What is narcissism? Science confronts a widely misunderstood phenomenon
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It seems there IS a small but significant percentage of people in day to day life that:
- Can't receive constructive feedback without exploding / taking it personally / feeling betrayed
- Simultaneously gives relatively harsh feedback, the type they would very much bristle at
- Does not do normal "relationship repair"/apologize when they make a mistake in a relationship, its 100% on the other person
There's an asymmetry in their relationships that, for whatever reason, the other side can be blinded to or accept. I think most folks are naturally trusting, and assume it must be a problem with THEM, so they work to please the (for lack of a better term) narcissist.
The good news is you can document and measure these things IMO. You just have to know not to assume you're the problem, which is probably is a healthy default with the 95% of non narcissist people out there.
This is true, but I've seen it said that basically when people encounter an extreme narcissist (or sociopath) the problem is that when we try to understand their behaviours, we project our own relative normality onto them to model what we would do in their shoes, because it's difficult for us to even perceive, let alone comprehend, what it must be like to lack what they lack.
So our generous interpretation of their actions is based on our own more stable self-image. We assume that there must be a typical human reason for them to behave that way, because that's the only way we can model the feelings that might lead to their behaviour.
Now if you turn it around, it is not difficult to understand why e.g. Trump lashes out at everyone. He only knows what it is like to be him, and he projects that and worse onto the world.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017/06/28/a-rise-in-narci...
I would say that from the outside, it's really very clear that America has become more narcissistic over the last 35-40 years, but I think there's also evidence of a reckoning -- of a younger culture beginning to mix more self-effacement in with their self-expression.
I'd place the UK slightly lower on the scale of worsening narcissism, but I am sure other countries would observe it in us. Gen Z would seem to be getting tired of the whining over here, too.
I was wrong.
I set out on a journey about 4 years ago to explore the trauma and abuse in my past, and a large number of resources for sufferers of C-PTSD deal with the fallout from narcissistic abuse. I eventually determined that my abusers are probably not narcissistic by any means, but I suppose it's good to raise awareness.
Here in the UK, the textbook example of a narcissist in politics was Robin Cook (about whom it was said he could not pass a mirror without checking his appearance). He had a series of affairs and was known to be intensely vain (and self-aware about it), but was not actually a bad human being beyond that weakness.
Trump's narcissism is in a fairly extreme form, but it is by no means what explains his character alone. It is said to be better defined by the coupling of narcissism, sociopathy and sadism (the "dark triad") -- malignant narcissism. There's abundant evidence of the other two; his utter indifference to chants of "Hang Mike Pence" alone should convince anyone. It is the product of the abusive, cruel upbringing he received from his father and his indifferent mother.
FWIW, I think it is also clear that Musk is a malignant narcissist. All the same indicators are there, and the same history with his father. But I hold out a little more hope for him; he is well-documented to be capable of emotional expression about the suffering his father inflicted and you can clearly see him trying to be better, thinking about what he says, reflecting on stuff. He does actually value humanity and you can see him wanting to be a better human. Trump could never do any of that.
A third example: Andrew Tate. Again, he had a psychologically abusive father. He is filled with self-loathing as a result.
An analogy I like is that he’s a guy who did open mic stand up but no one found him funny except maybe one or two people. His solution was to buy the comedy club and be the only performer.
Musk also has a long history of narcissistic behavior going back pretty much for as long as he’s been in the public eye, and I’ve seen indication that he’s reflecting or trying to change.
I suppose there may be a blurry dividing line between the two concepts, but it's certainly easier to uphold individualism as a virtue, and encourage others to cultivate it, rather than seeing it as a character fault and detrimental to national unity and morale.
What ultimately happened, as I recall, is a reworking of the definition to focus more on the core behaviour that Narcissistic Personality Disorder really means, though I guess functionally this might be much the same as saying "things we used to think were evidence of a diseased mind are now commonplace behaviours".
I assure you that outside of the USA we've always admired the individualism and those aspects of the American Dream etc., and I don't think that is what the DSM debate was about. There's always been unfair tropes about Americans abroad but the change we would notice in the last 40 years is the whining/demands to be accommodated, the babying of language, and the growth of infantilism generally. The "Karen" trope is a consequence of cultural narcissism. You guys have changed.
I'm sure the Brits have too (and in a few holiday destinations we are the worst tourists on earth, no question, though that's not narcissism, it's cheap booze) but I don't know if our core character has changed (for better or worse!) and I would say the world misses the cool self-assuredness it used to associate with the USA.
"What's in it for me?" is selfishness, not narcissism.
In particular, it seems to me that many people that are autistic, might seem like narcissists to others, but it is a very different experience for them.
