Transactional
Analysis Association.
Related Archival Materials
Related materials documenting Berne's development of Transactional Analysis and his work with the International Transactional
Analysis Association may be found in the following collections in this repository: MSS 82-0 (Eric L. Berne Papers, 1939-1973);
MSS 89-12 (Eric L. Berne Papers, 1931-1970); MSS 2003-12 (Eric L. Berne Papers, 1933-1971); MSS 2013-18 (Eric L. Berne Papers
[International Transactional Analysis Association Audio Recordings], 1963-1970); and MSS 2013-19 (Eric L. Berne Papers, 1904-2007).
Separated Materials
The following publications were separated from this accession and transferred to the Eric Berne Rare Books collection:
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry (1947, May). Volume 57, Number 5.
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry (1947, June). Volume 57, Number 6.
Berne, E. (1970).
Sex in Human Loving. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Conditions Governing Use
Copyright has not been assigned to the Library & Center for Knowledge Management. All requests for permission to publish or
quote from material must be submitted in writing to the UCSF Archivist. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the
Library & Center for Knowledge Management as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission
of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the researcher.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
International Transactional Analysis Association
Psychotherapy
Transactional analysis
Psychiatry