How self�love got out of control

Gaby Hinsliff

Social media, reality TV, politics … has narcissism become the new normal?

ySun 7 Oct 2018 00.05 BST

O nce upon a time, Love Island contestant Adam Collard would simply have beencalled a player. His knack for pitting young women against each other, whichprovided much of the drama on this year’s series of the dating reality show, mightwell have been controversial; he might conceivably have been accused of vanity, forflashing his six-pack. But what was new and striking this summer was the furious

debate among viewers over whether he could fairly be called a narcissist.

A century after Freud wrote his essay On Narcissism, identifying a form of self-adorationprompted by viewing oneself as an object of sexual desire, the term has filtered right downfrom psychology textbooks into casual everyday conversation. Like “gaslighting” – whichevolved from a reference to a George Cukor film, to a form of emotional abuse identified bydomestic violence specialists, to a word flung around with pretty wild abandon – its meaninghas stretched sometimes to breaking point along the way. But it clearly fills a contemporaryneed.

“It’s a buzzword,” says Marianne Vicelich, author of the self-help book Destruction: FreeYourself From the Narcissist. “Every time you have dinner with a few girlfriends someone usesthe term – their boss is a narcissist, or their husband, or their ex, or their mother.”

The Facebook group Knowing a Narcissist has built up a staggering 400,000 likes, withfollowers endlessly posting about the strains of dealing with a self-obsessed parent or partner.In her autobiography My Thoughts Exactly, Lily Allen describes her comedian father Keith as“cold and narcissistic”, too wrapped up in his own hedonistic life to spend much time withher.

Vicelich, a prolific author of self-help books, thinks that’s where young women are picking upthe term. “Women are becoming a lot more educated when it comes to relationships,” shesays. But it might also have something to do with psychologists openly speculating thatDonald Trump might have narcissistic personality disorder, a clinical condition involvinggrandiose behaviour, fantasies about one’s own power and attractiveness, craving foradmiration, and unwillingness to empathise with others (other presumed sufferers includeSaddam Hussein).

The term is also increasingly being used against young women, accused of overindulging in allkinds of navel-gazing, from the cult of “self-care” (taking time out to cosset yourself) tocompulsive posting of selfies. According to the American psychologists Jean Twenge and KeithCampbell in their book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, social mediaalong with other factors, from indulgent parenting to a highly individualistic culture, riskscreating a generation excessively wrapped up in itself. But is this really a new phenomenon, ormerely the latest expression of a phenomenon as old as human nature?

The original myth of Narcissus, the beautiful young man whose punishment from the godswas to fall so in love with his own reflection in a pool of water that he couldn’t bear to leave it,is on one level a warning against vanity; but it’s also a cautionary tale about isolation, becausethe cruelty of Narcissus’s punishment is that it cuts him off completely from other livinghuman beings.

In small doses, narcissism can be a good thing; or at least, better than a crippling lack of self-esteem. Research at Queen’s University Belfast suggests narcissists score better in exams thanother measures of their intelligence would suggest they should. In careers requiring confidentjudgement under pressure, such as finance or politics, a strong sense of self-belief could wellbe advantageous. But it becomes counter-productive when not tempered by respect for theviews of others, and it’s this inability to feel compassion, empathy, or even much curiosityabout others that distinguishes the truly narcissistic from the merely vain.

As Vicelich writes in her book, for narcissists “everything is about them and belongs to them”.They don’t recognise personal boundaries, hog conversations, crave constant validation andtake criticism extremely badly. “They basically behave like four-year-olds: it’s all about them,”she says. “They want your attention, they need things right now – it’s all about instantgratification – and they really have an undeveloped sense of self.” They can be charming,flirtatious company. But they typically see others largely as extensions of themselves and canbe controlling, cruel or critical of anyone they feel reflects badly on them. Loved ones willingto feed their egos are known in self-help lexicon as their “supply” – attention is to narcissists asdrugs are to addicts – and that supply needs constant replenishing. What’s changed in a decadeis the ease of getting a fix.

