The Narcissist Test: How to spot outsized egos ... and the surprising things we can learn from them. Dr Malkin Craig

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