This article focuses on the ideas Eric Berne (1953) put forward in his essay “Concerning the Nature of Communication.” The author shows how starting from cybernetics, Berne developed with great ingenuity concepts such as the value of noise, the construction of the communication context, and the importance of the hidden message. She illustrates how Berne anticipated the work of Jakobson and the Palo Alto School in moving from the communication context to the communication relationship, which would become the basis of future theories of interpersonal communication. Berne’s suggestion that a message contains intentionality and desirability predated Jakobson’s development of the concept of the function of the message and, in particular, the phatic function.

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Articles
Contributions to a Theory of Communication
Berne, Cybernetics, and Linguistic Structuralism
Pages 218-225
Published online: 28 Dec 2017