Dueling Scripts

• Script conflict by BW, 7/17/98
  
  

The wisdom of your question was highlighted for me just yesterday when Vick Kelly called me to discuss a patient who was newly released from a simply horrible marriage. Free at last, he began to date a woman he had always seen as lovely, and was both surprised and delighted that she returned his interest. They have been lovers for perhaps a week now, and he feels reborn only as one can when released from the miserable self identification we assume during the death throes of a marriage.

But, said Vick, he feels conflicted about this. Aren't I, he said, supposed to be dating everybody in sight? Shouldn't I be looking everywhere for the right partner rather than merely settling for the first one I find?

I commented that his action in going after the person who had caught his eye, living in the moment with that excitement and joy, was the reification of an Image, a self-definition and highly scripted way of life we all understand as hot new love. Yet the other Image, "playing the field," contains and is created by quite other scripts which are therefore in conflict with the one that rules at the moment. Here is a perfect example of scripts in conflict with each other.

We see this in the tiresome story of certain men who fall in love with a woman but feel that they are doing something wrong because "she isn't beautiful enough." Here, the Image associated with beauty is orthogonal to the Image associated with love; this is made all the more difficult because for a lot of reasons we link beauty and love. Anybody we love is usually seen as beautiful, and anybody we see as beautiful is automatically seen as lovable. These, of course, are scripts forged from infancy on in our relationship with our parents.

Good questions, and best answered by resort to the source: Tomkins AIC volume III on script theory, and the chapters on script theory in Virginia Demos' important compilation of Tomkins's papers---"Exploring Affect" (Cambridge University Press).

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