“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DECIDE EVERYONE ELSE IS A NARCISSIST”
“The concept of pathological narcissism dates back, Dombek explains, to the end of the nineteenth century, when the English doctor and writer Havelock Ellis described sexual behavior animated by attraction to one’s own self as “Narcissus-like.” Freud picked up on this, labelling as narcissistic the self-sufficiency of certain confident women and the behavior of homosexual men…
It’s Kernberg’s model that we now live with — one that understands narcissism not as a defense mechanism, or as a fungible reaction to circumstance, but as a “condition of a failed self.”…
Narcissists are not identified in a vacuum; the person you label a narcissist is usually someone who’s close to you, or a member of a tribe that you have been culturally encouraged or professionally incentivized to dislike. Millennials seem narcissistic to baby-boomer social scientists; men and women looking for love seem narcissistic to each other; analysis-resistant patients seemed narcissistic to Freud. Dombek’s historical survey is a persuasive reminder that the traits characteristic of the narcissist — his gender, his likely age, his supposed motivations — have shifted, and will continue to shift, “according to who’s got the power of diagnosis.”…
And there begins an emotional arms race, in which the only way to respond to someone you assume to be entirely insincere and empty inside is to suppress your own instincts for kindness — to act, in other words, like a narcissist.”
