Mind game

Mind games in psychology is used to define three forms of competitive human behaviors:

The term mind games was first used in 1968. Mind games in the sense of the struggle for prestige appear in everyday life in the fields of office politics, sport, and relationships. Played most intensely perhaps by Type A personalities, office mind games are often hard to identify clearly, as strong management blurs with over-direction, healthy rivalry with manipulative head-games and sabotage. The wary salesman will be consciously and unconsciously prepared to meet a variety of challenging mind games and put-downs in the course of their work.

The serious sportsman will also be prepared to meet a variety of gambits and head-games from their rivals, attempting meanwhile to tread the fine line between competitive psychology and paranoia.

In intimate relationships, mind games can be used to undermine one partner's belief in the validity of their own perceptions. Personal experience may be denied and driven from memory; and such abusive mind games may extend to denial of the victim's reality, social undermining, and the trivializing of what is felt to be important. Both sexes have equal opportunities for such verbal coercion, which may be carried out unconsciously as a result of the need to maintain one's own self-deception.

Eric Berne described a psychological game as an organised series of ulterior transactions taking place on twin levels, social and psychological, and resulting in a dramatic outcome when the two levels finally came to coincide. He described the opening of a typical game like flirtation as follows: "Cowboy: 'Come and see the barn'. Visitor: 'I've loved barns ever since I was a little girl'". At the social level a conversation about barns, at the psychological level one about sex play, the outcome of the game – which may be comic or tragic, heavy or light – will become apparent when a switch takes place and the ulterior motives of each become clear.

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