Not what I said.
You could be the most loyal Trump supporter ever on a political level and still acknowledge it. It is unavoidably obvious.
The person may be grandiose or neurotic. They may love themselves or hate themselves.
So this isn't really a specific condition is it? It's more like a symptom that can appear for many different underlying reasons. Asking "what it is" seems to be the wrong question to me.
And with suicidal behavior, do discrete categories really help? I don't have much experience talking people off ledges so maybe you can say better than I, but to me it seems like the line between some chemical imbalance model of depression and shit life syndrome isn't always so clear. I think in most suicidal people it's probably some combination of those two, or other factors as well.
This is the entire point of identifying said categorizations so you can at least have some chance in classifying an individual when they have an issue. It also allows you to identify if treatment for classifications is working on broad scales.
Yea, the world sucks that we exist in an analog continuum and use discrete labeling to save in information space and processing, but there is no solution to that for the time being.
If you don't know somebody well enough to form a complex opinion on what that person's personality is, you certainly don't know enough to diagnose them with any sort of personality disorder. And if you do know somebody that well, then you don't have to employ such "information space and processing" saving measures, because you already have an understanding of that person. You already did that work.
In any case, the label you apply to somebody after observing their personality traits doesn't tell you which of their buttons to press, it's the observation of their personality traits which may inform your angles of attack. Somebody is observed to be self-absorbed, and is therefore labelled a narcissist, and the observation of their self-centered personality is what tells you how to push their buttons. You can press those buttons whether or not you use or even know the clinical label, people have been doing it for millenia before these labels were formulated. The labels themselves aren't actually useful here. Discrete kinds of asshole is a dubious proposition in the first place. Assholishness is probably a continuous spectrum of behavior, so if you really want to strike at somebody deep you're better off considering them as a unique individual and tailoring your attack accordingly. Of course, once you've considered them as a unique individual you may find yourself less inclined to attack them...
If you're not armchair diagnosing anybody, then we don't have any disagreement. If you're classifying people as NPD on the same day you met them, that's what I'm arguing against. Doing so isn't helpful and you don't have enough information about that person to even do it properly.
Even when you do have enough information about that person, like a long-term friend or family member, and yet also enough personal distance from the situation to limit your biases, it's rarely a useful thing to do. It might help you feel better about a failed relationship, which is what a lot of people seem to use NPD for, but these are not real diagnoses.
It may sometimes be necessary to do this, but I think it's important to be very careful when doing so, particularly when somebody is judging a situation they're personally involved with. Nobody is a truly impartial judge of others, and when somebody has a personal stake in the dispute the biases are even stronger. Applying a dehumanizing clinical label to people I can't get along with could be an easy (ego-preserving) way to contextualize a dispute, but if I'm personally involved in the dispute then my ability to impartially analyze and categorize that person has been compromised. And if my analysis of that person is incorrect, then I've sabotaged myself by miscategorizing that other person.
That said, we _can_ approach the phenomenon of narcissism structurally. Freud uses an energetic model based on thermodynamics: each of us has some degree of (psychological) energy, and we invest that energy in various ways. One of those ways is in fantasy, as Freud explained in his classic "little entrepreneur" model in _The Interpretation of Dreams_. The little entrepreneur, who has the capital (energy), invests in specific companies (fantasies) hoping to receive a return (satisfaction). This is the basic gist of what's known as Freud's "economic model".
Narcissism is the extent to which the little entrepreneur invests in himself. Immediately we can see that some narcissism isn't bad -- you need to invest in yourself! The problem is only when there's too much, or more specifically, when energy is _not_ invested into the world (or, more specifically, into others) because too much is invested in oneself.
Freud dealt with the seeming "paradox" of grandiosity and depression in his paper "Mourning and Melancholia". The simple overview is that you have a little voice in your head watching over your "self", formed by early authority figures, that says "no" (footnote 1). When you have a lot of energy invested in yourself but it's saying "no", then you feel depressed, because all of your fantasies are rejected. Sometimes you can suspend the voice for a while and say "yes" to everything, which results in a burst of energy suddenly available for use. This is called mania. The manic-depressive is caught in a back-and-forth oscillation of the voice that says "no" and the suspension of that voice.
In a general sense, if you have a lot of energy invested in yourself, you will feel grandiose when you can turn off the "no" and depressed otherwise. If you can figure out how to turn off the "no" forever, then you can feel grandiose all the time. If you can't turn off the "no", then you'll feel depressed, and you might go to therapy hoping that they will give you permission to turn off the "no".
