Reflections on Narcissism (part 1): Competing Ways to Conceptualize Narcissistic Personality Disorder
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...