1935 – 2017
Claude
Steiner
Psychotherapist. Author. Founding voice of Transactional Analysis. He believed people are born OK.
His work is disappearing.
We are bringing it back.
Claude Steiner spent fifty years developing ideas that changed how people understand themselves, their relationships, and their capacity to feel. He wrote fourteen books, published in twelve languages.
His original websites have been lost: one taken over by an unrelated blog, the other by a commercial listing. This site exists to preserve his legacy and make his ideas accessible to anyone who needs them.
How can we help?
Key ideas
Emotional Literacy
The ability to understand, manage, and express feelings effectively. Distinct from emotional intelligence, and more actionable.
The Stroke Economy
How societies restrict the free exchange of recognition and warmth, and the psychological costs of that scarcity.
Life Scripts
The unconscious life plans people adopt in childhood that shape their decisions, relationships, and sense of what is possible.
Radical Psychiatry
A movement Steiner co-founded that challenged conventional psychiatric power and emphasised liberation.
Warm Fuzzies
A simple, profound parable about generosity and how fear of scarcity transforms communities.
Power
How interpersonal power works, how it is abused, and how cooperative alternatives can replace control.
Selected books
Fourteen books across five decades. These are among his most influential.
Love is the answer.
His final words, January 2017
About Claude Steiner
Born in Paris in 1935 to Austrian parents, Steiner fled the Nazi invasion as a child, eventually reaching the United States in 1952. He studied physics at UC Berkeley before turning to psychology, earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, and became one of the founding members of the International Transactional Analysis Association.
For over fifty years, he practised, wrote, and taught from Berkeley, California, always insisting that people are fundamentally OK and capable of change.
Read his full storyBorn
6 January 1935, Paris
Education
PhD, University of Michigan
Based in
Berkeley, California
Key contribution
Emotional Literacy
Legacy
14 books, 12 languages