Script analysis at the individual level considers that "from the early transactions between mother, father and child, a life plan evolves.
[11] Thereafter "the script proper...is a unconscious derivative of the protocol", which in later life, as "compromised in accordance with the available realities...is technically called the adaptation".
[11] Berne himself noted that "of all those who preceded transactional analysis, Alfred Adler comes the closest to talking like a script analyst," with his concept of "the life plan...which determines his life-line".
[12] Berne came to believe that "from earliest months, the child is taught not only what to do, but also what to see, hear, touch, think, and feel....each person obediently ends up at the age of five or six with a script of life plan largely dictated by his parents.
[16] Drawing on the work of Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Berne argued that fairy-tales, legends, mythology and drama were the early tools for mankind "to distill out and record the more homely and recognizable patterns of human living"[17] - and that they still provide keys to the framework of the contemporary life script.
Berne made "script analysis...a central theme of his last book",[18] subtitled The Psychology of Human Destiny, in which he explained that "one object of script analysis is to fit the patient's life plan into the grand historical psychology of the whole human race".
Richard G. Erskine, PhD, the originator of Integrative Psychotherapy (Developmentally Based, Relationally Focused), along with coauthor Marlyn Zalcman, developed the theory of Racket Analysis and received the Eric Berne Scientific Award in 1982 because of their contribution.
In 2018 Richard received the Eric Berne Memorial award for his three publications on “Unconscious Experience, Attachment Patterns, and Neuropsychological Research in the Psychotherapy of Life Scripts”.