Narcissism—be it the concept or its referent—is clearly having a moment in the wider culture. The demoniacal figure of The Narcissist is all over social media. In the 2010s, a yearly average of 357 peer-reviewed articles had the word “narcissism” in their abstracts, up from 173 in the year 2000 (see Weiss and Campell in Cambridge Handbook of Personality Disorders , 2020). Of course, it’s hard to know how to interpret such numbers, and the concept of narcissism arguably went through a previous vogue in the 1970s, thanks to Kohut, Kernberg, and Christopher Lasch—maybe this will be the topic of a future post. As Jonathan Shedler and David Puder discuss in this podcast , the popular portrayal of narcissism is frequently one-dimensional. In the psychodynamic tradition, however, among other clinical approaches, one finds distinctions between (a) normal, developmentally-necessary narcissism and (b) pathological narcissism, as well as between different types of pathological nar...
In the previous post, I discussed Lisa Feldman Barrett’s critique of the “classical theory of emotions.” I covered reasons to reject the idea that there is a simple set of crisply delimited, universal, basic emotions or the idea that such emotions have universal modes of facial expression or invariant physiological or neural “fingerprints.” In this post, I would like to sketch Barrett’s positive account—of how the brain, in interaction with human culture and the environment, constructs emotions. A word is needed first, though, about the metaphor of “construction.” It is a complex metaphor. It’s a metaphor that can pull us in many different directions. It tugs at other none-too-crisp distinctions we are familiar with, such as the distinction between finding something and making something, or the distinction between simple parts versus complexes of many different parts. It reminds of how we tend to think of some things as natural and others as manufactured—or artificial,...