Narcissus Redivivus

David is an able college administrator, 40, twice divorced, who has been in psychoanalysis for six months. In sessions with his analyst, he confesses to grandiose feelings of omnipotence, along with a nagging sense of worthlessness. In his relationships with women, he idealizes his lovers, then loses interest. He is consumed by envy, but whatever he works for--a big house, a boat--seems devalued as soon as he owns it.

He feels no emotions except anger and resentment. When his analyst announced he was going on vacation, David did not mind the prospect of doing without treatment for a while, but complained bitterly that he was not told gently enough. The analyst's diagnosis: a severe narcissistic disturbance.

David is hardly alone. Narcissism has become a leading topic of research in psychoanalytic circles, and one of the most common diagnoses. "You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias and familiar neuroses," says Clinical Psychologist Sheldon Bach. "Now you see mostly narcissists." Adds Psychoanalyst Herbert Hendin, author of The Age of Sensation: "Probably two-thirds to three-quarters of psychoanalytic patients have narcissistic problems."

Total narcissism is generally taken to mean an inability to distinguish the self from the outside world, as an infant makes no distinction between himself, his mother and a bottle of milk. Reeling from some past wound to selfesteem, the narcissist exploits and manipulates others in a quest to be admired. Says Psychoanalyst Donald Kaplan: "Other people exist like a candy machine. If there's no candy left, the narcissist starts kicking the machine."

Whose Lips? Though incapable of love, the extreme narcissist is likely to project his own idealized version of himself onto another person, then worship it for a while. A 19th century example: Herman Melville's attempt at "narcissistic merger" with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville wrote Hawthorne: "By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours and not mine."

One difficulty in diagnosing pathological narcissism is that the whole culture has turned in a narcissistic direction. Social Critic Tom Wolfe calls the '70s the "Me decade." Author Peter Marin describes the swing away from social concerns toward development of the self as "the new narcissism." Marin cites therapists as part of the problem: "The trend in therapy is toward the deification of the isolated self."

Marin, writing in Harper's, blames the so-called humanistic psychologies and disciplines, including gestalt, est, Arica and the "self-realization" theories of Abraham Maslow. Marin got some support last week at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Charles Hampden-Turner, president-elect of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, agreed that the humanistic movement "is top-heavy on the side of self-concern. I think that is self-defeating. [You seek] to become one with the universe, but instead, you isolate yourself." Transactional Analyst Barton Knapp of Philadelphia's Laurel Institute added that in therapy more people are making self-concern "the Goal" in life. "What's happened is that people move from a position of a compulsive taking care of another person to an equally compulsive taking-care-of-myself. In some respects, it is as if the milk of human kindness were curdled."

Behaviorist Dorothy Tennov of Connecticut's University of Bridgeport says narcissism is becoming a common diagnosis because "therapists seldom see virgins--people who haven't been to a therapist before. The people who go are a relatively small group who become therapy junkies." Others insist that today's narcissism is far broader, a cultural phenomenon growing out of two seemingly competing features of the 1960s and 1970s, rising personal affluence and deepening individual power lessness. The late Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno took what is probably the darkest view. Capitalism, he maintained, causes such alienation that "narcissistic merger" of the disaffected with charismatic fascist leaders is becoming more likely. Other critics argue that Americans are turning inward because of a sense that individuals cannot have important social or political impact. Says former Yippee Leader Jerry Rubin, now an experimenter in various self-improvement therapies: "Changes cannot be made on the political level alone. We must examine our own process."

New Greed. This kind of self-absorption has stirred research into narcissism. The emphasis on it in psychoanalysis, says Donald Kaplan, "is partly an intellectual fad, partly a response to the kind of patients we started to get in the mid-'60s--people in constant pursuit of new experiences to make their sense of self more palpable and acquit themselves of being less than their neighbors." Psychoanalyst Hendin agrees: "When I grew up, there was a greed for material things; now it's a very egocentric greed for experience." Today, says Hendin, "the culture has made caring seem like losing."

This has added to the problem of deciding who, in an age of less work and more play, is a disturbed narcissist and who is normal. Otto Kernberg of New York, a leading psychoanalytic researcher on narcissism, admits that even many certified psychoanalysts have narcissistic disturbances. But not to worry, Kernberg says; they usually stop practicing because narcissists hate to hear about other people's problems.

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