6. The LYAHF game with manipulation going all wrong
Keeping her son from fighting with boys his mother provokes him into it. Here LYAHF game in Irwin Shaw’s novel takes an ironic turn. Michael Storrs, a schoolboy, is being ruthlessly harassed as a ‘pansy’ by his mates and forced to fight the leader of his tormentors Joseph Ling.

The next dау, the game was repeated. Only now, even the bare tolerance that the boys had shown of him before was gone. As he ran after his hat, he was tripped аnd sent sprawling аnd а chant оf  'Pansy! Pansy!' echoed mockingly on аll sides. Finally, Ling got the hat аnd, just as he had the dау before, stood still with it аnd said, 'If you want it, fight for it.'

Michael knew there was nо other way out. And suddenly he didn' t want any other way out. Не walked slowly up to Ling and hit him in the fасе with аll his force. Ling fell back а step, more surprised than hurt, аnd Storrs was аll over him, hitting wildly, oblivious of everything but the sneering, unfinished fасе in front оf him, an exaltation he had never known before sweeping over him as he hit, was hit, fell tangled with the bоу in the muddied snow, felt his nosе begin to bleed, punching, kicking, trying to strangle, being strangled iп turn, unconscious that the bell had rung, that а man was bending over him, trying to tear the two boys apart.

(Irwin Shaw. The Top of the Hill. Chapter 2)

At first sight the cognitive scenario of the fight is different because one of the two fighters is a provocateur at the same time. But psychoanalysis makes Irwin Shaw to look for deeper reasons. The one who pushes Michael into violence is his own overprotective mother:

 “Thus the boy was overindulged, overprotected, overfed on highly nourishing and scientifically chosen foods, kept from the hurly-burly of ordinary childhood, forbidden to climb trees, go out for teams, consort with rough children, play with toy guns or bows and arrows and to go to and from the neighborhood school unescorted.”

(Shaw. The Top of the Hill. Chapter 2)

The LYAHF game as it was masterminded by the overworried mother presupposed that her son should “fight” (metaphorically, of course) her dead husband whom she set as a negative example for Michael: her law-abiding husband died from a knife wound that he got trying to stop a brawl between two drunks.  Instead, she achieves the opposite result by making her beloved son “the butt of the wits”:

When his mother observed even the slightest signs оf res-tiveness on the part of her son — pouting at the piano, embarrassment at being delivered аnd picked up at school like an infant, raising his voice when excited — there were nо overt punishments, nо slaps, nо deprivations, nо going to bed without dinner. His mother, Michael learned early, could exact retribution with а sigh, а tear, а sad look up to heaven. Не envied his classmates their tales of а good solid beating by irate parents. Meticulously dressed among his peers, who came to school looking like а last battalion of retreating Confederate troops, he became the natural butt of the wits аnd the bullies who surrounded him аnd he learned to dread recess periods, where, in the whirl оf games and wrestling and whooping, he would be singled out for torture.

(Shaw. The Top of the Hill. Chapter 2)

Irwin Shaw tells the reader how psychologically destructive were the manipulative moves used by Mrs. Storrs against her own son: if Freud had been alive “his giant groan would have been heard from Vienna to Catalina Island”.

7. The LYAHF game backfiring on the manipulator

The heroine of Turgenev’s “First love” Zinaida is adored, courted and made fuss of by men including Volodya, the story-teller who is 16 and reading for University, Though she has quite a sufficient number of men to make a choice from, Zinaida becomes  a mistress of Volodya’s father. Volodya happens to hear Zinaida’s request in French addressed to his father: she is asking him to dump his wife (apparently, believes to get rid of the rival). The father is outraged:

“My father shrugged his shoulders, and straightened his hat on his head, which was always a sign of impatience with him. . . . Then I caught the words: ‘Vous devez vous séparer de cette . . . ’ Zinaïda sat up, and stretched out her arm. . . . Suddenly, before my very eyes, the impossible happened. My father suddenly lifted the whip, with which he had been switching the dust off his coat, and I heard a sharp blow on that arm, bare to the elbow. I could scarcely restrain myself from crying out; while Zinaïda shuddered, looked without a word at my father, and slowly raising her arm to her lips, kissed the streak of red upon it. My father flung away the whip, and running quickly up the steps, dashed into the house. . . . Zinaïda turned round, and with outstretched arms and downcast head, she too moved away from the window.”