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter all supply attention-seekers with oodles of whatthey crave, in the satisfyingly measurable form of likes and shares. With its heavily filteredimages of perfect abs and perfect lives, Insta is most often accused of harbouring narcissists,but it’s striking how many Twitter trolls would also fit the definition of a craving to be noticedplus indifference to pain caused. (Katie Hopkins once admitted that she’d considered whethershe might be a psychopath, narcissist or autistic but decided none of the labels fitted.)

In their book, Twenge and Campbell use questionnaires filled out by generations of collegestudents to show a marked rise in scores on the so-called Narcissistic Personality Index sincethe 1980s, especially in women. It’s a contested area, with some questioning whethernarcissism is even a recognisable condition given how loosely it’s defined, and middle-agedcomplaints about the young being selfish are certainly not new (back in the 1970s it was babyboomers who were being dismissed as “Generation Me”).

Mirror, mirror: we now seem to need to document our everywaking minute. Photograph: Stefano Oppo/Getty Images

But if each of us lies somewhere on a spectrum between humble self-effacement andmonstrous egotism, then we can be shifted slightly towards one end or another by changes inwhat’s considered socially acceptable behaviour, says Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, seniorlecturer in psychology at Goldsmiths. “It’s possible that we have a norm, a permissive normtowards narcissism now, and that’s why this trait is more visible. That means societies aremore narcissistic because people feel freer [to express it].” Social media or reality TV might, inother words, have simply provided new outlets for something that was always there,legitimising the idea that we’re all special enough to document our every waking minute orthat the world urgently needs our take on the final episode of The Bodyguard. Yet for asupposedly self-absorbed generation, it’s striking how ambivalent millennials are becomingabout social media.

Jamie Jewitt is a former model who was one half of Love Island’s runner-up couple last year,with his girlfriend Camilla Thurlow. He has more than 831,000 followers on Instagram and128,000 on Twitter, and since leaving the show has filmed documentaries for the BBC andrecorded a TED talk. He has all the attention any self-respecting millennial could desire, yet isabout to start giving talks in schools about the perils of overdoing social media. If tomorrow hewas told that he could no longer use it, how would he feel? “For me, I know it would be a hugerelief,” he admits. “The annoying thing is that it’s necessary at the moment. It’s a huge avenueto get publicity for the work that we are doing and it’s always going to be a very handy tool forthat, but it’s a bittersweet thing. It’s a necessary evil, put it like that.”

Jewitt dates his discomfort back to his modelling days, when he was expected to upload asteady flow of unrealistically flattering pictures on Instagram as a showcase for prospectiveclients. “All of my model friends were doing what they were told, posting these images,becoming a bit self-absorbed and going down the rabbit hole. I refused to do it and I ended uplosing out on work, but I had such conflicting feelings about it,” he says.

After Love Island, he was determined not to go back into that world; instead he and Camillavolunteered in a Greek refugee camp (she had been working for a mine-clearing charity beforegoing on the show), and made a documentary about it. “I didn’t want to come out and end upliving a life that was just a version of what I’d done before with modelling. It became such afundamental thing, to have Insta and self-promote, and it was a dishonest way of living – youhad to take pictures of yourself looking your best, just so the clients would see you as a viabletool to use to sell their products. It’s not real and it’s not healthy.”

Although 28-year-old Jewitt might not be your average reality TV contestant, his reservationsabout social media are fairly typical of his generation. A third of Generation Z have deletedaccounts in the past year, with a fifth saying they wanted more privacy and couldn’t cope with

Big baby: does Donald Trump have a narcissistic personalitydisorder? Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

the pressure to get attention, according to research by Origin, a Boston-based market researchcompany. Private messaging circles like Snapchat and WhatsApp are overtaking public-facingplatforms like Facebook and Twitter among the young. But if the generation raised on socialmedia is increasingly wary of its impact on them, the generation who discovered it later in lifeis a different matter.

“Make America great again.” “Take back control.” “The people have had enough of experts.”What’s striking about the slogans adopted by Trump in the US and the Leave campaign inBritain is that they flatter the movement’s supporters as much as its leaders. They imply thatthe people are invariably smarter than anyone disagreeing with them, that they deserve to bein charge, that their natural greatness is being unfairly suppressed.

