always makes up an excuse. Like on Saturday, my friends had arranged to go for a night out and asked me and my boyfriend to go, and when I asked him he said maybe. Then two hours later he said he wasn’t feeling well. But then his sister phoned and asked if we wanted to go and play pool and he said yeah. We got into an argument because I thought he was being selfish, because my friends had asked first. When I asked if he had a problem with my friends, he said no, he just didn’t want to go. We ended up staying in that night but he hardly spoke to me. I asked him the following morning why he had hardly spoken to me the night before. He said that it was because he wanted to go play pool. Is he being selfish, or am I just being silly?
As the writer says, this sounds like old-fashioned selfishness. But it can also be explained by her boyfriend showing narcissism – a particular form of selfishness that targets people with either lavish attention or hostility, that makes loved ones isolated, and that blames others for personal shortcomings. As you’ll see further on in the book, this can have far more disastrous effects on relationships than arguments about not seeing friends.
I was talking to the journalist, novelist and relationships writer Bel Mooney about this. The idea of narcissism, she said, helped explain many of the letters she got from readers writing in to her regular advice column in The Times. In recent years, she said, she’s noted an increase in people writing to her who are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, ‘self-centred’.
‘It’s all I, I, I, I, I,’ she said. ‘They go on about themselves in a very self-indulgent way, talking about how they need to find themselves and so on. And I think, “Why are you asking me what to do, because what you really want me to do is to confirm what you are feeling, and if I challenge it you aren’t going to like it.” And I think, how are those people going to be in a relationship? And I’d say dire.
‘You get letters from these sorts of people wishing that others could be satellites around their sun. I’ve been amazed at the number of stories like that I’ve had since I started the column – people who are so lacking in empathy that you feel something is very missing. The problem is serious because at its more extreme end it can go into personality disorder.’
She told me of one letter from a man whose 40-year-old wife had become increasingly obsessive about her appearance and weight, constantly going to the gym. He discovered she was having a relationship with another man at the gym because of the texts she had been sending him, and when he confronted her with this she became violent and abusive with him in front of the children. She became increasingly critical of him, and then asked for a separation. ‘I don’t know whether that’s narcissism or not, but it is common and extremely cruel,’ Bel told me.
Well, yes, it is narcissism, and it does manifest itself in very cruel ways in relationships. But as we’ll see in the rest of this book, the concept of narcissism also throws light on all sorts of other aspects of our lives: it makes sense of our ideas of romantic heroes, of obsessively driven high-achievers, of compulsive liars and doomed and deluded dreamers. It makes sense of our glamour-led, celebrity-obsessed culture. It makes sense of our society’s obsession with high-achievement and winning at all costs. It even makes sense of our Truman Show-style love affair with reality television, and all those X Factor contenders who believe against all the evidence that they really will be the next Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake.
Think of those high-profile politicians whose relationship with the truth has been, shall we say, tenuous. Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Archer … all have been caught lying in a big way. Their behaviour can be explained in the context of the narcissistic traits that made them big achievers in the first place. With their vision and drive for success came a tendency to the fantastical that is classic narcissism, and makes lying less of a sin and more of an inner compulsion.
Narcissistic personalities are, and always have been, intrinsic to human attraction, achievement and tragedy. But today, in the navel-gazing, celebrity-exposing noughties, they are more apparent than ever before. If there ever were one, this is the Age of the Narcissist.
In the therapy-obsessed United States, narcissism is a household word. It is used to explain sundry acts of cruelty, selfishness and grandiosity among the population. The internet message-boards of Dr Phil, America’s top agony uncle, are full of people suddenly realising that their problems are the result of having narcissistic parents.
Why have the Americans latched onto this term in such a big way? It probably all started with a hugely popular book written by sociologist Christopher Lasch in 1979 called The Culture of Narcissism. It was an indictment of the increasingly self-centred short-termism of American society, as sense of family and society declined. It drove the word ‘narcissism’ firmly into popular American usage. Not long after came the classification of a new personality disorder by the American Psychiatric Association – it was called Narcissistic Personality Disorder. After that came a personal mission by self-confessed narcissist and author Sam Vaknin to raise the profile of the condition, through a book and continued high profile on the internet.
Since then, the diagnosis and treatment of the disorder has spawned a string of books, been the subject of hundreds of chat shows, and given rise to dozens of support groups and online chat forums where victims of narcissists share their stories of suffering at the hands of manipulative men and women.
The focus over the Atlantic is very much on narcissism as a dangerous disorder – a psychiatric problem. ‘Narcissists lack empathy, are exploitative, envious, haughty and feel entitled, even if such a feeling is commensurate only with their grandiose fantasies,’ writes Sam Vaknin. ‘They dissemble, conspire, destroy and self-destruct. In the long run, there is no enduring benefit to dancing with narcissists – only ephemeral and, often, fallacious “achievements”.’1
Not nice people then. Over here, the popular view is a bit different. When most of us hear the word ‘narcissist’, we don’t tend to think of people with a personality disorder. We still tend to think of a narcissistic man as a preening Brad Pitt type, who hones his abs and pecs, occasionally plucks his eyebrows and assesses his own reflection when he looks into your eyes. It’s people like David Beckham who get called narcissists in Britain, because they care about their looks and have a standing and image that they do their damnedest to maintain.2 Because the British are naturally suspicious of anyone who cares too much about what others think of them, the term here is still mainly reserved as a vague form of mild abuse. We are far less aware of the specific meaning of the word in psychoanalytic or psychiatric terms.
But things are beginning to change. In July 2005 the film star Jude Law, dubbed the world’s sexiest man by People magazine, admitted an affair with a family nanny. Reports followed, supposedly from a ‘source close to Ms Miller’ that actress Sienna Miller, his partner, had as a result given Law an ultimatum: he must make her fall in love with him all over again, he must control his temper, he must not stop her from seeing her friends.
The reports gave way to media speculation that Jude Law did, in fact, show all the traits of a narcissist. ‘It’s the musts that give it away,’ wrote Yvonne Roberts in the Independent, ‘as does the graphic picture presented in the press of a controlling, possessive, cheating individual who doesn’t appear to know what he wants until it’s in danger of slipping away.’3 These, she explained, were some of the traits associated with a condition called narcissistic personality disorder, widely diagnosed in the United States. ‘In the Sixties, the common slogan was “All men are bastards”. Now for those in the know, fairly or unfairly, it’s “All men are narcissistic bastards”.’
Who knows if Jude Law really is a narcissist? But I like the new slogan, because narcissism does (as we’ll see later in the book) indeed help explain why men are bastards.
What is interesting is the way the story exemplifies the new importance of narcissism in our culture, and the way we view relationships. The characters Jude Law plays in his films sometimes exemplify the traits of narcissism – look at Alfie