Claude Steiner

Claude M. Steiner, PhD (1935 to 2017), the psychotherapist and author of Games Alchoholics Play, Scripts People Live, and its sequel The Other Side of Power, was born a Jew in Paris. He spent his childhood in Spain and Mexico, before immigrating to Los Angeles in 1952. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he was a protégée of Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis, to which Steiner made a significant contribution throughout his life. His bibliography contains over 150 contributions, including fourteen books—from TA Made Simple (in 1969) to The Heart of the Matter (2009). His work has been published in twelve languages. The Warm Fuzzy Tale and Achieving Emotional Literacy embody his theories of emotional intelligence, about which he lectured and gave workshops around the world in the last decades of his life. One of the major focuses of his work was the subject of power, about which he wrote a number of articles in the magazines he co-founded and helped produce, namely Issues in Radical Psychiatry and Issues in Cooperation and Power, and later in his book The Other Side of Power (1980). After a long struggle with Parkinson’s, he died in January 2017 in Ukiah, California. His final words were, “Love is the answer.”