widely-held belief that real narcissism in adulthood usually has its roots in emotional rejection or deprivation from one’s parents in childhood. It’s a pattern born of a lack of empathy and love, and results in people being in turn unable to empathise or love. Narcissists breed narcissists, because their behaviour forces their children to create an artificial idea of grandiosity and self-esteem around themselves. It’s self-defence.
Many psychoanalysts have pointed out that it’s not just our relationships with our parents that can encourage narcissistic tendencies – it’s our relationship with other people and society too. Freud’s followers have picked up on the term ‘narcissism’, because it seems increasingly relevant to our modern times.
As psychoanalyst Marion F Solomon says, many people today suffer from ‘a narcissistic vulnerability that permeates all their relationships’. This is the result, she says, of a number of converging factors, including ‘the messages that society sends us, the emotional failure between parents and children, and the history of failed relationships that has today become part of the life of many.’ Narcissistically vulnerable people desperately wish to be involved in a relationship, but have unreasonable expectations of what they should give to the relationship, and what they should get from it. This inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration for both themselves and their partners.6
Because of our experiences, some of us have strong narcissistic traits in adulthood, and others have milder ones. All of us will have narcissistic traits as children. And all of us are likely to revert to narcissistic, self-centred patterns of behaviour at times of stress. We all become needy and demanding when we feel we can’t cope. This has a name: it’s called reactive narcissistic regression. Even if you’re the most empathetic, selfless person around, you’ll have some understanding of narcissism if you try to imagine how it feels when you’ve been really upset and are demanding attention. Say you’ve just had an argument with someone you love. You’ll cry and make a scene and make demands on people – probably your friends – that you would never do normally. You might even exaggerate your own achievements a bit to boost your own sense of power, and compensate for the vulnerability you are feeling inside. ‘I told him like it was … I’m too good for him, and he knows it.’ That’s you, essentially, reverting to a primary narcissistic state. The thing about people with strong narcissistic traits is that they are like that most of the time.
WHY NARCISSISM IS GETTING SERIOUS
In the 1970s, two psychoanalysts from America – Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg – played a major part in defining modern ideas of narcissism. Though they disagreed on the causes, they put forward ideas of narcissism as a ‘disorder of the personality’ that has been widely taken up in popular American culture. Kohut was the man who first coined the phrase ‘narcissistic personality disorder’, saying that some of the traits that Freud and other psychoanalysts had classified as narcissistic could be so problematic in some people that they constituted a personality disorder.7
This had a real impact, particularly after 1980, when narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD, was recognised as a distinct mental health disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Examples of personality disorders in the same category as narcissistic personality disorder include antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder.
Suddenly, narcissism had distinct ‘diagnostic criteria’, and NPD was a clinical term that could be legitimately used of people who have ‘an excessive sense of how important they are’, and who ‘demand and expect to be admired and praised by others and are limited in their capacity to appreciate others’ perspectives’.8
This is a controversial area. Not everyone, including some psychiatric authorities in the UK, is convinced that moving psychoanalytical theories about personality types and the evolution of a sense of self into the arena of diagnosable mental-health problems is helpful – particularly when the treatment for that particular illness is unknown. Their fears are perhaps supported by what has happened in the United States since word about NPD hit the agony aunts, the chat shows and the pages of dozens of books.
Therapy-literate Americans are now rushing to diagnose others, and themselves, as narcissistic personalities – not in a ‘It’s natural for us all to have narcissistic tendencies but some are more narcissistic than others’ kind of way, but in a ‘narcissism is bad’ kind of way, involving much pointing of accusatory fingers. The word ‘toxic’ is now regularly attached to the word ‘narcissism’, and millions of American men and women are taking the diagnostic criteria for NPD, overlaying them onto their foundering relationships, and condemning their partners as narcissistic personalities.
There’s much breast-beating too. Bestselling relationship authors Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, who wrote the book Help! I’m in Love with a Narcissist!, confess that when they started to research their book, they began to see aspects of themselves in many of the case histories and behaviour patterns they were writing about. ‘It is a terrible thing to be writing a book about “awful behaviors” and “awful people” only to realise that you share some of their characteristics’ they wrote.
Perhaps they should take stock of their own wise advice later in their book, where they point out that most of us have some narcissistic or selfish characteristics. ‘That doesn’t make us awful or completely unpleasant to know. It does make us human, with room for improvement.’9
Because the truth is that narcissistic personality disorder and narcissism are closely related, but not the same thing. They are different points on a continuum of human characteristics – just as obsessive attention to detail and genuine autism are points at different ends of a spectrum of human characteristics. So narcissism may be difficult, ‘toxic’ and even dangerous in some people, but it’s important to see it in a wider perspective. If only because, if it’s in all of us to some extent, we cannot use it too readily as a weapon to hurl at others. The key is understanding. As the British psychoanalyst Michael Knight said when I spoke to him: ‘All of us have personality disorders on a bad day.’
That’s not to say that the American Psychological Association’s definition isn’t useful – it is, not least in pinning down some of the most commonly observed traits of the people we have come to describe as narcissists. The American Psychological Association’s diagnostic definition of NPD is carefully put together, and tells us a lot about narcissists at all points on the continuum – their exaggerated sense of self-importance and fantasies of their brilliance and success, for example. It tells us that they believe they are special, and that they are entitled to admiration or favourable treatment. It tells us that they tend to take advantage of others to achieve their ends, and find it hard to identify with the feelings of others. And it tells us that narcissists are often arrogant and haughty.
People who have several of those characteristics, manifesting themselves in such a consistent and extreme manner that they severely disrupt lives, may well be described as having a personality disorder. Those who sometimes show signs of some of them are simply displaying narcissistic traits. The extent to which they need addressing depends on how problematic they are proving – either for the individual concerned, or for the person they are having a relationship with. The fact that they do indeed often prove problematic, particularly for the people whose lives they touch, is one of the main reasons why narcissism demands our attention.
SAM VAKNIN AND THE CULT OF NARCISSISM
Sam who? Sam Vaknin is one of the most influential voices in modern perceptions of narcissism. This is partly because of his book, Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited. But mainly it is because of his amazingly intense presence on the internet – in discussion forums, information pages, agony columns. He is not a psychoanalyst or a psychologist or a psychotherapist. In fact he’s a philosopher. But he’s also a self-confessed narcissist, and has become a self-appointed spokesman on narcissism issues for America – and, via the internet, the world.
Vaknin doesn’t go easy on narcissistic personalities. He regularly comments on their ‘toxicity’ or ‘malignancy’. A typical comment on narcissists is: ‘The glamour