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Confusion and Controversy

How Narcissism Became a Dirty Word and We Found an Epidemic

Many years ago, a close friend of mine, Tara, called me about an incident with her father and her two-year-old daughter, Nina. They’d been out for a stroll in the park when Nina suddenly became unglued, screaming and wailing to go home. Tara did what she could, but Nina remained inconsolable. After about half an hour, Tara announced, “We have to go, I’m sorry.” Her father shot her a stern look, warning: “If you leave every time she pitches a fit, she’ll think the world revolves around her!” Tara, fuming, fired back. “Yes. Yes, she will. And I think that’s a good thing! Don’t you?”

On the surface, this father-daughter quarrel was a generational battle over how to raise a child. But at a deeper level, their argument reflects two radically different views of human nature. Tara’s dad seems to believe people are easily corruptible, requiring constant reining in to avoid becoming hopelessly self-centered, while Tara thinks we’re all made of sturdier stuff and actually benefit from a little self-absorption now and then. The first position inevitably adopts a rather dim view of humanity, the latter a more optimistic one.

Without realizing it, Tara and her father had squared off in one of the oldest debates in history, one that’s central to the confusion surrounding narcissism today.

The Birth of Narcissism

Long before the word narcissism had been coined, philosophers fought just as fiercely as Tara and her father over the place of the self in our moral priorities.

In 350 BC, Aristotle posed a question—“Who should the good man love more? Himself, or others?”—and answered it: “The good man is particularly selfish.” In India two centuries earlier, the Buddha had spread the opposite view: The self is an illusion, a trick our minds play on us to make us think we matter. Buddhism suggested that this illusory self should never be our primary focus. Four centuries after Aristotle, Christian teachings added a negative fillip: making too much of oneself constitutes the sin of pride (and a quick path to hell). Excesses of the self underlie other sins—sloth, greed, gluttony, and envy—as well.

Down through the centuries, the debate raged, engaging philosophers from Thomas Hobbes (self-love is part of brutish human nature) to Adam Smith (self-interest benefits society, aka “greed is good”). It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century, however, that the debate entered into the circles of medicine and psychology and the word narcissism first appeared. In 1898 pioneering British sexologist Havelock Ellis described patients who’d literally fallen in love with themselves, sprinkling their bodies with kisses from their own lips and masturbating to excess, as suffering from a “Narcissus-like” ailment. One year later, a German doctor, Paul Näcke, writing about similar “sexual perversions,” coined the catchier term narcissism. But it was the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who in 1914 made the word famous in a groundbreaking paper: On Narcissism: An Introduction. He liberated the term from its sexual connotations (unusual for him), describing narcissism, instead, as a necessary developmental stage of childhood.

As infants, Freud wrote, we’re convinced the world originates in us, at least all the exciting parts of it. We literally fall in love with ourselves, giddy with all the fascinating and sexy things we seem capable of. He called this stage “primary narcissism,” and felt it wasn’t just healthy, but also crucial to our capacity to form meaningful, close relationships. Our passion for ourselves as infants gives us the energy to reach out to others. We have to overestimate our own importance in the universe before we can see anyone else as important.

But Freud didn’t know quite what to make of narcissism beyond infancy. Was it good or bad for adults? On the one hand, he felt that narcissism and love were closely linked; lovers often raise each other on a pedestal above the rest of humanity. He also pointed to charismatic leaders and innovators as proof that individuals who feel special can bring tremendous good to the world. But he was quick to condemn adult narcissism as well. If we don’t let go of the childhood fascination with ourselves, he cautioned, it can lead to vanity (in his view found chiefly in women) and to serious mental illness, severing us from reality and turning us into delusional megalomaniacs. Freud’s dual views on adult narcissism generated enormous confusion and set the stage for a crackling duel nearly fifty years later between two giants in mental health: Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg.

Both men were born in Vienna to Jewish families and both trained as psychoanalysts. But they came of age under vastly different circumstances. Kohut, born in 1913, knew a Vienna full of hope and prosperity, brimming with rich artistic tradition and teeming with intellectual fervor. The advent of Hitler and the Third Reich changed all that. Soon after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Kohut fled his beloved city for England and then America, where he settled in 1940. Born in 1928, fifteen years after Kohut, Kernberg grew up in a grim and ominous Vienna in the shadow of encroaching Nazism. When he was 10 years old, he and his family fled to Chile, where Kernberg spent the next twenty years, far away from the home he’d once known; he moved to the United States in 1959. The two men’s contrasting experiences seem to have colored their views of human nature. Darkness pervades Kernberg’s view, while hope suffuses Kohut’s.

