Karpman's Article On The Karpman Triangle

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Fairy Tales and Dramatic Script Analysis

author: Stephen Karpman (Karpman S. B., 1968)

On a conscious level, fairy tales help to instill social norms in young minds, but subconsciously, they can provide a certain number of attractive stereotyped roles, places and schedules for a wandering scenario of life. Until now, scientific script analysis has relied on the Scenario Matrix (see Claude Steiner, Transactional analysis bulletin, 1966). In this article, I will present diagrams for dramatic scenario analysis using familiar examples from well-known fairy tales.

Drama can be analyzed as switching in role and position in the time continuum. The intensity of the drama is influenced by the number of switches over a period of time (Scenario Speed) and the contrast between the toggled positions (Scenario Swipe). Low speed and swing are boring. The timing of each switch changes independently, from sudden to worry-free.

1. ROLE DIAGRAM

Just as ego state analysis is part of structural and transactional analysis, role analysis is part of game and scenario analysis, identifying the entities involved in the action. The slogan on a person's "T-shirt" usually represents the slogan of his script role. With this slogan, it can be established, often by asking directly what role a person plays in life.

A persona "living in a fairy tale" usually has a simplified view of the world with a minimum of dramatic characteristics. The role diagram provides a means of visually organizing this set of key entities in therapy. When a person knows his or her "favorite fairy tale", key roles can be listed in a circle and then life roles can be selected. Less often, this is worked out in reverse order, and the classic story is then discovered and matched to the roles. This vividness and imagery in the description of action bears a useful similarity to the analysis of games.

The arrows in the diagram indicate not the sequence of actions, but the rule that all roles are interchangeable, and that a person can play each of them from time to time and from time to time can see other persons, for example, a therapist, in any of them. Some people may exhibit manifestations or traits of several at the same time, as in the case of Little Red Riding Hood (shown below), who at times looked like a grandmother and walked like a lumberjack. Growing up, for Little Red Riding Hood, perhaps means first playing the role of a mother, and later - a grandmother. The rule of interchangeability is the same as in game analysis, where from time to time a person loses each side of his game, or in dream analysis, where "each dream character is a dreamer." The therapy cannot be completed until the position of the person in each role has been analyzed.

Karpman triangle example

Figure 1. Role diagram

2. DRAMATIC TRIANGLE

Only three roles are needed in dramatic analysis to describe the emotional permutations that are dramas. These procedural roles, in contrast to the substantive roles mentioned above, are Persecutor, Savior, and Victim. The drama begins when these roles are established or anticipated by the audience. There will be no drama until the roles are switched. This is indicated by a change in the direction vector in the diagram. Examples from three tales will be given to illustrate some of the uses of the theory.

A. In the Pied Piper of Hameln

The hero starts out as the Savior of the city and Chaser of rats, then becomes the Victim of the Major's Persecuting Double Crossing (withholding the fee) and in revenge switches to the Persecutor of the city's children. The Major switches from Sacrifice (rats) to Savior (hires the Pied Piper of Hamelin), to Pursuer (double cross), to Sacrifice (his children died). Children switch from Hunted Victims (rat) to Rescued Victims and Victims pursued by their savior (enhanced contrast).

B. In Little Red Riding Hood

The heroine begins as a Savior (food and company for grandmother, S? F, and friendship and directions to the wolf, S? F). In an alarming switch, she becomes a Sacrifice for the Pursuing Wolf (P? F), which, in turn, through an unexpected switch, turns out to be a Victim of the Lumberjack Chaser (P? F), who in this action plays two roles simultaneously (increase in speed) - the Savior Little Red Riding Hood and grandmothers (S? LJ). According to one version, Little Red Riding Hood plays all three roles when he ends up as the Pursuer, stitching stones into the wolf's stomach with the lumberjack. The grandmother's switches are as follows: F? S, F? P, F? S; wolf - F? S, P? F, F? P (the direction of the arrows indicates the initiative, the letters indicate the position of the participants in the triangle).

