We are in an age of unprecedented self-admiration — but why does this trouble us so much?
©Bridgeman Art
Caravaggio’s ‘Narcissus’, (c1597-99)
The word might occur to you at dinner, at around minute 15 or so of a
monologue that began the minute your companion arrived. There wasn’t a
discernible difference between her arrival and the commencing of the
monologue; barely a greeting, in fact, just wave after wave of language,
stories whose subject is the same (how she’s been maligned or
overlooked, perhaps), and she is not even pausing to breathe, and your
breath shortens, as if it’s physically possible for a human being to
suck the air out of another human being’s lungs from across the table.
Or it might occur to you in an entirely different kind of situation,
with a friend or lover who seemed like the opposite kind of person — a
real listener, warm and charming, preternaturally “present” with you,
swiftly intimate. Then he pulls an invisible emotional zip-cord and goes
cold, even disappears. Never mind if this second person’s reversal
bewilders and angers you so much that now, at other dinners, you are the
one whose stories of injury flow one from another. In both cases, it’s
the same word that arises in your mind: narcissist.
Sometimes
the word explains an encounter with dull self-absorption, sometimes
with a consummate performer, a charming surface covering a vacuum, a
fake. Either way, it names a stunning lack of empathy. It expresses a
belief that there is a piece of this person missing, an essential
fellow-feeling, what we call “humanity”.
And yet, at the same time, it gets its strength, its explanatory
power, by linking the diagnosed to something that many have claimed, in
recent years, is everywhere. Data gathered by social psychologists such
as Jean Twenge and W Keith Campbell are used to bolster the apocalyptic
story that narcissism has become an epidemic, that among the young
especially, traits of narcissism are on the rise, that the future is in
the hands of Generation Me, and that more and more, a word that is used
to describe the least human among us is the best word for all of us.
Not only psychologists but self-help gurus, bloggers, and journalists
without the benefit or burden of training in psychology have joined the
chorus, reminding us of the findings of the social psychologists and
offering their own warnings and advice to those who might get caught up
in the epidemic.
“Five Early Warning Signs You’re With a Narcissist” scrolls down the
Twitter feed, and “18 Signs You’re Dealing With a Narcissist” and “Is
Your Ex a Sociopath or a Narcissist?” and “Narcissists and Children of
Narcissists: Yes, It’s Getting Worse!” And although organisations of
professional psychologists discourage their members from diagnosing
people without an in-person examination — a standard that a blog post on
the American Psychiatric Association’s website reminded its members of
recently — many perform long-distance diagnoses, explaining the
behaviour of public figures in lengthy articles in national magazines.
Against the methods and conclusions of the social psychologists who
claim there’s an epidemic, there have been levelled considerable
critiques from within and outside their field. Twenge and Campbell
gathered tens of thousands of surveys from 30 years of studies of
college students and concluded that narcissistic traits were on the
rise; others have argued that the measure — the 40-question survey
called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory — is inaccurate and that
the work is weak for the reasons social psychology studies are often
weak: it is drawn from convenient samples of college students in
introductory psychology classes. Other psychologists, such as Jeffrey
Arnett, marshal evidence to show that millennials are more empathetic
and responsible than any generation before.
©Getty
A boy takes a selfie in front of the ‘Manhattanhenge’ sunset phenomenon
Perhaps it doesn’t matter; more and more, the word just feels true,
and we’re in an epidemic of diagnosis. But when the bore and the charmer
both begin to look like a certain American politician, and the American
politician reminds us of the worst of what’s online, which may be what
the whole younger generation is like, and it begins to feel as if a new
selfishness has taken the future hostage and your dinner companion is
not just dull, your recently departed not just a fake, but the future
itself is narcissism — it raises the question of what it is that we
fear, exactly, when we say the word.
. . .
“You can love her, yes,” a therapist once answered, when I asked
about someone who she thought might have Narcissistic Personality
Disorder, or NPD. “But it’s different. You can love her like you’d love a
six year-old. Not expecting her to be an adult. Not expecting her to
love you back.” Like any diagnosis, the word narcissist sutures a person
to a label that means he or she is not like you, not like normal
people. And it signifies that you should turn away.
Of course we don’t necessarily intend, when we say the word, all that
a clinical diagnosis implies, or we shouldn’t. As the World Health
Organisation’s list of diseases, the ICD-10, puts it, a personality
disorder is defined by deep behaviour patterns that are “extreme or
significant deviations” from the way people in a given culture usually
relate to others. And narcissism, serious narcissism, is rare. But the
word exerts its power by association with deviance.
The memes that appear on the internet about a certain American
politician include the following: 1) His face in a haughty, upward look,
with the caption “Malignant Narcissist” underneath it. 2) His face in
an ugly expression with the criteria for NPD — grandiosity, an excessive
need for admiration, lack of empathy, and so on — superimposed over it.
3) His face while he’s giving a speech with a tally of the number of
times he used “I” and “me” in the speech superimposed on it. 4) His face
kissing his own face in a mirror.
More and more, a word that is used to describe the least human among us is the best word for all of us
The vanity, lack of empathy, and exploitativeness of the clinical
narcissist are qualities shared by sociopaths; it is the diagnosis of
cult leaders, of mass murderers. With our dinner companion, our lost
lover, if the word gives us a moment’s solace, it does so by gathering
its power from our sense of what pathology is. We’ve not only pushed
them outside the circle of mental health, and into the company of the
worst among us — narcissism, as a word, gets its bite from its
association with a certain way of thinking about evil.