And this isn't a bad thing: the therapist gives you permission to turn off the "no", suddenly the energy is available for use, and maybe you get through to the other side, when you realize that the promises of satisfaction through the self alone feel somehow empty in comparison with investing your energy in the world, in other people. The transformation that must occur is the development of the capacity to _love_. And narcissism is, to an extent, a step along the way (footnote 2).
There is a distinct phenomenon that "science" also seems to categorize as narcissism, where you might feel like you're the master of the rules of society, and that you have the right to control other people, do whatever they want, break the rules, etc. This phenomenon, which some might call "sociopathy" but as a technical term we can call "perversion", doesn't always come with a high level of narcissism, but can, and when it does, you end up with the sorts of villainous characters like Donald Trump etc etc. They wont seek "treatment" because why would they? They're already the masters. The social structure required to help them is really to incentivize them to act such that their personal interests align with the greater good, rather than creating an antagonism, because otherwise the greater good will lose. Another solution is to make spaces where they can act out their desires without harming others. On a personal level, though, it's pretty hard, but thankfully this sort of individual is quite rare, and oftentimes their actions lead to their own downfall.
1: not using the term until the end here, but the voice "above the self [I]" that says "no" is the "superego".
2: working off the Lacanian idea here that analysis proceeds through a stage of "maximal narcissistic projection" (Sem 1), after which the analyst can intervene from the position of the "Ideal-I" and basically allow the analysand to reorient their position wrt fantasy.
[0] https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-...
To be clear, psychoanalysis is actually cited in the original essay: "Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg" are both quite well-known, although divisive figures. But Freud himself, who produced the theory with proper scope to interpret the claims, is not.
Sure, and people analyzing the "discursive roots of modern psychology" - historians of science - do talk about Freud. And Wundt, and James, and Watson, all of whom are of comparable significance in the history of the field. But scientists are not historians; they're interested in analyzing the actual thing out there in the world, not the way we talk about it.
The social reward system we have today selects for them instead of selecting them out.
There is one bedrock problem under all the others: how to fix this.
Hannah Arendt (in "What is Authority?") zeroes in on the term "religio" in particular, as the root of "religion" with the literal meaning of "to bind [oneself]". If one is bound to a higher law, secular or theological, as common knowledge, then to act against the law is to subject oneself to punishment.
Unfortunately, as we know all too well in software, this state of having a group bound to a law that transcends them is a precarious state indeed, requiring continuous maintenance or else it's liable to be taken over by those who manipulate the rules to preach without practicing. A failure of the rules leads to the "primal father" situation described by Freud in _Totem and Taboo_, where those who feel dominated band together to kill the person who bound them, and then produce taboos to prevent the situation from occurring again.
If you have any suggestions of how to make fields like psychology any easier, I'm sure many would like to hear them.
See Herbert Simon and P.W. Anderson for more reading along these lines.
It's true that people do employ the language of psychology as a cudgel. That's inappropriate. Unfortunately the nature of language is too be appropriate and used in novel ways, is inevitable that some of those will be counterproductive. The only solution I see is to educate people better about these concepts, and failing that to buy more time by abandoning terminology that has picked up insurmountable connotations and taking another step on the linguistic treadmill.
It's also true that a lot of people are profoundly effected by eg a romantic partner or boss who has those issues - not all of those people are wrong. I dated someone I believe has NPD, and it was an abusive and traumatic relationship. I have had family members who definitely had NPD, and they were abusive to their children. I've both been & seen people profoundly hurt by this (the NPD sufferers included).
It's callous to disregard people who have sought a diagnosis or to equate it to an astrological sign. If you haven't struggled with your mental health, or if you have struggled but have found adequate redress outside the clinical sphere, you may count yourself fortunate, but it's inappropriate to denigrate others who have had a different experience.
Personally I'm going to therapy and trying to find an anxiety medication that works for me, along with meditating, exercising, and other forms of intervention, and I have absolutely no shame about it. It was a great decision. I've seen medication and therapy make a night and day difference for people in my life.
I encourage everyone who experiences depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues to investigate professional help. Please don't let these judgemental misconceptions stop you.
So you've done the diagnosis yourself, outside of a psychiatric clinic? See this is exactly what I'm talking about. You have observations coming from these completely biased sources, making pretty heavy conclusions about someone's brain, and when you look at the solutions to how to deal with these people it's super severe - like completely cut them out of your life, treat them like a dangerous animal. It should be completely obvious to everyone why this is a bad way of thinking and doing things.
Read that a few times, and then tell me again I should have kept that person in my life.
To be frank with you, you're speaking from a place of ignorance. And I think that's fantastic, if you haven't been forced to cut anyone you loved out of your life because they were abusive to you, that's wonderful. I want that for everyone.
But you should be more careful when commenting on these matters.