What Kind of Narcissist Are You?

Abstract

We are all narcissists, and necessarily so, since healthy narcissism is one of the main routes available to us for nourishing and protecting ourselves. Like all personality traits, narcissism is dimensional. For our own good, and for that of those whose lives we touch, it is useful to know what kind of narcissist we are, and to what effect. When my own narcissism was tweaked by an event that left most people relatively nonplussed, I examined the implications of this psychic insult. I looked to the contents of my narcissistic mirror, asking who and what had contributed to that template. After this analysis, I was able to see more clearly and concretely how helpful the concept of narcissism can be when trying to understand both normal and pathological behavior.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am grateful to Barbara Young, M.D., for her comments on the manuscript that led to clarifying revisions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

René J. Muller

René J. Muller has interviewed over 3000 psychiatric patients in the emergency room at Union Memorial Hospital and Good Samaritan Hospital, both in Baltimore, and written two books based on this experience: Psych ER: Psychiatric Patients Come to the Emergency Room (2003) and Doing Psychiatry Wrong: A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession (2008). He has been a regular contributor to Psychiatric Times and was a peer reviewer for the annual U.S. Psychiatric and Mental Health Congress. Currently, he is working on a new approach to classifying and diagnosing mental illness based on the psychobiology of Adolf Meyer, who was Chief of Psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1910 to 1941.