Narcissism on the Rise
If narcissism has its political features and consequences as I’ve attempted to evoke in previous posts, a growing incidence of narcissism had been showing up in American psychotherapeutic consulting rooms long before Donald Trump, long before 9/11, long before even Christopher Lasch’s seminal book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was published in 1979.
Not surprisingly, over the succeeding decades we’ve thus had a plethora of books published on the topic of narcissism. Yet they don’t seem to have helped us much. For as a psychotherapist in private practice, I’ve seen absolutely no diminishment in what’s walking in the door for treatment.
In fact, the longest running study of narcissism that had been conducted by a group of social psychologists (between 1982 and 2006 with American college students) indicated that the trend toward narcissism has been steadily increasing (by 30% over the duration of the study). And by the study’s end, approximately two thirds of the students were scoring highly on a narcissism index.
Narcissus 1948 Lucian Freud,
© The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images / Photo © Tate
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http://bit.ly/TateNarcissus
Yet weirdly, when the latest version of the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition) was preparing for its release in 2010, it had decided to entirely eliminate Narcissistic Personality Disorder as a potential diagnosis.
When this was announced, the uproar that resulted from many psychological professionals led the DSM-5’s personality disorder committee to reconsider their stance. And when the DSM-5 was finally published in May of 2013, NPD was retained as a potential diagnosis.
Yet the estimate given for Narcissistic Personality Disorder amongst the American population was then listed as a dubiously low 0% to 6.2% — which also proved to be controversial.
Certainly, the enormous statistical discrepancy between 0% NPD at the low end or even 6.2% NPD at the high end, and two thirds of a population being studied is quite glaring. And it seemed to reflect a polarized confusion in the minds of even many mental health professionals sent out to treatnarcissism — a confusion of what the term “narcissism” truly means, or should refer to.
My view is that there’s really quite a wide spectrum in narcissism — from a horrifically toxic version at its most extreme (as in a malignant narcissism portrayed by Erich Fromm as “the quintessence of evil”) — to what’s now become normative, “the narcissism of everyday life.” The DSM-5 recognizes neither. In essence, we’ve had dueling views of the same syndrome — and thus, widely ranging estimates of its prevalence.
The lack of coherent agreement in our understanding of what narcissism truly is has limited both our recognition of this widely suffered syndrome, and what will be required for its healing. The need for a deeply considered re-visioning of both seems timely for us now. And that is what this book — Re-visioning Narcissism: Healing Heresies for Polarized Times — will provide.