People are claimed to follow an unconscious plan for their life formed in childhood, and to steer events toward its predetermined ending.
Berne's script is decided early, reinforced by parental messages, and lived out. The construct cannot be tested in the form given, since any life can be read as fulfilling a script identified afterwards. What is researched is narrative identity: people construct coherent stories of their lives, and the construction is retrospective.
In practice
- A biography that finds the pattern of a whole life in one childhood scene has done the work backwards.
- A person who says they always knew how it would end is reporting the story, not the plan.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is early conditioning: parental messages are absorbed before a child can evaluate them, and later choices are steered to fit.
- In its favour
- Something in the neighbourhood is measured: narrative identity research shows that people construct coherent life stories and that the shape of those stories tracks wellbeing.
- Against it
- The construct cannot be tested in the form given, since any life can be read afterwards as fulfilling a script identified afterwards, and the theory has no adequate evidential base.
- Standing
- No study has established the construct. Narrative identity research studies how people construct life stories, which is a claim about telling rather than about a plan that governs events.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop