Just another day at the office
I want to write a little bit about the genesis of this project, mostly so that I don’t forget. It may also be useful to some reader to peek behind the curtain of how professors at liberal arts colleges work.
Part of where this project came from was a random blog post that I was reading about Murray Edelman, whose concept of “symbolic reassurance” is one of the most powerful and under-examined concepts in the discipline. I find that it’s even more powerful when considered in his own historical context. I’m liable to get bogged down if I write any more about Edelman, so I’ll try to get to the point. It’s going to take a second.
At the time, I was working in an administrative role at the college and didn’t have time to dedicate to serious scholarship. My curiosity was rather untethered and I indulged it in spare moments between trying to establish a program in “public philosophy” and implementation of an expanded, branded “experiential learning” initiative.
So, when I had time to read a blog post on Murray Edelman, I found stray references to an unknown-to-me author named Eric Berne and his book Games People Play. The post didn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of the connection between Berne and Edelman. And so the reference was like a fly to a brook trout: a hook in a swiftly moving stream.
Over the next few months, I put the pieces together of who Berne was: a Canadian who had trained in psychoanalysis and settled in Northern California. It didn’t take much: he’s reasonably well-documented online. He was mostly in private practice, not institutional. But he was well-known in his field as the founder of a therapeutic methodology called “transactional analysis.” Games People Play was a mature expression of this methodology. The book itself, I would learn, is a strange text: part textbook for therapists, part self-help, and partly a book for the general reader. It seemed self-conscious and like it was attempting humor, though most of what he seems to try and pass off as humor are bald-faced misogyny and homophobia. In that regard, parts of it are hard to get through.
In writing my paper on John Dewey I had come across the vocational guidance literature, so I had a basic mental model of how to understand Games People Play, but not one large enough to shake my curiosity off of it.
That’s where the project got its start: a random blog post on an afternoon between administrative tasks.
But I forgot to mention one thing: Games People Play wasn’t some obscure text from the 1960s. It had been a smash for its publisher. It was well-known enough that in 1968 Joe South released a song called “Games People Play,” which won the Grammy for Song of the Year. I’m pretty certain, though I haven’t been able to find the documentary connection that I would need to make the claim in academic writing, that South’s song is inspired by the book and its popularity. The Grove Press archives may have just what I’m after; a publisher like Grove would want their piece of the pie.
It has been recorded by something like two hundred artists since. King Curtis’s instrumental version (Duane Allman on guitar) won a Grammy of its own. Dolly Parton did a version. My favorite is Lee Dorsey’s, on Yes We Can (1970), produced by the inimitable Allen Toussaint.
As unsexy as that sounds, it’s how the project got started. Sometimes the life of the mind is just another day at the office.