American Narcissism LXXIX: The Fidget
The False Self and the Karpman Drama Triangle
This article is in response to an excellent recent one by Cecilia Presley. Please read it: it is filled with vital and helpful information. It lays out essentially what I will say in this very brief article.
Almost every writer on narcissism that I respect here on Medium has, at one time or another, brought up the Karpman Drama Triangle, the one with Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim at the three corners, and then said how relevant this was to understanding narcissistic trauma. I won’t redraw the diagram for you. You can easily locate it.
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My wife points out that the Drama Triangle is the usual basis for the police procedural novels that she reads, and we both agree that it is both a literary- and a life-truism everywhere one looks. My reaction, when I first heard of it, was “So?”.
So why am I so excited to bring it and Cecilia’s article up here now? It is because her article on the thinness of the “personality” of the narcissist and referencing the triangle made me first think of a thin triangular fidget toy, like pictured above, then about the three corner roles as being what the narcissist learns to use transactionally: basically, the false self of the narcissist is a trite and bad crime novel utilizing the triangle — or a fidget — and the fact that narcissist spins from one corner to another, and can do little else, ought to be a good metaphor for its overall falseness. The narcissist is in essence trapped within this triangle’s roles, and lacks both the empathy and the object relations to escape.
Each corner of the triangle encapsulates a bit of human drama that the narcissist uses for supply, keeping the fidget spinning. Each corner is both an act by a false self, and a belief within the narcissist (and too often unfortunately within the victim, who is fooled here) that this is a true human interaction.
How can it be both a true human interaction AND an act? Because a well-made fidget has precision ball bearings, and the narcissist has, equally a well-oiled repertory of rehearsed pre-made responses for these ever-so-common human circumstances. Remember that narcissists always use projection and introjection. So well-oiled is their performance that it is projected backwards upon their internal screen at the same time the projection is offered, or forced, to the victim as an introject. Both swallow the same poison, as it were. The narcissist “believes” it, and they very strongly want you to also. I wrote earlier about “the groove” of narcissist / victim behavior; this is the “groove”.
The simile of the fidget toy for the false self of the pwNPD, and how closely the False Self construct itself references the Drama Triangle simply MUST be more than coincidence. Google AI states the three-bladed fidget is: “The standard design, preferred for its optimal weight distribution and smooth, long-lasting spins.” So too, the drama triangle is the narcissist’s standard, optimal design for spins.
And one last neuropsychological point, true or not. I read long ago that blind persons who can gain sight after surgery, have a concpetual / visual problem with triangles. They “know” that a triangle has three corners, but their new vision does not immediately register this. They have to count the corners to be sure. That is for me analogous to the recovery of the victim of narcissistic abuse, who has first to identify and then to re-conceptualize each of the three points (Rescuer / Love-Bomber, Victim, and Persecutor) as being much less than they appear, because they now know that each is only an act. By a bad actor spinning a fidget. In a bad novel.
