A specter is haunting America: the specter of narcissism. It shows up in the flood of recent books with titles like “Narcissists Exposed” and “The Narcissist Next Door,” in hand-wringing over Instagram-addicted millennials, in studies showing that American writers are using “I” and “me” more frequently than they used to, in the casual application of the term to everyone from Donald J. Trump and Barack Obama to Edward J. Snowden, Oprah Winfrey and Kanye West.
Kristin Dombek, in “The Selfishness of Others,” also warns of another, more subtle menace: the fear of narcissism.
It’s a fear, she argues, that can distort our relationships with others, freezing us in self-righteous victimhood. But Ms. Dombek isn’t just a Cassandra. She’s also here to help, with nearly 140 pages of sharply argued, knottily intelligent, darkly funny cultural criticism and, if that doesn’t work, the blunter instrument of a nine-point diagnostic test.
Do you worry you are surrounded by fake, empty people who are trying to manipulate you? Do you believe you should associate only with others with “high empathy scores”? Do you require “excessive reassurance” that other people, especially when encountered online, are real?
If so, you may have narciphobia.
Ms. Dombek, who describes herself as “born in the uncanny valley between the millennial generation and Generation X,” is the former advice columnist for the hip Brooklyn-based literary journal n+1, where she gamely responded to semi-ironic reader questions like “Is it cool to try hard now?”
In “The Selfishness of Others,” her first book, she stretches out, showing how a specialized clinical term metastasized into a sweeping description of our entire culture, and a weapon of intergenerational and romantic warfare.
Ms. Dombek doesn’t deny that pathological narcissism is real, and can be dangerous. But expanding the diagnosis from mass killers who “post on Facebook before they walk into schools and movie theaters with guns” to run-of-the-mill “bad boyfriends” and young people in general, she argues, blinds us to how our own craving for esteem and attention works.
“This story about how some people are,” she writes, “under the surface is also a story about the way that we all want.”
Any book, for its writer, “is its own asylum,” Ms. Dombek laments, “but a book about narcissism is like the padded cell inside the asylum.” Here, she bangs her head against psychoanalytic theory, reality television, Greek mythology, online self-help culture and social psychology survey methodology, among other subjects, until the reader sees often-illuminating stars.
One of the book’s most entertaining sections riffs on the dark continent of online self-help that Ms. Dombek calls “the narcisphere,” where victims of relationships with narcissists help one another parse “narc” behaviors like “love bombing,” “mirroring” and “doing a discard,” which sometimes come disguised as perfectly normal actions. (“My narc in-law removed the family pictures from the hallway, and replaced a living room chair with a piano,” one poster says. “I just can’t figure out why she would do this.”)
Ms. Dombek wanders virtual structures like the Web of Narcissism castle, complete with warnings from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” — narcs, like vampires, “cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world” — over the door.
She also checks in on the “manosphere,” as she calls the parallel universe of sites where “seduction strategies meet paleo diets,” and men trade advice on how to outmaneuver the kind of needy, manipulative women who are likely to label them narcissists. But it doesn’t, by her lights, stand a chance.
“If there’s one thing a girl with a bad boyfriend has,” she writes, “it’s the moral upper hand in the religion of mental health.”
Calling out narcissism, she notes, wasn’t always primarily a female sport. For Sigmund Freud, the archetypal narcissist was a woman, particularly a beautiful woman, locked in immature “self-contentment and inaccessibility.” Other psychologists extended his theories, giving rise to the common notion of the narcissist as wearing “a charming mask covering a cold calculator, a self empty of empathy and the capacity to love.”
The term went wide in the 1970s, when best-sellers like Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Generation” and, especially, Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” transformed narcissism from an individual therapeutic problem into a cultural norm. For Lasch, the rising popularity of therapy and self-help — along with radical feminism, confessional writing, permissive parenting and the designated hitter rule — was itself implicated in the problem.
Today, pop psychology has given us a wealth of subtypes, including the Phallic Narcissist, the Corporate Narcissist, the Organizational Narcissist, the Medical Narcissist, and the Spiritual Narcissist. (Do you try to act generously, publicly align yourself with noble causes and “talk a lot about care and empathy”? You may be a Communal Narcissist.)
But amid the epidemic of narcissism talk, Ms. Dombek argues, we remain confused about just what narcissism is. Is it cover for an empty, insecure self? Or is it “exactly what it looks like”: excessive self-esteem, as the psychologist Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell — authors of “The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement” (2007) — have argued?
Ms. Dombek’s own view echoes that of the philosopher René Girard, who argued that our tendency to see narcissism in parents and partners is an effort to reassure ourselves that if those we desire are less than ideally responsive to us it’s because they are sick, not because we are uninteresting.
“Only one person can be the center of another person’s world at any given time, and ideally, this would always be you,” Ms. Dombek writes, before slipping in the shiv: “This is where all the narcissistic romance websites invite you to be: in the center of the world, stuck in time, assessing the moral status of others, until love is gone.”
That may sound awfully judgmental. But Ms. Dombek, despite her efforts to keep the first-person pronoun at bay (“I don’t want you to find me self-absorbed,” she writes early on), is also offering an earnest recovery narrative of sorts.
Before the book ends, her bad-ish boyfriend — or “romantic affiliate,” as he prefers it — has morphed into a good boyfriend, or at least a partner no more self-preoccupied, she realizes, than she is. She breaks free not from him, but from the compulsion to obsess over whether he is a narcissist, clearing space to consider bigger questions, like the relationship between the cigarette butt she unthinkingly — a passing stranger might say narcissistically — flicks onto the sidewalk and impending climate catastrophe.
A stretch? Perhaps. But it’s worth pausing over one slyly double-edged item on Ms. Dombek’s narciphobia checklist. Are you “preoccupied with fantasies that the world is ending because of the selfishness of others”? Maybe we all are. And maybe sometimes the fantasy is real.
The Selfishness of Others
An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism
By Kristin Dombek
150 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $13.00.
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