(S. Turgenev. First Love. Chapter 21)

Conclusions

1. “Cherchez la femme” as a jocular name is in line with Eric Berne’s preference for colloquialisms and is to be treated as a unifying cognitive frame that describes the essence of the game more accurately than LYAHF. “Cherchez la femme” game is extremely popular with people who play it over and over again with varying results, extending beyond the cases characterized by Eric Berne as romantic, tragic or comic.

2. The psychology behind “Cherchez la femme” cognitive frame is distinctly masculine because it points to a woman as “the guilty party”. The presence of a woman in the cognitive frame shows her in negative colors: she is the trouble-maker. This arrangement of roles – she as the manipulator, he as the victim of manipulation – proves utter untenability of Eric Berne’s statement “the psychology is essentially feminine”.  

3. Eric Berne, has made his case in terms of the psychology of the manipulator: it is feminine, because the manipulator is a SHE who turns out to be a dominant party in her relations with a man due to her more exquisite turn of mind. This approach, complimentary to a woman, may be regarded as interior. In the exterior approach the woman appears in negative colors. 

4. Eric Berne is absolutely right in his claim that “LYAHF is the basis of much of the world’s literature, both good and bad”. Taking into account this important clue, it’s amazing that no research should have tested Eric Berne’s games against ‘real’ actions, events and personalities. Following in the wake of Karl Leonhard,
L. S. Vygotsky and many others this research shows the interpretation of psychology behind the LYAHF game in the works of great authors.

6. The tragic scenario of the game in its classical execution is found in Kuprin’s “The Dual”: a scheming and selfish woman, who is as hard as a nail, manipulates an unsuspecting victim into letting him get killed.

7. The execution of the moves in an amazing variety of cognitive points to the final stage in the internalization of the role by an individual and depends on such variables as sex, age, personality, intention, power, peculiarities of socializing and stroking generated by this or that culture.

8. The fact of “seeing” the LYAHF game in the animal world (the ‘smiling’ she-wolf in “White Fang”) is a thundering testimony to the importance of the cognitive scenario for the comprehension of psychology behind the games played by humans.

8. You can denounce hypocrisy, but it is a psychological universal of human mind that will always aim at manipulating other people.

Literature

1. Andresen - Andresen, Julie Tetel. Carter, Phillip M. Languages In The World: How History, Culture, and Politics Shape Language. – Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. – 377 p.

2. Berne, Eric. Games People Play. The Psychology of Human Relationships. – Penguin books, 2016. – 176 p.

3. Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. – Routledge: London and New York, 2012. – 242 p.

4. Leonhard, Karl. Akzentuierte Persönlichkeiten. – Berlin: VEB Verlag Volk und Gesundheit, 1976. - 328 S.

5. Machin, David, Mayr, Andrea. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. – London: SAGE, 2012. – 236 p.

6. Mooney, Annabelle, Evans, Betsy. Language, Society and Power: An Introduction. – London and New York: Routledge, 2019. – 262 p.

7. Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. – Penguin Books, 2007. – 505 p.

8. Simpson, Paul. Stylistics. – London and New York: Routledge, 2010. – 247 p.

9. Schewe, Manfred & Scott, Trina. Literatur verstehen und inszenieren – Foreign Language Literature Through Drama. A Research Project. In: GFL-Journal 3, 2003. - 56-83.

10. Vygotsky L. S. Thought and Word (1934) // The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader: London and New York, 2000.  – 122 – 126.