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Claude Steiner, Ph.D. Author, Emotional Literacy I was born in 1935 in Paris, France, the first born of Austrian parents. Fleeing from Hitler, my Jewish mother and Christian father escaped to Spain in 1939 with my sister Katherine and me in tow. Eventually, after having one more child--my brother Miguel--my parents emigrated to Mexico just following the end of WWII. I spent my childhood and adolescent posing as a Christian in catholic schools. My sister is a language teacher now living in Rohnert Park in N. California and my brother currently lives in Zurich, Switzerland and makes his living as a banker. In 1952 I came to the US to study engineering and then physics at Santa Monica City College in California and for a while earned my living as an automobile mechanic. I went on to study physics at the University of California in Berkeley but decided that I didn't want to spend my life making bombs and transferred to the study of psychology and child development. I also began to work as a summer camp counselor and eventually director at the Berkeley Jewish Community Center.		Learn more from Claude Steiner Tool / Concept you will learn from his presentation at Nexus: Keys to emotional literacy. His presentation schedule and session description at Nexus 2000 Books | Bibliography | Links
In 1957 I met and became a disciple of Eric Berne, the psychiatrist author of Games People Play. Eventually, in 1965, at Berne's urging, I obtained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His wish was that I should be the ITAA's first "research director." Over time I became Eric Berne's colleague, collaborator and friend and with him, a founding member of the International Transactional Analysis Association.(ITAA) In the late 1960's and after Berne's death in 1971, I got more and more involved as an activist in various liberation movements and against the war in Vietnam and went on to develop the theory and practice of Radical Psychiatry about which I wrote extensively in books and journals especially in The Radical Therapist a quarterly journal published by the Radical Psychiatry collective. In addition, I conducted a full time, group and individual therapy practice in Berkeley. I have written eight books, two of them minor best sellers. I also wrote the now ubiquitous children's fable, The Warm Fuzzy Tale. In 1975 I started to develop and teach my emotional literacy concepts and eventually I refined the program of emotional literacy training presented in my latest book Achieving Emotional Literacy. I coined the phrases "warm fuzzies" and "emotional literacy," and developed the theory of the "Stroke Economy." My books have been translated into eight languages and I have a world-wide lecturing and teaching audience. My burning interest in power plays, especially the most subtle psychological power play -- propaganda -- caused me to give up my clinical practice and travel as a journalist to Mexico and Central America to study the effects of US propaganda in that region. Later I returned to the practice of clinical psychology and also became a founding member and Senior editor, for three years, of the quarterly journal Propaganda Review. I have three grown children Mimi (35) Eric (32) and Denali (18) and two grand children (Mathew and Bella, Mimi's children) and I live and practice in Berkeley and on my 160 acre ranch with its two acre, commercial, organic garden in Mendocino County, California. My hobby is car and farm machine mechanics and here is the best part: I have yet to take a car of mine to a mechanic for repairs (other than air conditioning).