[FRIAM] narcissism

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Excellent! Thanks. The context always helps.

Re: below -- The research I'm seeing uses measurement tools like the Narcissistic Personality Index for grandiose types, the Pathological Narcissism Inventory, the HyperSensitive Narcissism Scale, etc. and correlates (postively or negatively) with various features expected to be presented by narcissists. So, they're not using diagnosed people at all, as far as I can tell.

That may well be part of the problem. If the 2 types are *only* distinguishable at a subclinical layer, then maybe we're simply talking past each other. But because 1) I don't believe people can be diagnosed at a distance and 2) in order to get trustable data we'd have to [non]diagnose *everyone* (or N% of the population), then requiring a diagnosis for this sort of conversation would be silly. You can't have "big data" without the "big". I'd argue that an actual diagnosis is practically useless and everything useful would be subclinical.

But, as I've said, the alternative model for NPD in the DSM 5 seems (to me) to imply 2 types. So, I can't help but extrapolate and think whatever committee wrote that alternative model would be amenable to the idea of there being 2 clinical diagnosis types. That other youtuber I posted (Todd Grande) says in one video that while working on the DSM 5, there was a faction of people that argued that NPD was incoherent and the diagnosis should be removed entirely ... I haven't checked for evidence of that other than him saying it, though.


On 4/29/20 3:47 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Anyway, to answer your question in the way I think you want it answered would require gathering data on a set of patients already diagnosed with NPD and then gathering objective data via questionnaires or some other instrument (MMPI-like for instance, Meyers-Briggs-like) and seeing if discriminant function analysis or some clustering algorithm indicates that there are two groups which correspond to grandiose and vulnerable.  This is not likely to happen given the methodological constraints of psychoanalysis. Another psychoanalyst named Karen Horney wrote a book or at least a chapter called "the expansive versus the self-effacing solution" which sounds related but look there only you are willing to accept a non-statistical analysis.



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