The narcissist is like John Milton’s Satan, who speaks in chiasmi:
the mind, Milton has Satan argue, “can make a heaven of hell, a hell of
heaven”. Evil is our word for a lack of empathy, for deception, for
falseness, but the feeling of evil can also come when the world as we
know it might be upended, or so we fear.
But sometimes, just before we shut it down with the word, is the
realisation that someone is seriously messing with our sense of what
truth is.
The particular memes I described above, about the American politician, are not about
Donald Trump,
though there are plenty of memes in that direction, too, plenty of
diagnostic articles. They were made by conservative Americans, and the
face behind the lengthy list of diagnostic criteria for NPD is Barack
Obama’s.
Which is not to say that narcissistic evil is simply relative to
where you stand. Sometimes the fear is worthy, and the politician should
not be voted for, and perhaps examined; the person should be divorced.
But I’ve heard the diagnosis used, in all earnestness, to explain the
self-absorption and immaturity of couples who, unfathomably, choose not
to have children, and I’ve also heard it used, by someone who’s chosen
not to have children, to explain the choice to do so, on an
overpopulated planet. And here, our current word for evil seems to
provide cover for a fear of a worldview, or a choice, or even a way of
being, or a whole category of people whose experience somehow cancels
out your own.
. . .
In
Paradise Lost, Milton echoed Ovid’s Narcissus in his
depiction of Eve. He had her, in her first moments alive, glimpse
herself in a pool and fall in love with her own image, in “vain desire”;
it was her narcissism that made her vulnerable to evil. Freud, too,
would unite “narcissism” with “femininity” in his inaugural essay on the
topic: “Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a
certain self-contentment . . . ” That the narcissists described today by
online advice blogs are generally straight men only confirms the word’s
utter flexibility. When it is difficult to reckon with a difference, it
is easier to call a person fake, selfish, and sick.
An online meme featuring Barack Obama
The word arises in the mind to describe the feeling of watching a
whole generation perform their lives online — the selfie-posting, the
live-tweeting of nights out, the Kardashians — the monstrous new
superficiality of our new lives. And here, for me, the word catches the
most traction.
Maybe we are acting more and more, in general, in ways that were
previously considered vain. But is the internet manufacturing a new kind
of self, different enough from the way selves have been before that its
most fluent practitioners — those who might post a selfie,
incidentally, with considerably less anxiety and self-concern than a
50-year-old does — deserve the same name we give to people lacking the
conscience to keep them from mass murder?
It’s an old claim, too — since the late 1970s, when Christopher Lasch condemned the superficial self-absorption of the time in
The Culture of Narcissism,
and Tom Wolfe satirised it in “The ‘Me’ Decade” on the cover of New
York magazine, it’s adapted the language of psychology textbooks to
explain the difference of the young. It’s always easier to see it in the
previous generations’ condemnations — the nostalgia for a time that is
slipping away, when selves were whole, and deep, when we didn’t have to
perform them, when you could really trust people. The word as a
description of the feeling of the centre shifting out from underneath
you, as it does at that dinner table when your friend goes on and on and
you fade into the wallpaper behind you, as if unseen; the feeling of
history passing you by as you become invisible, and unable, any more, to
speak.
If the narcissist challenges us to reckon with the possibility that
empathy is something that can be performed, so does every post on our
Facebook feed. Behind our computer screens, who knows what is going on?
Some of my most empathetic and generous friends post the most selfies;
maybe some of the people who never do, but post constant outward-seeming
messages about injustice, are secret assholes.
Perhaps we fear narcissism because we are all more conscious of how
much we make ourselves, how much might be under the surface, how
unknowable we always have been. We bear witness, more and more, to
selves under construction, in virtual space. In the comments sections,
we react to others at lightning speed, on a scale greater than ever
before in human history, judging others as fake and evil.
©Reuters
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, in August
The word narcissist asserts that our values are different from those
of the American politician, the internet, the young, the dinner
companion — that we have empathy, and they don’t, but sometimes what it
covers over is our fear that we are a little like them, for we are
called upon to do the very same things. Like every apocalyptic story,
the story of the narcissism epidemic gives us a way out, a way to
differentiate ourselves, asserting a kind of decency that is in danger
of making us as self-satisfied as the ones we fear.
I cannot say whether or not the next time the word comes into your
mind, you should write the person who causes it to arise in your mind
off, completely; never see your dinner companion again, cut off contact
with your former lover, try to love her more like a six-year-old,
expecting nothing. But if everyone did that, we’d have an epidemic
indeed. Because in that moment, the language of psychological diagnosis
encourages us to consider ourselves the empathetic one, and judge the
other as selfish — that is, to understand her actions only as they
pertain to us.
And in this sense, while the internet challenges our understanding of
what empathy is, how to interpret it, and how to perform it in
meaningful ways, the moment when we fear narcissism is not a new thing
at all. The psychological language that teaches us to dread the other
makes a tragedy of what is also the oldest comedy of all. When you start
calling each other assholes, you’re interpreting the actions of others
only as they affect you. When you give up on them, then you’re one, too.
The popularity of the word tells a deeper story about being human, that
the internet forces to a crisis: when others look more selfish than we
do, that’s often the moment when we’re most stuck in our own position,
mistaking it for the centre of the universe.
Afraid of the feeling of the centre shifting away from us, of history
moving past us, we interpret the world as if its meaning is its meaning
relative to me, and, when we fear the narcissism of the other, the joke
is often on us.
Kristin Dombek is the author of ‘The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism’ (Faber)
Photographs: Bridgeman Art; Getty; Reuters