C. In Cinderella

The Heroine switches from the twice-hunted Victim (mother, then sister) to the thrice-saved Victim (fairy godmother, then the mouse, then the prince), again to the pursued Victim (after midnight), then to the Victim being saved again. A rough quantitative analysis of the intensity of the drama can be done by summing the switchings: WRP (Twice Persecuted Victim)? Zsss (Victim to be saved three times)? Zhpp? Ws = 8 switches.

Drama is comparable to Transactional Games (Psychological Games), but drama has more events, more switches per event, and one person often plays two or three roles at the same time. Games are simpler and only contain one main switch. For example, in "I'm Only Trying to Help You" there is one rotation in the dramatic triangle: the Victim switches to the Persecutor, and the Savior becomes the new Victim.

Karpman-Bern Dramatic Triangle

Figure 2. Dramatic triangle

3. LOCATION DIAGRAM

A. Drama

The location diagram makes it easy to switch in location to the main vector of the Near-Far axis, both poles of which have a finer grading into Closed-Open and Public-Private. The drama is manifested by switching in location and is intensified by Scenario Breadth (from home to the ballroom of the castle, from Wuthering Heights to China, from the courtyard of the house to Oz, etc.) and Scenario Speed (changing the adventures of Pinocchio, Ulysses, etc.) … Many other factors can be added both to increase the perceived degree of contrast and to enhance the role-playing drama, such as time of day or season, temperature, noise level, lightning, size, unrecognizable symbols, etc. Weather and landscape play a strong role in historical novels, which show how they change as the narrative shifts.

The diagram is numbered here only for reference to the list of examples below it, which are taken from both fairy tales and real places in life.

Dramatic triangle psychology

Figure 3. Location diagram

1. A clearing in the forest, a pond, a courtyard, a rooftop, an open ship.
2. Market, playground, street parade, swimming pool, stadium, roads.
3. Furnace, bedroom, consulting room, brain.
4. Tavern, theater, witness stand, lecture hall, elevators, locked rooms, supermarket, casino, hospitals.
5. Flying carpet, hilltop, charming garden, milky way, tundra, sky, desert, prairie, quiet coast, safari.
6. Magic kingdoms, ships, ski resorts, battlefields, summer beaches, European cities, Timbuktu, Heaven.
7. Cave, grotto, gingerbread house, whale stomach, castle tower, space station, Egyptian tomb, underwater bell, underground passages, coffin.
8. Wonderland, castles, empty hotel, reformatory school, slave quarters, barracks, cabarets, cathedrals.

The idea of actually traveling between any of the two locations listed above in one day reveals the drama of switching locations. For a finer analysis of the location, a diagram within a diagram could be made. To do this, you need to redraw the entire layout diagram within each of the eight separate parts. Several such examples would be those that involve the contrast of being closed in an open space (street phone booth, spaceship, etc.) or being in an enclosed space that is both private and public at the same time (wedding chapel, recreation room, etc.).).

B. Structuring space

In therapy, the location diagram can be used to visually illustrate the spatial changes that a person makes and, at the same time, to compare with others. It can be helpful to show the patterns of movement of a person and liken them to a scenario pattern. Many classic stories have Odyssey patterns that involve a lot of travel, while others have long periods of no travel, like Sleeping Beauty and Rip van Winkle. Such a fabulous pattern of movement, like a house - a forest - a distant glade in the forest - a gingerbread house can be represented by the following numbers in the diagram: 3 - 1 - 5 - 7.

Structuring space, like structuring time, can be useful in a similar way. This is figuratively illustrated by the eight possible preferences and locations where people spend their time. In terms of the scenario pattern, a person can localize the place of the tragic ending in his imagination and avoid the “scenario trip”. One patient realized that her suicidal binge was protecting her from fear of being alone (private, closed apartment) and changed that by getting a roommate.

Living space changes can lead to resignation or postponement. Important life decisions are made when entering new scenarios such as a new job, home, vacation, or starting therapy. Changes in location can also lead to separation anxiety or arrival alarms, which are often of script significance.

