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