What matters about Narcissistic Personality Disorder–which I will note lies between neurosis and psychosis in the psychiatric hierarchy of mental illness–is that at root it represents an inability to feel empathy. Narcissists like Bill Clinton might say they feel your pain, but they don’t. Intelligent narcissists can learn to mimic empathy, but they don’t feel it.
From my perspective, the only important difference between narcissists and sociopaths is that the former still feel guilt and shame. They still have consciences, even if their ability to act morally is hugely impaired by their emotional illness.
On some level, they know they lack something, and they want it. But they lack the capability. It is like wanting to run, but having no legs.
The way they get the feeling they want, the way they indirectly assuage their conscience, which is telling them they are awful people, is by embracing morality in the abstract. You embrace compassion. You embrace love. You love the Earth, you love animals, you hate racism, you oppose inequality. These are all large items, which can be pursued in the abstract, without having to actually connect empathetically with anyone or any thing.
I would argue that what the world needs most is empathy, not compassion. Compassion almost necessarily implies a power difference: one person feels compassion for another. In empathy, you are simply speaking to people where they live and they are speaking back, and you are hearing one another clearly. Empathy is a means of genuinely reconciling difference. It is the part that says we are all human after all.
To change gears slightly, but only slightly, I read this defense of “narcissism” today: http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/vivian-gornick-defense-narcissism-elizabeth-lunbeck-christopher-lasch-feminism
The reviewer wants to argue that the term narcissism was applied to all those who wanted to be different, to break with the past.
It is not narcissism to not want to be a slave. It is not narcissism to pursue your own way, even sometimes at the expense of others. As one example, the Buddha abandoned his wife and child to pursue enlightenment. A mentally healthy person will do math. They will balance one action versus another. They will weigh the harm done if they do nothing, and the harm done if they do something. They will balance their own wants and needs with those of others, and sometimes choose their own as paramount. This is not narcissism.
And she is not wrong in that in traditional culture individualism and individuation were frowned on and often punished.
What I think we have seen over the past century or so is an unveiling, an unveiling of the selfishness and heartlessness which has always nested in many of our most cherished institutions. I think parents should interact empathetically with their children–to see them as individuals, to nurture their self expression, within limits–and not simply treat them as slaves bound by tradition to do what they are told and to be seen and not heard.
We need to be clear, though, that even revealed in the light, narcissism–the lack of empathy–remains an illness, a pathology.
The author, herself, is a feminist, and presumably at least a kissing cousin with Marxism. This is the thing: all Leftists have done is substitute old tribes for a new one. For a rooted conformity they have substituted a rootless conformity. For the demonization of one set of Others they have merely substituted a new set of Others. They have taken what was worst in the Old World, and amplified it. They do not truly pursue individuation, but rather attacks on traditional culture, launched and led by Pod People.
What they have not done is learn to empathize. I could probably say the defining difference between an actual Liberal and a Leftist is the ability to see and treat genuine ideological others as equals.
This author demonizes Christopher Lasch for having traditional views on the family. Guess what? Lots of women have those views too. Do their opinions count with her? No, I’m quite sure they don’t. That is the whole point of having a term like False Consciousness: it conceals the bullying which define the leftist world view and action plan.
We do need to grow up as a culture, but this will never happen as long as large segments of our political order are regressing in the name of progress. Narcissism really is nothing more than a variety of infantilism somehow brought, pathologically, into the adult present.