The Narcissist Test: How to spot outsized egos ... and the surprising things we can learn from them. Dr Malkin Craig
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 Keith Campbell, of the University of Georgia, explored the alleged rampant arrogance and entitlement of today’s youth. This was the dramatic follow-up to her first book, Generation Me, in which she declared, based on the same research, that “today’s young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled—and more miserable than ever before.”
Twenge placed the blame for this epidemic squarely on shoulders of parents and educators who made a generation of children coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s feel, perhaps, a little too special. After all, it had become commonplace for classrooms to be plastered with positive-reinforcement posters proclaiming things like “You are unique!”; for trophies to be handed out for effort, not accomplishment; for parents to remind their children at every turn that they were perfect just as they were. Love yourself enough, the message seemed to be, and you can do anything. Some educators even argued that boosting self-esteem would be something of a panacea, promoting well-being and happiness, preventing bullying—possibly even reducing crime. Make kids feel special, they argued, and great things will follow.
While this self-esteem campaign doesn’t appear to have had a positive impact on crime rates, bullying, or achievement scores, Twenge argued that it did have a significant cultural impact: it created “an army of narcissists.” In an effort to help children feel better about themselves, we’d inadvertently ruined them. Having given them too much leeway and swollen heads, we hadn’t simply damaged our kids; we created a generation that posed a threat to the entire world.
Twenge’s theories touched a cultural nerve. The press was already rife with reports of overinvolved parents who coddled their children, chewing out their sons’ or daughters’ teachers for dishing out bad grades or calling during job interviews to speak to their prospective employers. Headlines buzzed with shocking tales of millennials’ sense of entitlement: disgruntled administrative assistants who slacked off at work, convinced that secretarial duties were beneath them; entry-level workers who held court when they should have been listening to their boss; new hires who spent entire meetings glued to their smartphones, texting friends instead of taking notes. And now, it seemed, Twenge had provided an explanation for all the bad behavior.
Her conclusions, however, have drawn fire right from the start—and the evidence she marshals to support the idea of a narcissism epidemic has come under the heaviest attack. The NPI, on which Twenge draws so heavily, is a deeply flawed measure. Under its design, agreeing with statements that reflect even admirable traits can inch people higher up the narcissism scale. For example, picking “I am assertive” and “I would prefer to be a leader” counts as unhealthy even though these qualities have been linked repeatedly in decades of research to high self-esteem and happy relationships. People who simply enjoy speaking their mind or being in charge are clearly different from narcissists who enjoy manipulation and lies. But the NPI makes no distinction. More people checking these salutary statements could easily account for millennials’ rising NPI scores through the years, and that’s what some studies indicate has happened.
Second, numerous large-scale studies, including one of nearly half a million high school students conducted between 1976 and 2006, have found little or no psychological difference