ONE ON ONESELF

Narcissism is not a disorder, or is it?

IONCE had an editor who told me that I had to stop writing articles in the first person. Immediately. She declared that the trend in magazine writing was moving away from the narcissistic focus on “I”. Henceforth all stories should be written in the third person. This was tricky. At the time of her trend forecast I was working on a comparative analysis of change-room cubicles that I was personally visiting and rating in stores across the nation. (Heady stuff.) I quote from the resulting highly non-personalised but revealing text: “One might discover that one’s buttocks are in fact rather large and flawed when observed in direct neon overhead lighting, in triplicate and with surround sound. One might despair. One might not purchase the bikini one was considering. Not now. Not ever.”

In the editor’s defence she probably could not have predicted how all that blogging stuff flooding the interwebs was going to take off. When she made her pronouncement against the “I”, BryanBoy, Susie Bubble and Tavi Gevinson had barely burst out of their fashionable cocoons in cyberspace. How could she have imagined another family on reality-TV apart from the shambolic Osbournes?

Facebook was still just a friendship aggregator, not the universe’s biggest news and advertising agency. She could not have conceived of how Twitter and Instagram would put a capital “I” into every “one”, never mind how Snapchat, YouTube or Facebook would enable each and every soul with a smartphone and a social media account to be their own reality TV show with an instant feedback loop of likes and comments.

The editor, in retrospect, was bravely trying to stem the tide. To no avail. I give her this though she spawned a huge fear in “one” of manifesting as “A NARCISSIST”. This is the condition

plaguing us now — narcissistic personality disorder. Sufferers have an excessive need for admiration, lack empathy, have a rich fantasy life and a well-developed sense of entitlement. So, practically everybody on social media.

Kristin Dombek just wrote a book analysing the rise of this most contemporary of conditions, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the

Fear of Narcissism. She is a little doubtful that NPD counts as an actual condition and questions what it says of people who are quick to label others as “narcissists”.

Whilst Freud argued that narcissism was brought on by cold, inattentive parents not giving the fledgling narcissist enough affirmation, the current “sociopsychological” explanation attributes the condition to the polar opposite parenting style. Apparently it stems from too much affirmation. Dombek thinks the popularity of the label, “as an insult, or a citizen diagnosis, these days, is partly about a fear of the internet itself . . . where we have to deal with so many people so quickly, without being able to test who they are behind the images and words they put online”.

In other words, too many selfies and you are immediately on the narcissism spectrum. Go ahead, google NPD — the internet is full of questionnaires that will promptly pathologise you if you answer too honestly. Yes, yes, “one” took the narcissism test and “one” placed somewhere north of a reality-TV star and somewhere south of a criminal sociopath. “One” is now attempting the cure. “One” is curbing “one’s” enthusiasm for self-representation and the overuse of the first-person “I”.

Sufferers have an excessive need for admiration, and a rich fantasy life