It's You, Baby: It's Really All About YOU!!!!

"The narcissists did it. Some commentators are fingering them as the culprits of the financial meltdown,...we went on a national binge of I-deserve-it consumption that's now resulting in our economic purging,...

This is the cultural moment of the narcissist,...John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.)....

...A psychological condition that impairs a person's ability to form normal relationships and wreaks havoc on those who have close encounters with it,...

...the sense that other people don't matter, the belief others are instruments for the narcissist's use, the self-admiration.

...Personality disorders are seen as a failure of character development. Others include anti-social personality disorder (these people are also commonly called "sociopaths" or "Bernie Madoff") and borderline personality disorder (think of Livia Soprano). NPD has been officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association only since 1980, but descriptions of this syndrome go back to ancient times. The name for it, after all, comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, the beautiful boy who was unable to love until he saw his own reflection in the water and died pining away at his image.

Elsa Ronningstam, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who specializes in NPD, points out the myth is not really about self-love but the inability to love. Eleanor Payson, a therapist in Michigan and the author of The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists, says of people with NPD, "They have a primitive, undeveloped sense of self." To compensate, they create a grandiose image to distract from an inner state that Payson says is one of "almost malignant anxiety and emptiness."

...Shame, that painful sense one has acted in an unacceptable way, is another necessary emotion that is also largely missing from the person with NPD. Since shame feels so terrible, it sounds liberating not to feel it. But psychologist Schore points out a feeling of shame signals that we need to reassess our behavior. "Shame is a moral emotion," he says. "It's without feeling shame that the most horrendous acts occur."

-- Emily Yoffe, in an article about one of the main topics of this blog - the life-altering hypocrisies (and their extremely ugly results) that are part-and-parcel of narcissistic personality disorder - on Slate.