Institutional Narcissism
A look at the malignant ethos infiltrating influential organizations
Years back I watched The Corporation, a documentary which brilliantly illustrated how the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath parallels the character structure of a corporation. Based on the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan, the film’s psychological analysis elucidated how an ethos of malignant narcissism permeates the corporate entity on organizational and ideological levels.
As Bakan conveyed, “The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.”
Like corporations other large scale establishments such as religious institutions, the medical industry, political parties, progressive social movements and academia can evidence the psychological condition of disordered narcissism. In fact, The Communal Narcissism Inventory (CNI) (Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R.) identifies those who are driven to satisfy the same selfish needs as the agentic narcissist, focused on actualizing inflated self-directed personal goals for power, success, and admiration, but in cooperative public domains.
