Who’s Afraid of Narcissism?
Goldilocks And The Three Bears
Often The Narcissist is portrayed as some Bad Old Bear startling Goldilocks.
Here is a snippet of a typical article on Medium attempting to describe The Narcissist:
Narcissists are people with a wide array of traits, skills and properties that make them both compelling and poisonous. The real narcissist is one who is unable and unwilling to look past their own untiring self-infatuation, and — often — the most toxic narcissists in our lives are invisible hiding in plain sight. Beware, I was sleeping with my boyfriend, then woke up oneday to discover he was a narcissist!
What is this infantilization of the Medium writer and reader? An invitation to a fairy-tale?
In these modern-day fair tales, wherever there is a Narcissist-Bear you can fall in love with in spite of all the vanity, lack of empathy, and meanness, you will discover an empathetic Paranoiac-Goldilocks whose reality is infused with tentacles of deception, invisible signs of betrayal, and the ability to mind-read using a magic decoder ring that reveals where the Bad Old Bear is hiding.
The author of the snippet above is not alone in writing in this infantile and paranoiac way: Goldilocks and the Three Bears seems to have become a popular children’s genre with adults who have had unfortunate life experiences with someone they label The Narcissist: someone who is deceitful, arrogant, vain, non-empathetic, a rule-breaker, toxic, etc., etc.
Here is a snippet from an article entitled How To Spot A Narcissist from an expert in Psychology Today:
Narcissists can be beguiling and charismatic. In fact, one study showed that their likable veneer was only penetrable after seven meetings. But you don’t want to fall in love with one.
Narcissism is notoriously difficult to explain, but plug in the word Narcissist into the search engine of Google or Medium, and you will find a multitude of armchair psy-coaches defining ‘him’ in no uncertain terms in a Goldilocks and the Three Bears story.
Is it relevant that in most of these fairy-tales the Narcissist is habitually portrayed as male and the Paranoiac female?
Imagining their experiences generalizable and equipped with a few Wiki definitions of narcissism, these park rangers promote a kind of public paranoia in which a narcissist is said to be lurking around every corner. Of course, they are only a step away from providing us with a magic decoder ring.
Below is a list of some titles from articles about The Narcissist on Medium. I have substituted Bad Old Bear for Narcissist in the titles to bring out their Goldilockian and Paranoiac innocence:
I was married to a Bad Old Bear for 12 years — and I had NO idea
How To Dine With A Bad Old Bear
How To Spot A Bad Old Bear
What Are The Love Languages Of A Big Old Bear?
I’m A Professor of Human Behavior, And I Have News About The Bad Old Bear In Your Life
Don’t Be a Bad Old Bear’s Catnip
The Double Life Of A Bad Old Bear
Do You Have A Covert Bad Old Bear In Your Life?:They are just as toxic as overt Bad Old Bear but harder to spot.
How to Tell If Your Friend Is a Bad Old Bear: A guide for evaluating and handling relationships when a Bad Old Bear interferes .
The most dangerous types of Bad Old Bears (and how to avoid them).
etc. etc.
Nothing is more heartfelt than the trials and tribulations such stories recount, but the real question is why overlay them with Narcissism? Why not just call a Bear a Bear? Even if it is a fairy-tale Bear.
Many of the Goldilocks on Medium and elsewhere cite the iffy psychiatric literature describing Narcissistic Personality Disorder as proof that what they are talking about — the Narcissist — somehow exists in reality. Without denying their reality, it should be asked whether such stories are made into a fairy-tale through an incorrect use of the psychiatric terminology.
For if they had read the psychiatric literature closer, they would have discovered that not only is a Narcissistic Personality Disorder one of the most unreliable diagnoses that can be made, but that the Narcissist always implies a symmetric rival: the Paranoiac, whom the psy-coaches prefer to call an ‘Empath’ since it does not have the negative connotations.
In the end, it would be a lot more productive to simply read again Goldilocks And The Three Bears.
The narcissist/paranoiac split is just an effect, different sides of the same coin, whose cause is egoism: forms of individualism that decline quite naturally into The Narcissist and Paranoiac. I have written elsewhere how such egoism has its roots in the cosmonaut.
To get past the fairy-tales, I have shown in a couple of different articles how Narcissism can be distinguished from Egoism and viewed in a more coherent way.
I have also asked whether all the vociferous Goldilockian writings on ‘The Narcissist’ today merit a Golden Bullshit Award?
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Winter 2019
‘Los Angeles
