Narcissism Isn't What Most People Think it Is
Understanding the evolving concept of narcissism
They say you should “never meet your heroes” for good reason—all of your heroes are flawed. Once we cast aside the imaginary character we’ve envisioned the whole time and stare blankly at the unpolished human we’ve revered for a very long time, we’re disillusioned as we realize our perceptions of greatness were mere fabrications.
Narcissism works a bit like this. You meet someone, they put on a veneer of perfection, then you get to know them a bit and discover that beneath the pretty picture is someone who’s struggling mightily with internal personal problems.
Early psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud described narcissism, saying, “[Narcissism] works for the self-assertion of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration.” In other words, narcissists flinch at the slightest brush of disagreement and are often roused to anger over small things.
Freud also ingeniously recognized what he called “the narcissism of small differences,” noting that whenever you see conflict among individuals around the globe, more often than not, it it’s a minor ideological or cultural difference driving the conflict. It’s usually two groups of people who are strikingly similar except for a few small differences in beliefs or customs. Often, people can agree on 99% of things and they’ll fight to the death over the remaining 1%.
Catholic and Protestant Christians aren’t all that far apart in the grand scheme of things and they’ve fought against each other in bloody wars for centuries. They believe in the same religion but squabble over different interpretations. The same could be said of Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Nearly the entire history of the Roman Empire was marred by civil wars and power struggles, Roman fighting Roman, legion fighting legion. And don’t even get me started on the Greek city-states of the ancient world.
Narcissism’s Rise in Popular Culture
The term “narcissism” has filtered down from academic spaces to everyday ones, as adoption of the term by mainstream culture has propelled its popularity. It seems like everyone knows a narcissist and they commonly claim to have survived one.
The internet has no shortage of content dedicated to narcissism. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter have become places where people come to vent their relationship frustrations or monetize their stories (or at least their side of the story).
Generally, by “narcissism,” these creators mean those with “narcissistic personality disorder,” which is different from just having narcissistic traits—we’re all a bit self-absorbed at times. But, as we’ll soon see, the landscape of what it means to be a narcissist is shifting faster than most of us could ever imagine.
Of course, it’s crucial to note that most of these online conversations about people lack a formal diagnosis by a medical professional. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is unanimously difficult to diagnose, by definition. People with NPD generally don’t think there is anything wrong with them (or at least they’d never let on that there is). The problem is almost always someone else’s fault, not theirs, which is the overarching theme of the disorder, which begs the question, in their minds—if it’s always someone else’s fault, why is it my responsibility to change?
Nonetheless, there’s a lot that people get wrong about narcissism.
With the sudden rise in popular culture, it’s smart to understand what narcissism is and is not so you don’t get swept up in the current of the Information Age and next thing you know, you wind up calling someone a narcissist on shaky evidence.
Narcissism: The Moving Target
When I was a kid, there was only one type of narcissism: grandiose narcissism. Every depiction and understanding of a narcissist was exactly like Donald Trump: cold, calculated, Machiavellian, smug, self-assured, constantly self-praising, cocky, sometimes arrogant, incapable of admitting wrongdoing, incapable of sincerely apologizing, usually overly flashy, obsessed with power dynamics…you get the picture.
The grandiose narcissist is full of themselves and everything, every situation, must somehow benefit them. They rarely show vulnerability because they’re practically never vulnerable. You can easily find a flurry of articles linking Donald Trump to Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Even today, this is what most people think narcissism is.
It turns out, the opposite is true.
First, the collective fields of science responsible for deciding what does and doesn’t count as narcissism expanded its definition. Researchers proposed subtypes, including vulnerable narcissism, which is a totally different flavor of narcissism. The vulnerable narcissist isn’t self-assured, cocky, or arrogant, though they might act that way in an attempt to deceive others. Vulnerable narcissists are deeply insecure people, so they put on a presentation because that’s what they think people want or expect from them.
But like Freud pointed out over a century ago, the slightest touch of disagreement can set them off and suddenly you see the presentation was all an act when it crumbles before your very eyes. They aren’t truly strong people, they’re fragile people with a strong person’s costume on. They're imposters.
From there, researchers, psychologists, and psychiatrists kind of went crazy trying to propose even more various different subtypes. Even now, you can find relatively recent articles about the various narcissistic subtypes on Psychology Today and curiously (but not surprisingly) each of the lists differ slightly.
One even went so far as to discuss the “communal narcissist” the person who wants to be overly helpful, so much so that they’re actually selfish. This idea is a bit ridiculous on its face—the idea that someone can be narcissistic to the degree that they would constantly put others first is a bit of a stretch and it shows that sometimes even the most well-educated people can get a bit hasty.
Now, after all of that research, all those articles were written, new research suggests (probably accurately) that only vulnerable narcissism exists and the rest were either just psychopathy (technically anti-social personality disorder) in the case of the “grandiose narcissist” and the rest were just a result of the excitement at the possibility of discovering new subtypes of the disease.
But how do they know? Aren’t these all just made-up categories, after all?
The researchers gave people what’s called a FLEX test which measures how highly they think of themselves through a battery of questions. The average person might overrate their abilities a little bit; the narcissist is off the charts with their estimations of self. Surprise surprise, the psychopaths don’t score obnoxiously high on this like the narcissists do, and the people with “grandiose” narcissism don’t either. In relation to grandiose narcissism, this, like the idea of “communal narcissism,” is self-defeating. How can a narcissist not be totally full of themselves? Vulnerable narcissists, on the other hand, scored very high on the FLEX test despite feeling deep insecurity at their cores.
Let me illustrate it this way:
Let's say you give a vulnerable narcissist and a psychopath a test to see how highly they thought of themselves. You’d assume that both greatly overrate their abilities. But the vulnerable narcissist is secretly trying to win your approval, so they score themselves really high. But the psychopath doesn’t give a shit about your approval (or the test). They only care about themselves and your test doesn’t benefit them in any way, nor is it very exciting.
This crude analogy is just one way that researchers try to delineate the different types of personalities that can lead to pathologies and an unhappy life. It also gets to what’s at the core of narcissism—a deep-rooted insecurity that the person afflicted constantly feels the need to smother with a puffed out chest and doing better than others.
Dealing With Others
It’s really easy to get swept up in all this content about narcissists now that it proliferates, but much of the time, the people pushing this kind of content have no more credentials than being an “influencer” and usually aren’t actually reading the research (unlike this guy). They skim a few Psychology Today articles and—with the confidence of a dairy bull on methamphetamine—get in front of the camera and talk as if they were experts.
This becomes especially true with something like narcissism which is an evolving concept. Yes, it might be true that only vulnerable narcissism is true narcissism, but more work needs to be done to settle that question (nonetheless, I think this research will be confirmed and will someday become common knowledge—it passes the smell test).
If you notice some strange behaviors in your relationship and you think there might be a mental illness at work, it’s essential to speak with a trained mental health professional about it. It’s too easy to confirm our own suspicions and then we fall down a social media rabbit hole leading to accusations, fights, and pain. A mental health professional will be able to address your specific situation instead of making vague statements that are as applicable to you as the horoscopes section of the tabloids written by hungover interns.