About Re-Visioning Narcissism

 Gary Rosenthal's Re-Visioning Narcissism: Healing Heresies for Polarized Times is a visionary tour de force, ambitious in scope, and passionately argued. The title and subtitle outline two of its ambitions. The first is to offer an updated, more nuanced view of narcissism than we've had thus far. The Second--to reflect our polarized time, with hints for its healing.

The glut of recent Trump books reflects our "polarized time" from a largely political angle. Re-Visioning Narcissism begins here--while tracing this polarization back to its earliest roots, 70,000 years ago. But the author reflects the mythic, spiritual, psychological, and evolutionary elements also in play now--while recognizing that this polarization has not, and cannot be, resolved by political means alone. We need to get wiser--fast. For climate change scientists tell us we have barely 10 years to clean up our act before we reach a point of no return.

Yet no political party has a program for inducing wisdom--they've been more concerned with defeating each other--exactly what was happening millennia ago, when humans first began to create myths --their own tribal narratives--as they struggled with other tribes for turf. Though in an Internet age, the bickering of small tribes now has a global reach.

Just as healing processes often begin with "taking a history," Rosenthal takes a history of narcissism itself--beginning with the Greek poets two thousand years ago who gave us the myth of Narcissus, from which narcissism was first named. And we're offered reflections of how earlier epochs envisioned it, and some of the practices they developed for its transformation. Such transformation was in the past only achieved by a few adepts. What's distinctive about our current age is that it's become an evolutionary and global imperative.

In an age rife with narcissism, heresies may be needed, to counter the prevailing view. Such heresy might call into question the ways that narcissism and other personality disorders are currently being conceived by American psychiatry's mainstream. For example, the book questions the official estimate of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which for the last two editions of its diagnostic and statistical manual have told us that the prevalence of narcissistic disorders in the American population be as low as 0%. (And this, after they first thought to banish it completely).

When a cultic orthodoxy tries to minimize narcissism, it's akin to attempting the same with COVID--and one of the reasons narcissism could stand a little ... re-visioning. Such a view only recognizes narcissism's most florid exemplars and fails to identify differing narcissistic styles--from a "closet narcissism" at its most benign, to a "malignant narcissism" portrayed by Erich Fromm as "the quintessence of evil."

The book also reflects the chain of events that led American psychiatry to throw sociopaths and psychopaths out of their manual, as if they no long exist--having blanketed both of these similar but different disorders under the APA's invented construct of an Antisocial Personality Disorder. An outcome was that Americans had been delayed in recognizing that a Trojan Horse--one with a psychopath inside, not just a narcissist--had entered our gates during the 2016 presidential election.

Though the book will be useful--and provocative--for psychologists, it is geared for an intelligent lay audience. For it initiates conversations that intelligent people are needing to have now, as we face the unique challenges of our time--from preserving the rule of law, to better planning for pandemics, global warming, and evolving beyond the polarization and narcissism that has impeded our response to them all. And these challenges will be with us ... long after Trump is gone.