The Rise of Healthy Narcissism

As a young psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, like Freud, quickly earned a reputation for brilliance as a clinician, researcher, and teacher/lecturer. (He was renowned for his ability to commit entire therapy session transcripts to memory and to deliver compelling talks without a single note to prompt him.) Throughout most of his career, he remained one of Freud’s staunchest defenders. But in the 1970s, he split from the orthodox Freudian community to found an entirely new school of thought, Self Psychology, devoted to understanding how people develop a healthy (or unhealthy) self-image.

Kohut believed that Freud had stumbled by placing sex and aggression at the center of human experience. It’s not our baser instincts that drive us, Kohut argued; rather, it’s our need to develop a solid sense of self. And for that, he said, we don’t just need other people; we need narcissism. Freud had all but elevated self-reliance to the level of virtue. We should be fully autonomous as adults, declared the master, demanding neither approval nor admiration. But where Freud saw narcissism as a mark of immaturity, an infantile dependency to be outgrown, Kohut saw it as vital to well-being throughout life. Even as adults, we need to depend on others from time to time—to look up to them, to enjoy their admiration, to turn to them for comfort and satisfaction.

Young children only feel like they matter—only feel like they exist—when their parents make them feel special. Parents who pay attention to their children’s inner lives—their hopes and dreams, their sadness and fears, and most of all their need for admiration—provide the “mirroring” necessary for the child to develop a healthy sense of self. But young children also need to idolize their parents. Seeing their mother and father as perfect helps them weather the storms every fledgling self goes through as we face life’s inevitable disappointments. I’m awesome anyway, you can tell yourself when bullied at school or flunking math, because my parents think so. And my parents are perfect, so they should know.

Kohut believed that children gradually learn that nothing—and no one—can be perfect and so their need for self-perfection eventually gives way to a more level-headed self-image. As they witness the ways healthy adults handle their own flaws and limitations, they begin coping more pragmatically, without the constant need for fantasies of greatness or perfection. At the end of their journey, they acquire healthy narcissism: genuine pride, self-worth, the capacity to dream, empathize, admire and be admired. This, Kohut said, is how any of us develops a sturdy sense of self.

But when children face abuse, neglect, and other traumas that leave them feeling small, insignificant, and unimportant, they spend all their time looking for admiration or finding people to look up to. In short, Kohut concluded, they become narcissists—vulnerable, fragile, and empty on the inside; arrogant, pompous, and hostile on the outside, to compensate for just how worthless they feel. People, in their eyes, become jesters or servants in their court, useful only for the ability to confirm the narcissist’s importance.

The rest of us, if our parents do their job right, never lose our moments of grandiosity. Nor should we. In Kohut’s eyes, it was madness to think of lofty dreams as inherently bad. If anything, they provide a depth and vitality to our experience, fueling our ambitions and inspiring creativity. Composers and artists throughout history, he noted, often have moments of self-importance. To produce anything great—to even sit down and try—often requires feeling that we’re capable of greatness, hardly the humblest state of mind. Kohut refused to see some of civilization’s greatest creations simply as the result of illness. Instead of stamping out narcissism, he argued, we should learn to enjoy it as adults. Narcissism only becomes dangerous, taking us over and tipping into megalomania, when we cling to feeling special like a talisman instead of playing with it from time to time. It all depends on how completely we allow grandiosity and perfectionism to take us over.

There’s an appealing romanticism to Kohut’s vision of narcissism. It allows us to disappear into ourselves, like Narcissus diving into the pool, but instead of drowning and becoming lost forever, we discover another world, richly populated with shimmering versions of everyone we love. Once there, we, too, take on a kind of otherworldly glow. For a time, we’re different, special, set apart from the rest of humanity. If we’re healthy enough, we can reemerge and rejoin the ordinary world, bringing our bounty, such as empathy and inspiration, with us. Where Freud’s narcissist is childish—a Peter Pan figure stubbornly refusing to become an adult—Kohut’s is, at his best, an adventurer, slipping in and out of intoxicating dreams of greatness.

By the 1970s Kohut’s self-psychology movement had become something of a juggernaut and his views on narcissism had become widely accepted. In fact, when the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)—the guide to classifying mental disorders published by the American Psychological Association—hit the shelves in 1980, it carried a brand-new description of unhealthy narcissism very similar to the one Kohut had proposed. By then many mental health experts believed feeling special could lead to many good things—and the dangers, while very real, had been overstated. But the tide was about to change.

