When Claude Steiner and the late Eric Berne developed the theory of Transactional Analysis, their basic belief that people were “born princes and princess, until their parents turned them into frogs” countered the fundamental principle of psychiatry which asserts that emotional and mental distress comes from within. This theory was further developed in Steiner’s book Games Alcoholics Play. Dr. Berne, in What Do You Say After You Say Hello?, acknowledged Steiner’s important role in the analysis of “life scripts” which we choose at an early age and which rule every detail of our lives until our death.

In Scripts People Live, Steiner expands upon this belief to show that people are innately healthy but develop a pattern early in life based upon negative or positive influences of those around them.

Claude M. Steiner, was born in 1935 in Paris, France, the son of a Austrian parents. Fleeing from Hitler, his Jewish mother and Christian father escaped to Spain in 1939 with their two children and emigrated to Mexico after the end of the war. He is a Phd, clinical psychologist from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He met Eric Berne the psychiatrist author of Games People Play in San Francisco in 1956 and was his disciple and, later, colleague, friend and collaborator, and with him a founding member of The Transactional Analysis Association.

After Berne's death in 1971, Dr. Steiner went on to develop the theory and practice of Radical Psychiatry about which he wrote extensively in books and journals. His books include: Games Alcoholics Play, Scripts People Live, Healing Alcoholism, The Other Side of Power, When a Man Loves a Woman, Emotional Literacy, Excellence in Aging; for Men, The Heart of the matter; Love, Information and Transactional Analysis, and he was editor of two anthologies, Beyond Games and Scripts and Readings in Radical Psychiatry as well as the author of the ubiquitous fable of The Warm Fuzzy Tale.

Steiner's books have been translated into ten languages and he has a world-wide lecturing and teaching audience. He was a senior editor, for three years, of the quarterly journal Propaganda Review. He has three children and six grandchildren. With his wife Jude Steiner-Hall he lives and practices in Berkeley California USA and on his ranch in Ukiah, Mendocino County, California.