ABSTRACT
This article had its origins in the 2014 World Transactional Analysis Conference held in San Francisco and titled “TA Now: A Game Changer.” The conference provided many opportunities to review game theory and the similarities between games and enactments as defined by transactional analysis and psychoanalysis. During the conference, I noticed that many practitioners, including me, seemed to use the terms games and enactments interchangeably. As the conference progressed, I began questioning this assumption. I engaged in many conversations about how we might have been too quick to conflate the two terms without examining the possible differences between them. When I asked colleagues if they thought games and enactments were similar, most had a knee-jerk reaction that yes, they were similar, followed by a reflective pause that indicated possible doubt, and then further discussions, with no definitive answer emerging.
