have gained increasing currency as leading men in film and television culture. There’s something about them that draws and keeps our attention. Those same qualities seem to have rubbed off on the actor in real life, drawing a feverish interest from the media and among the public. We watch the every move of the glamorous and famous because we aspire to look like them and be like them. So the appeal of narcissism draws out our own narcissistic tendencies.
Yet beneath it all, if you look at Jude Law and his family, there’s a real story of pain. We don’t know what happened in his household, and it would be unfair to label Law a narcissist on hearsay. But we do know that people with strong narcissistic traits tend not to be happy people, and find family life hard. Having a relationship with a narcissist is a rollercoaster where the lows can drag all sense of self-worth out of the partner.
So what I hope to show in this book is that narcissism is a far deeper and far more useful idea than the British have previously given it credit for. And it’s a far broader, less medicalised idea than the Americans have given it credit for. As a health and relationships writer, I come to the subject with a very broad perspective. You’ll find other books on narcissism (if you search hard enough) that look at it from a psychoanalytical point of view, or from a relationships counselling point of view, or a cultural point of view. What I want to do with this book is take a wider approach, combining the above with the medical, the evolutionary, the psychiatric, the sociological and the historical. This is not a specialist or an academic book on narcissism – it is a book to help us try to understand our relationships with people and the world. Because if this is indeed the Age of Narcissism, we need to understand how the concept is shaping our world and relationships in all its different ways.
There are dangers in addressing a subject like this. As a journalist, I’m very aware of how easy it is to label people for the sake of convenience. There’s an increasing tendency among popular psychoanalysis and psychology to force human nature into boxes neatly labelled ‘personality type’. There’s another, and linked, tendency for doctors, psychiatrists and drug manufacturers to try to turn personality traits into illnesses. Once we were just a ‘type’, now we have a diagnosis. There are lots of examples. Many thousands of children are now being diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), which was unheard of 30 years ago. Some people are controversially saying that the condition doesn’t really exist. It’s simply what a few decades ago would have been classified as ‘wilfully naughty children’, they say. The children haven’t changed, but our attitude to them has.
There is a similar controversy raging over autistic spectrum disorders – some are claiming that many of these conditions, such as Asperger’s Syndrome, are not disorders at all – merely different manifestations of ‘maleness’.
These are difficult areas. But whatever you believe about ADHD and autism, it’s certainly true that a large number of drug companies are now trialling drugs designed specifically to combat all sorts of behavioural traits that until recently most of us would simply have regarded as all being on the continuum of ‘normal’: stress, shyness, anxiety, phobias, gambling, impulsive behaviours – even addiction to the internet.
I don’t want to do the same kind of thing for narcissism or suggest that something which up to now has been regarded as a human trait of selfishness should become a formal tag to put onto people willy-nilly. But seeing patterns in relationships and the way we conduct our lives helps us to overcome problems, and talking about narcissism can help us understand some of the people in our lives and some of the pitfalls in our own behaviour that can make us more vulnerable to them. It helps us to identify when we are the victims of narcissism, and ways we can assist each other to break out of destructive, self-centred cycles. It also helps identify the small number of people who need expert psychiatric help because they have a genuine personality disorder.
So forgive me if I use the tags ‘narcissist’ or ‘narcissistic personality’ in the following chapters. I’m not suggesting that the people being referred to are only narcissists, or that they don’t have many other characteristics too. Humans are an intricate bundle of motivations and behaviours. But I hope to make it clear that in some people, narcissistic traits are sufficiently character-defining for us to have justification in calling them narcissists.
You’ll see in the next chapter that the word has a long history of describing human characteristics, from Greek myth, via Freud, into modern psychiatric textbooks and popular usage. That makes it different and arguably richer than other, simpler human personality traits such as, say, ‘anger’ or ‘selfishness’. What’s more, there’s an increasing consensus that the causes of narcissism lie in the way we are brought up. It raises fascinating questions about parenting, and the interaction between our genetic make-up and our environment in conditioning our personality.
The book also deals with how narcissism has affected relationships, how different individuals have coped, and some of the coping strategies you can try to implement if narcissism is having a negative effect on your life. You’ll read in the chapters ‘I’m a celebrity narcissist’ and ‘Generation me’ about the dangers we all face as we are unwittingly drawn into a cult of narcissism, where the selfish and self-obsessed values that create narcissists are also being promoted as desirable and glamorous in our popular culture.
I started out writing a book because I was intrigued about the men who seemed to succeed at everything, and I ended up writing a book not just about them, but about all of us. About the vulnerability that can make us behave in strange and difficult ways, and which leaves us susceptible to the charms of those who will make life most troublesome for us. Like the tale of Narcissus itself, it’s a very human story. Anyone who has ever felt used by the one they love, anyone who feels that others have needed them merely to prop up their ego, and anyone who has ever been humiliated in a relationship should read on …
Enough about me.
We’ve talked far too much about me,
let’s talk about you.
What do you think about me?
BETTE MIDLER TO HER LUNCH
COMPANION IN THE MOVIE BEACHES (1988)
So you want to know what a narcissist is? It’s all those annoying people who are more conscious of image than substance, isn’t it? Those hollow gym bunnies, those self-centred people who are so interested in how fabulous they are that they can’t even see how glorious you happen to be looking this evening? Possibly even someone like your boyfriend, or girlfriend?
Well, that’s certainly part of the story. Narcissism is a word that’s increasingly bandied around by the media as a means of describing intensely self-centred or image-conscious people. If you saw politician George Galloway’s preening, arrogant performance on Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, it will come as no surprise that David Aaronovitch commented in The Times that ‘it was the narcissist, not the politician, who had turned up to compete’.1
Welsh rugby player Gavin Henson is another modern-day narcissist by popular definition. He was ‘outed’ by girlfriend Charlotte Church in July 2006 as having an extensive beauty regime, including constantly changing the side he sleeps on to avoid getting lines on his face. He’s reported as saying it takes him two hours to get ready before a rugby game. ‘Hot bath, shave my legs and face, moisturise, put fake tan on and do my hair. I need my fellow players to say I’m looking good.’2
You’ll have heard the term ‘narcissist’ being commonly bandied around as an alternative to the tag of ‘metrosexual’, applied to image-conscious