Some games are played to exploit or fight off sexual impulses. These are all, in effect, perversions of the sexual instincts in which the satisfaction is displaced from the sexual act to the crucial transactions which constitute the payoff of the game. This cannot always be demonstrated convincingly, because such games are usually played in privacy, so that clinical information about them has to obtained secondhand, and the informant’s bias cannot always be satisfactorily evaluated. The psychiatric conception of homosexuality, for example, is heavily skewed, because the more aggressive and successful “players” do not often come for psychiatric treatment, and the available material concerns the passive partners.
The games included here are: “Let’s You and Him Fight,” “Perversion,” “Rapo,” “Stocking Game” and “Uproar.” In most cases, the agent is the woman. This is because the hard forms of sexual games in which the man is the agent verge on or constitute criminality and properly belong in the Underworld sections. On the other side, sexual games and marital games overlap, but the ones described here are readily available to unmarried people as well as to spouses.
– Dr. Eric Berne MD on Sexual Games in Games People Play.
List of Sexual Games in Games People Play
