Jeff Russell

I'm so glad to see y'all getting so into the topic!

sdi, if I may, I think some of your confusion might be coming from me not stating the main idea clearly enough, and then reinforced by the examples I chose.

TLP's definition of "narcissism" is not being "selfish", "egotistical", or "grandiose", though those commonly come along with it, and most of my examples reinforced that. Instead, TLP's definition is that narcissism is having a felt sense of "identity" that is some "thing" that you are or have, rather than the emergent outcome of the actions you do. Sometimes (often?), these things line up, and you might say that one way of measuring how pathological things have gotten is by the disconnect between these two things.

Let's go a little more concrete: Alice thinks of herself/sees herself as a "nice person". It's important to her sense of identity, "who she is", that she can apply that label to herself. To whatever degree Alice thinks she has some quality, some essence of "nice personness" that is insulated from rather than determined by her actions, that's narcissism. Happily, Alice actually does things she thinks other people will like, takes care of the worse off, gives people compliments, and so forth - in other words, she actually does nice things. So, she likely has a very small amount of narcissism that is pretty healthy.

Next, let's take a look at Bob. Bob also thinks of himself/sees himself as a "nice person," and it is likewise important to his sense of identity that that is what he is. Bob also is pretty good about helping other folks, saying kind things, and so forth, but every once in a while, something gets under his skin and he explodes in a tirade about how ungrateful and awful the person who set him off is, and as often as not, he makes the target of this outburst cry. Bob always feels bad about this and apologizes, does what he can to make it up, and tells himself "that's not really who I am, I'm really a nice person." That last part - protecting the identity of being "a nice person", without actually doing the work to stop the behaviors inconsistent with that identity, that's the narcissism talking, and it's started to get less healthy.

Lastly, we come to Charlie, who, like Alice and Bob, sees himself as "a nice person" and finds it important to define himself that way. Charlie, though, only sometimes helps people out, rarely says anything kind, and often makes jokes about things other folks are sensitie about. When someone confronts him about it, he says "okay, well, yeah, I don't help out that much, I say mean things more often than kind things, but I'm really a nice person deep down." That's getting to a much unhealthier level of narcissism, because the identity is now almost entirely divorced from the deeds.

The crucial point I wanted to highlight here is that narcissism does not obviously equate with selfishness as it's usually understood, but rather with a desire to protect one or more parts of the self's identity in the face of contradictory evidence. It is just at its ugliest and most likely to hurt other folks when that protected identity is either a) something harmful, like thinking you're better than other people, or b) the gap between identity label and actions is huge.

All that being said, it is quite possible that the author's (and my own!) experience and inner state are, in fact, rather different from yours - I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page about definitions before discussing further.