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Claude Steiner was born January 6, 1935 in Paris, France. His parents were Austrian, his mother Jewish and his father Christian. The family left France in 1939 ahead of the impending Nazi invasion. Eventually the family settled in Mexico.

In 1952, Steiner went to the United States to study engineering. In 1957 he met and became a follower of Eric Berne, psychiatrist and founder of the transactional analysis school of psychotherapy. In 1965 he obtained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is founding member and teaching member of the International Transactional Analysis Association.

In the 1970s and '80s, Steiner was a founder and practitioner of Radical Psychiatry, a new approach to psychotherapy based in a social theory (of alienation) rather than a medical one (of individual pathology). Influenced by progressive movements of the time, work in the modality continues into the present.

Claude Steiner has written extensively about transactional analysis. His writings have focused especially on life scripts, alcoholism, "emotional literacy", and Interpersonal power plays.

Steiner has been active in political causes. He opposed the US role in Vietnam War of the 1960s and has been an outspoken critic of US policy and actions involving Latin America.

Claude Steiner summarises his views in his conclusion to his Treatise: TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS IN THE INFORMATION AGE Transactional Analysis In The Information Age

It seems that many in Transactional Analysis are impatient with the state of transactional analysis as a dynamic, developing theory. For myself, I have thought at times that Transactional Analysis has had its day. Many of its ideas have been silently incorporated into the psychiatric culture, but on the whole its point has been missed and it has not been given a place among the great psychiatric theories of the century and I was ready to put it to rest. Accordingly I followed my interest in power and its abuses away from Transactional Analysis into propaganda, journalism and Central American politics. From the distant perspective of an investigator into media and information, in a dawning Information Age I came to see Transactional Analysis in a brand new light; as a visionary theory of Information Age psychology and psychiatry. As the world peers into the twenty first century with every one wondering how they will be affected by the looming millennial changes, we, in Transactional Analysis, are in possession of a legacy which is only now becoming clear: we have the tools and the insights of an Information Age, communication-based psychology and psychiatry.

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