Some Uses of Narcissism

Everybody knows what narcissism is. It is a term everybody uses to describe bosses and coworkers, unpleasant neighbors, and certain politicians. From this, one could be forgiven for assuming the definition of the term is clear: if journalists and television anchors feel free to use it regularly, then it must be generally understood. But note that in a debate over the behavior of the recently elected 45th POTUS, experts in the field of mental health, including a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard and an editor of the DSM (Dodes, 2017; Frances, 2017), could not even agree that there was pathology present. This does suggest that there is less clarity than one might expect.

But perhaps not. Consider what historian Elizabeth Lunbeck has to say about the nature of narcissism in the introduction to her book The Americanization of Narcissism:

Generations of commentators, lamenting narcissism's paradoxes and capaciousness, have tried to narrow its referents and settle, once and for all, its meaning. Narcissism's protean nature, however, has proven as much a resource as a liability, and the concept has become too ubiquitous, and culturally and clinically useful, to submit to assiduous boundary policing…. Narcissism has always been simultaneously pathological and normal, and debates over selfishness, hedonism, and vanity have not arisen out of the idea of narcissism but, rather, are among the oldest questions we have asked ourselves. (2014, pp. 6-7).

So, at least as Lunbeck sees it (without giving references to those generations of commentators), narcissism is a concept that gets used in lots of different ways. Today, it is used almost constantly to attack Donald Trump. As we will see, the term is used quite differently again in Lunbeck's history of 1970s social criticism, in the work of Christopher Lasch (1979/1991; 1984), and again in Kate Schechter's study of developments in the history of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Illusions of a Future (2014). Why narci