The Rise of the Dark Narcissist

Otto Kernberg agreed with Kohut that healthy narcissism provides us with self-esteem, pride, ambition, creativity, and resilience. But he diverged sharply with Kohut’s theory when it came to unhealthy narcissism. Whereas Kohut viewed even grandiose narcissism in a somewhat benevolent light, Kernberg saw it as inherently dangerous and harmful.

Likely due to his exposure at an impressionable age to Nazism and Hitler (one of the most dangerous megalomaniacs who ever lived), Kernberg believed in the presence of evil in the world. His experience during psychoanalytic training reinforced his dark views of human nature—Kernberg cut his teeth professionally working in hospitals and clinics with severely mentally ill patients prone to aggression and psychosis, while Kohut arrived at his theories treating privileged patients in his luxurious private offices. In Kernberg’s view, narcissists, at their most destructive, are masses of seething resentment—Frankenstein’s monsters, crudely patched together from misshapen pieces of personality. They’d been failed so horrifically as children, through neglect or abuse, that their primary goal is to avoid ever feeling dependent again. By adopting the delusion that they’re perfect, self-contained human beings (and that others are beneath them), they never have to fear feeling unsafe and unimportant again.

Far more loyal to Freud’s legacy than Kohut, Kernberg refused to abandon the idea that sex and aggression fueled much of our behavior. Like Freud, he saw human beings as roiling cauldrons of hostility and lust, driven by their darkest and often cruelest passions. The most dangerous narcissists, in Kernberg’s view, may even be born with too much aggression wired into them; they’re frightening mutations, given to a far stronger impulse to envy, attack, and destroy their fellow human beings when they feel hurt. Made to feel worthless as children and fueled by their overabundance of hate, they ravage the rest of humanity out of revenge, using people to satisfy their own needs and casting them aside when they’re done. Kernberg called the most frightening of these specimens “malignant narcissists.”

The only sensible response to this threat, according to Kernberg, is to dismantle the warped self-image and reconstruct it in more benevolent form. He believed that narcissists were capable of reform and that confronting them with the truth of the danger they pose is the first step in changing their behavior. We certainly can’t stop the threat of destructive narcissism by feeding their need to feel special. That’s a bit like letting the monster loose to terrorize the villagers. This was anathema to Kohut, who advocated approaching narcissists with empathy. They need our understanding, he said, if they have any hope of getting better. Kernberg, still allied with Freud’s bleak vision of humanity, could only see Kohut’s stance as dangerously naïve.

Kohut’s and Kernberg’s competing theories were battled over through conferences and papers, with neither side gaining ascendancy. But after Kohut succumbed to cancer in 1981, Kernberg was left alone in the spotlight and his views, particularly of malignant narcissism, spread widely. They were helped into public consciousness by historian and social critic Christopher Lasch’s popular 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, which drew heavily on Kernberg’s frightening image of destructive narcissism. In most people’s minds, narcissism became synonymous with malignant narcissism.

This image began to take hold, magnified by the idea that narcissists weren’t rare creatures that we had only the slightest chance of encountering in our lifetimes, but monsters standing on every street corner, sitting in the next cubicle, and sleeping in our beds. And soon one little test enabled the paranoia to spread like wildfire.

An Epidemic of Narcissism— or a Little Measurement Magic

Introduced in 1979, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is a basic tool of psychology researchers, and is routinely administered to undergraduate psychology students in the United States and around the world. (If you ever studied psychology in college, you probably took the NPI.) Respondents read 40 paired statements and check off which one of the two best describes themselves. For example: “I like to show off my body” and “I don’t particularly like to show off my body” or “I find it easy to manipulate people” and “I don’t like it when I find myself manipulating people.” Each narcissistic choice gets one point; the opposite choice gets a zero. Points are added up and people who score well above average earn the title of narcissist.

In 2009, twenty years after the inventory’s start-up, psychologist Jean Twenge, of the University of Texas, compared average totals by year for thousands of US students and announced that the averages had risen “just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present.” She proclaimed that a “narcissism epidemic” is raging among millennials—and underscored her contention by using the same shock phrase for the title of her book. The Narcissism Epidemic, coauthored with psychologist Keith Campbell, of the University of Georgia, explored the alleged rampant arrogance and entitlement of today’s youth. This was the dramatic follow-up to her first book, Generation Me, in which she declared, based on the same research, that “today’s young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled—and more miserable than ever before.”

