Narcissism Rears its Pretty Head Again

© 2009 John P Hewitt

For the last thirty years narcissism (e.g. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 1978; Jean Twenge, The Narcissism Epidemic, 2009) has been an off and on staple of American cultural criticism. The publication of books on the topic is followed by a flurry of attention, at first promoted by publishers and then spreading virally through the media. In “Broadsheet” (Salon,July 27, 2009) Judy Berman contributes to the trend with a discussion of “The culture of (female) narcissism.” Drawing on Twenge’s book and on an article by the Guardian’s Jane Bunting (“The narcissism of consumer society has left women unhappier than ever,” The Guardian, July 26, 2009), she explicates an apparent link between increasing narcissism and growing unhappiness among women. Narcissists have unrealistic, unattainable goals and expectations of themselves, and can therefore hardly fail to be unhappy. Berman asks a question she admittedly can’t answer: if women’s self-expectations are growing increasingly narcissistic and women therefore increasingly unhappy, then how can things be fixed without setting feminism back or undoing cultural change?

I can’t answer her question either, and with all due respect, it seems to me neither interesting nor answerable. The important question is not “What should we do about this rise in narcissism?” It is not even “Is there really a rise in narcissism?” Put aside the appealing, but ultimately unanswerable empirical question of whether people, male or female, are really more prone to narcissism than they were twenty or forty or sixty years ago, and concentrate on a question that can be answered: Why do people — psychologists, social critics, feminists, pundits — ask such questions in the first place?

The simple answer is that people need explanations: if women haven’t been made happier by the successes of feminism, why not? How can a Bernie Madoff think he can get away with a Ponzi scheme of the historic magnitude of the one he created? Why are people so self-absorbed? Why Facebook? Are these people pathological narcissists? Explanations thus arise from efforts to make sense of things. The world is sometimes a disturbing, baffling, disappointing place. People ask why and construct answers or listen to the answers others provide.

Well enough, but where do these answers — indeed, the questions themselves — come from? Who decides what is disturbing or disappointing, whose questions get attention, and where do they get their answers?

The answer to this broader question lies partly in the existence of an army of conceptual entrepreneurs in the academic, journalistic, and media worlds, who have a ready stock of questions, answers, and successful ways of marketing them. Asking questions and providing answers is an enterprise. The customers are book, magazine, and newspaper editors, TV news producers and discussion show bookers, and, ultimately, readers — and viewers like you. The vendors are journalists, teachers, pundits, authors of self-help books and articles, and a diverse assortment of hucksters and sellers of snake oil. Where there is a conceptual need, there are conceptual entrepreneurs ready with explanations. Narcissism. Low self-esteem. Operators are standing by.

Where do the entrepreneurs get their questions and answers? Academic psychology — with an occasional assist from sociology and, increasingly of late, economics — is a wholesale warehouse of ideas. Since the 1960s, for example, self-esteem has been a potent conceptual tool for defining and explaining all manner of individual and social ills. Arising from academic social psychology and not intended for retail channels, it found its way into the conceptual toolkits of educationists, and from there dispersed widely. Some academics, particularly in schools of education, became retailers in their own right. Other retailers, less “expert,” followed, spreading the word, creating exercises, workbooks and other forms of “bibliotherapy,” workshops, programs, and other devices for enhancing the self-esteem of schoolchildren, bankers, nurses, and everybody else. The concept of narcissism has not yet spawned quite so vast an arsenal of techniques for improving self and others, but there is no reason it could not. For the enterprising, now might be a good time to jump in.

This analysis leaves untouched the question of why particular psychological constructs appeal so broadly to conceptual entrepreneurs and their customers. What is it about narcissism or self-esteem that attracts such attention? Something in these concepts answers to very deeply rooted themes in American culture, especially to its strains, arguments, conflicts, contradictions, and polarities. In particular, talk of “self-esteem” and “narcissism” is linked to the historic American tension between individualism and communitarianism. The discourse in which these terms figure is thus normative as well as conceptual. More precisely, by providing the means of criticizing American culture at its extremes, the discourse sets boundaries, establishes limits, and frames important normative issues.

Consider “self-esteem:” In the eyes of some self-esteem is a universal right; in the eyes of others it is a privilege earned by accomplishment. In the one view, self-esteem is too often damaged by the expectations and requirements of society, which therefore has the responsibility to repair it. In the other view, self-esteem is the individual’s responsibility, not society’s, and not every person deserves to have it. Yet those who believe self-esteem is an entitlement may also subscribe to the view that having it is the key to accomplishment. And those who think it an entitlement may also believe it important to give people, especially children, opportunities where they can succeed so that they can earn it and thus be able to earn more. The discourse of self-esteem thus both reflects and helps define a complex and often contradictory set of values, and sets forth the obligations of the individual and the community alike. Debates about self-esteem, which are a key part of this discourse, expose the part of the cultural ground on which people struggle with themselves and with one another.

It is much the same with “narcissism.” Christopher Lasch was rightly critical of those who misunderstood his subtle psychoanalytic concept of narcissism as a mere substitute term for “selfishness.” Yet those who understand the term this way— probably a majority of people who bandied the term about when it first attained widespread attention in the late 1970s, not to mention contemporary commentators — are in some sense exactly right. “Narcissism” is an appealing term (and in this it resembles self-esteem) because it brings the apparent legitimacy of science, loosely understood, to what is at its root a normative enterprise. Narcissists, in the eyes of non-specialists, are selfish, self-absorbed, unrealistic, too much preoccupied with their own welfare and entitlements and too little with the rights and well-being of others. Yet a soupçon of narcissism is not only inevitable but probably also necessary for psychological health. (Indeed, self-esteem is perhaps what people mean by a little narcissism). It’s nice to imagine that there is a science of personality disorder underlying the term, but at bottom in its everyday usage “narcissism” is a term of opprobrium. Those who employ it establish boundaries between themselves and others — between those who uphold the individual’s responsibility to his or her fellows and those who have taken individualism too far.

Words like “self-esteem” and “narcissism” thus provide a language in which important but polarized elements of the culture are discussed and experienced. They should be understood not as scientific terms for grasping social reality, but as a body of ideas that people employ in cultural skirmishes about truth and virtue. They support everyday normative enterprise while serving as a valuable product for conceptual enterprise. And it is no accident that the two seem in a rough sort of way to have vied for dominance in the last three or four decades. Each addresses — and arouses — significant and opposite worries not just about the future of feminism, but about the direction of the culture as a whole.