Narcissistic Personality An anonymously-written famous quote goes, “In order to love others, we must first love ourselves.” For some people, loving themselves may have been taken to another level. There are individuals who can be described as “full of themselves” or have excessively loved themselves and may seem to have forgotten the “love others” part of the quote. These people are what others may tag as narcissists. But, there is more to narcissism than merely being full of one’s self.

Havelock Ellis (1898, as cited in Campbell & Foster, 2007) coined the term “narcissus-like” after the Greek myth of Narcissus, who rejected the efforts shown by a nymph named Echo and had eventually led him to fall in love with himself. He came up with the …show more content…
But, based on the claim of psychoanalytic theorists, we may infer that it may start to emerge during childhood because it results from rejecting or overindulgent reactions in childhood (Freud, 1914; Kohut, 1977 and Kernberg 1975). It tends to decline as individuals get older (Foster, Twenge & Campbell, 2003). With regards to who is more narcissistic between male and female, studies have found that there are more narcissistic men than women (Philipson, 1985; Foster, Twenge & Campbell, 2003). But, contrary to this, a study was done with celebrities and was found that narcissism is higher in females than in males (Young & Pinsky, 2006). Narcissism is widely emerging as it has been linked to changes in society. Social norms have become lenient and value for individual freedom has increased which resulted in cultural changes such as an increase in the number of single parents and more opportunities for women and racial minorities (Fukuyama, 1999; Myers, 2000; Seligman, 1990 as cited in Twenge & Foster, 2010). In turn, these larger culture-level changes also affect individuals. In a study, it was found that Americans have embraced more individualistic traits over the past few decades (Twenge & Campbell, 2009). Social media and various technologies were claimed to make people become more self-absorbed and narcissistic which may hinder participating in their communities and having rich …show more content…
Campbell & Foster (2007) introduced the extended agency model. They have viewed narcissism as having three basic ingredients: a positive self, a relative lack of interest in warm and caring interpersonal relationships, and reliance upon self-regulatory strategies. The positive self is the perfect and inflated view of the narcissist. Lack of interest in warm relationships is related to the communal traits. Self-regulatory strategies are those used for regulating the self in order to make themselves look and feel positive, special, successful, and important. Their tactics include efforts to be noticed, look good, surpass others, and defend the self against perceived threats. There are three basic assumptions the extended agency model uses. First, narcissistic qualities, related skills and self-regulation strategies operate like a system. Second, the system elicits positive feelings or “narcissistic esteem.” Third, there is no one ultimate goal of narcissism. There are certainly goal directed behaviors, but narcissists do not have one primary goal. The narcissistic system includes (a) the fundamental qualities of narcissistic personality (e.g., approach orientation, agentic concerns), (b) narcissists’ interpersonal skills (e.g., social confidence, charm), (c) narcissists’ intrapsychic self-regulation strategies (e.g., fantasies of power, self-serving bias), and (d) narcissists’ interpersonal strategies (e.g., self-promotion,