And whether deliberately or not, it’s a siren call to what’s known as collective narcissism, or anexaggerated love not of oneself but of one’s group. Collective narcissists aren’t personallygrandiose – if anything they may feel individually powerless – but can be cultlike in theirdevotion to a national, religious or ideological identity with which they identify.

“Collective narcissists feel their group is threatened all the time, that others are after it.They’re prone to conspiratorial thinking,” explains Golec de Zavala, who specialises inresearching the phenomenon. “Whenever they feel their group status is threatened, if theyhad it in their power, they would aggress against those who threaten it. Things that otherpeople would not even notice or imagine are insulting, they would be hostile towards.”

On social media, de Zavala says, they tend to come across as “zealous” and persevere witharguments well after others have given up. And while her research shows they’redisproportionately likely to have voted for Trump in the US or Brexit in the UK, “it could bethat on the left there are collective narcissists, too.” The cap is certainly a good fit not just forBrexiteers hellbent on crushing imagined saboteurs, or white men furiously objecting to BlackHistory Month on the grounds that it doesn’t seem to be about them, but also perhaps for theposters of memes comparing Jeremy Corbyn to a persecuted Jesus. More disturbingly, thecollective narcissist’s extreme intolerance for dissent might help explain why politicians in allparties now routinely face death threats over ideological stances taken.

In small doses, collective narcissism can foster a healthy sense of patriotism or pride. But it canturn ugly when supporters are encouraged to believe that their own group’s innate specialnessisn’t being properly recognised and that rival groups are getting what’s rightfully theirs. Whatdifferentiates them from other protest movements, says de Zavala, is that they don’t just wantequality but “special privilege”, or supremacy over everyone else.

“What I think is happening to us now worldwide is that this collective narcissistic constructionof national identity became the norm,” she says. “It’s something that was marginalised andnow is becoming mainstream and if you look at our research on collective narcissism, that’s abad sign.”

The concept originates from the 1930s, when it was used to explain why people who lost theirpersonal sense of self-worth in the depression began investing heavily in group identitiesinstead, and the parallels with the 2008 crash are all too alarming. De Zavala startedresearching collective narcissism in part because she wondered if there was a way of curbing itearly, bearing in mind where it ultimately led in the 1930s. One option, she thinks, might bechannelling collective narcissists’ energies into constructive ways of boosting their group, suchas voluntary work in their communities – essentially a twist on John F Kennedy’s “Ask notwhat your country can do for you” approach. But her research points towards tackling the factthat collective narcissists are generally dissatisfied with their lives. “If you make people

experience self-transcendent emotions – such as gratitude or something that diminishes theimportance of ego – we had experimental studies which showed that, especially amongcollective narcissists, it reduces prejudice.” In other words, the ability to focus on somethingbigger than yourself might have more profound social effects than we realise.

Taming the individual narcissist in your life, or indeed your Oval Office, may be harder giventheir indifference to others’ distress and their inability to take criticism. “If you attack them,that’s wounding their fragile egos, so that’s no good – in a relationship you just have to workaround them,” says Marianne Vicelich. It is hard not to be reminded of how the White Houseinsiders are described in Bob Woodward’s new book Fear: Trump in the White House, creepingaround removing papers from Trump’s desk to stop him signing them rather than confrontinghim directly.

And if you can’t avoid dealing with a narcissistic parent or boss? Stand up for yourself, Vicelichsays, remembering that their bombastic exteriors are often a defence against deep insecurity.“They’re not happy people. Once you realise their egos are so fragile and that what they’resaying is no reflection on you, you can start setting boundaries.”

The original Narcissus, it’s worth remembering, eventually died of sorrow at his lonelypredicament. Perhaps the most underrated act of self-care in the modern world is the ability,just occasionally, to get over yourself.

• This article was amended on 9 October 2018 to correct a reference to the film Gaslight:George Cukor directed it, not Alfred Hitchcock.

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