How self-love got out of control

Social media, reality TV, politics … has narcissism become the new normal?Once upon a time, Love Island contestant Adam Collard would simply have been called a player. His knack for pitting young women against each other, which provided much of the drama on this year’s series of the dating reality show, might well have been controversial; he might conceivably have been accused of vanity, for flashing 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-adoration prompted by viewing oneself as an object of sexual desire, the term has filtered right down from psychology textbooks into casual everyday conversation. Like “gaslighting” – which evolved from a reference to a Hitchcock film, to a form of emotional abuse identified by domestic violence specialists, to a word flung around with pretty wild abandon – its meaning has stretched sometimes to breaking point along the way. But it clearly fills a contemporary need. Continue reading…
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