Talk:Stephen Potter

Henry Arthur Jones or James ?
A thorough but unattributed and undocumented chronology at Stephen Potter - Biography, my most fertile source, includes the entry
 * 1923-1926 Secretary to Henry Arthur James, the playwright.

While i get no hits on
 * "Henry Arthur Jones " "stephen potter",

i also get none on
 * "Henry Arthur James" playwright OR theater OR theater OR drama

On the other hand,
 * "Henry Arthur Jones"

produces numerous theater-relevant hits, and suitable dates.

I conclude that the struck out material above is a slip of the eye or pen for
 * 1923-1926 Secretary to Henry Arthur Jones, the playwright.

--Jerzy(t) 05:19, 2004 May 14 (UTC)

I made a couple of minor corrections, and an update 2005-05-11. My reference is Julian Potter, Stephen's younger son and biographer. From Pinctor

Jerzy's conjecture is correct. Alan Jenkins's biography of Potter confirms that SP. was secretary to Henry Arthur Jones (p.69), although the book is vague about exact dates of employment. Lexo (talk) 22:20, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

No Stephen Fry
I removed the following sentence:
 * Audio versions, read by Stephen Fry, are available in the U.K.

Alas, there is no sign of such audiobooks anywhere. I suspect someone got confused because Stephen Fry did the Harry Potter audiobooks in the UK, thus leading to an obvious search engine confusion (Stephen + Fry + Stephen + Potter + audiobook). It would, of course, be lovely if Stephen Fry did do them -- they are close to his kind of satire. But they do not presently exist. Artemis-Arethusa 20:39, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Upping the quality of this article
I own a copy of Alan Jenkins' biography of Potter, plus have a small collection of Potter's works (all of his gamesmanship/lifemanship stuff plus the anthology The Sense of Humour, the travel book Potter in America and his early study of D.H. Lawrence.) I am something of a fan but while I have no illusions that an article on Potter need be of the scale of an article on, say, Leo Tolstoy or Alan Turing, I do think that his influence has been out of all proportion to the number of people who've actually read his stuff. He has changed people who've never even heard his name, but who have heard of the concepts he (arguably) gave a name to. Also, I think that the sources demonstrate that Potter had a bizarre cult following in the post-WW2 US intelligence community. I will do my best to get this article to a higher level. Lexo (talk) 21:30, 19 May 2008 (UTC)


 * That would be helpful. "Remember, if you are not one up, you are one down."  --John Nagle (talk) 00:38, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Influence of Gamesmanship/One-upmanship
Eric Berne, the author of "Games People Play," gives Stephen Potter credit as one of the progenitors of Transactional Analysis. In this connection, it is not just the four "Up-manship" books (Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship and Supermanship) that merit consideration, but also the fifth of the series, "Anti-Woo," which did not make it into paperback. Unlike some of Berne's books, where the game players may be seeking intimacy, in Anti-Woo the prototypical English bachelor seeks to avoid being ensnared by predatory females: the "ploys" used can be viewed as the kind of ultmately self-defeating games that Berne described in his later works.NRPanikker (talk) 15:56, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

External links modified
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