Autonomy, awareness, and freedom

Famous psychologist on how to free oneself

by Eric Berne

Eric Berne is known for his Transactional Analysis theory and quite a bleak view of humans spending their life to play “games”. Yet, in the last couple of pages of his book “Games People Play” he offers a way out which he calls ‘autonomy’, awareness being a key ingredient to it. Here is an excerpt:

Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future. A good illustration of possibilities in American life, is driving to work in the morning in a hurry. The decisive question is: ‘Where is the mind when the body is here?’ and there are three common cases.

You can read these four pages here. NB: Read the book too; books are deeper