Twenge placed the blame for this epidemic squarely on shoulders of parents and educators who made a generation of children coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s feel, perhaps, a little too special. After all, it had become commonplace for classrooms to be plastered with positive-reinforcement posters proclaiming things like “You are unique!”; for trophies to be handed out for effort, not accomplishment; for parents to remind their children at every turn that they were perfect just as they were. Love yourself enough, the message seemed to be, and you can do anything. Some educators even argued that boosting self-esteem would be something of a panacea, promoting well-being and happiness, preventing bullying—possibly even reducing crime. Make kids feel special, they argued, and great things will follow.

While this self-esteem campaign doesn’t appear to have had a positive impact on crime rates, bullying, or achievement scores, Twenge argued that it did have a significant cultural impact: it created “an army of narcissists.” In an effort to help children feel better about themselves, we’d inadvertently ruined them. Having given them too much leeway and swollen heads, we hadn’t simply damaged our kids; we created a generation that posed a threat to the entire world.

Twenge’s theories touched a cultural nerve. The press was already rife with reports of overinvolved parents who coddled their children, chewing out their sons’ or daughters’ teachers for dishing out bad grades or calling during job interviews to speak to their prospective employers. Headlines buzzed with shocking tales of millennials’ sense of entitlement: disgruntled administrative assistants who slacked off at work, convinced that secretarial duties were beneath them; entry-level workers who held court when they should have been listening to their boss; new hires who spent entire meetings glued to their smartphones, texting friends instead of taking notes. And now, it seemed, Twenge had provided an explanation for all the bad behavior.

Her conclusions, however, have drawn fire right from the start—and the evidence she marshals to support the idea of a narcissism epidemic has come under the heaviest attack. The NPI, on which Twenge draws so heavily, is a deeply flawed measure. Under its design, agreeing with statements that reflect even admirable traits can inch people higher up the narcissism scale. For example, picking “I am assertive” and “I would prefer to be a leader” counts as unhealthy even though these qualities have been linked repeatedly in decades of research to high self-esteem and happy relationships. People who simply enjoy speaking their mind or being in charge are clearly different from narcissists who enjoy manipulation and lies. But the NPI makes no distinction. More people checking these salutary statements could easily account for millennials’ rising NPI scores through the years, and that’s what some studies indicate has happened.

Second, numerous large-scale studies, including one of nearly half a million high school students conducted between 1976 and 2006, have found little or no psychological difference between millennials and previous generations (apart from a rise in self-confidence). In fact, one study of thousands of students suggests that millennials express greater altruism and concern about the world as a whole than do previous generations, prompting psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, of Clark University to call them “GenerationWe.” The results of a 2010 Pew Research Report, surveying a nationally representative sample of several thousand millennials, also stands in stark contrast to Twenge’s findings. Millennials, the Pew authors concluded, get along well with their parents, respect their elders, value marriage and family far over career and success, and are “confident, self-expressive, and open to change”—hardly the portrait of entitled brats.

But there’s another far more troubling problem with using the NPI to declare an epidemic: we have no way of knowing whether or not people scored as “narcissists” remain so over time. No study has followed up on these thousands of college students after they graduated. Furthermore, just about every theory of adolescence and early adulthood presumes that the young are only temporarily a self-absorbed bunch, and research seems to support that view. We used to think that was a good thing: the bright-faced idealism of youth. The young believe themselves capable of anything; they’re ready to take over the world and make it a better place. Most of us, in our less cynical moments, appreciate their ostentatious energy. But just as with other temporary bouts of narcissism brought on by specific life stages, such enthusiasm eventually fades. As we approach our thirties, most of us come back down to earth, and our self-importance, and yes—self-absorption—give way to the realities of life.

Though we currently seem obsessed with Kernberg’s dark narcissism, the pervasive better than average effect—where healthy people do appear to feel special—suggests that Kohut’s benign view is the right one.

We need our grandiosity at times to feel happy and healthy. And a growing body of recent research concludes that a little narcissism, in adolescence, helps the young survive the Sturm und Drang of youth; moderate teenage narcissists are less anxious and depressed and have far better relationships than their low and high narcissism peers. Likewise, corporate leaders with moderate narcissism are rated by their employees as far more effective than those with too little or too much. And my own research with my colleagues is pointing in the same direction: only people who never feel special or feel special all the time pose a threat to themselves and the world.

The difference between narcissists and the rest of us is one of degree, not kind. To better understand that, we need to explore the full range of the narcissism spectrum.