The interpretation of which room seems to a person psychologically suitable for living, with its depiction and concretization of reality, has long been a part of the therapeutic technique of Transactional Analysis. People carry their script rooms around them, which leads to things like a pillow talking in a conference room, a public lecture in the bedroom, a bathroom talking about the Parent-Teacher Association, and an apartment building talking at the first ball. Parental guidelines can affect spatial limits, such as "Never leave home" or "Be in two places at the same time." In one case, a man who was warm and friendly in his office but cold and aloof in the hallway discovered that he grew up in the same room with his mother and that the hallways were "no man's land" as he moved through life from one warm room. to another.

4. CHILD'S CHOICE

The influence exerted on the child through myths, fairy tales and classic stories varies from family to family and from culture to culture. Cultures differ not only in the natural choice of popular fairy tales that are told and published, or in the writing of new stories, but also in the available versions of well-known fairy tales. There are probably half a dozen or more different artificial endings added to Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood. A mother reading stories to her child chooses versions that end happily, sadly, violently, inauthentically, etc. Her choice may be influenced by her age, marital status, or child preference. Many fairy tales include “temporary deliverance from children,” indicating that they can be therapeutic for the mother, interactions with her children, and that they have passed through generations due to the preference of mothers as much as due to the preference of children. … Children's literature provides a script role (eg Curious Chipmunk), but not a script in which they are not intuitively selected "classics."Sometimes, a person who does not remember his favorite fairy tale just needs to ask his mother, who will remember.

The script matrix is used to construct the formative parental permission and prescription transactions. A large number of script-forming transactions occur during the reading of fairy tales. The nudge or warm smile of the mother means “This is you” and lays down “Don't think. Be Cinderella”into the script matrix. The definitively important Do not think precept appears under the guise of a joke and a “Let's pretend” contract between mother and child, such as “Never mind the minor players,” “Never mind the ending (payback),” and “Go through it again and again . A tale is especially effective and “accepted” if it reveals a “family myth” about the child, as well as a long-term matrix for prescriptions to be followed.

MEDICAL HISTORY

Sometimes the mother and child may skip the moral of the story and assume that secondary roles are more attractive than the hero or heroine. In what might be called "Little Red Riding Hood Meets Waiting Cinderella" presented at the Transactional Analysis Workshop in San Francisco, the mother assigned her three children to different roles in the "family tale." It was an interesting example of the birth order and personality formation of her children, in which they were a cast of the order of appearance in the Cinderella tale. The older sister, the black sheep of the family, who did not have permission to look attractive, was the Step Sister, who shifted her misfortune onto her younger sister, later satisfied the Cinderellas at work, then her daughter after marriage and divorce. The daughter, who was born the second, was Cinderella, offended and not understood in childhood and turned by religion (fairy tale); she grew up with permission to be pretty and married well. The third child was a boy of the Prince Charming type, who was always "waiting for Cinderella", but something unexpected always happened to his romances (midnight "Dynamo" (Rapo) in his castle), and who came to therapy because he did not "lived happily ever after."

His girlfriend, who is of the Little Red Riding Hood type, also came to therapy. In her youth, she heard from her father that "experience is the best teacher" and "Do what I do, not what I say." She was told an interesting story with creepy details about his adventures as a "lumberjack" while serving with the LAPD. She walked innocently at night in the "forests" of the troubled areas of San Francisco: Tenderloin and North Beach, and nothing dangerous happened to her. One day she met an optimistic prince "waiting for Cinderella", constantly shouting "wolf" from her fairy tale. He felt that something "unexpected" was happening to his novel again. This was not until, much later, he saved her from the "wolves" of North Beach, who mistook her for a call girl, after which she fell in love with him as the expected "lumberjack" from her script and put her game on "Fool" (Stupid). But for him, she was no longer his Cinderella, since it was not love at first sight.

Source: Karpman S. B. Fairy tales and script drama analysis, Transactional analysis bulletin, 1968, V.7, No. 26, P.39-43