Definition
having an excessive love or admiration for oneself, often to the point of being self-centered or self-absorbed.
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Excerpts from News Articles
1
The exhibition takes it all with leaden literalism as a radical, revolutionary indictment of Victorian capitalism. In reality it’s a collision between Rossetti’s erotic narcissism and his attempt to create a conscientious painting. Surely, the reason he never completed Found is because he knew it was awful.
2
Joaquin Phoenix is on really uninteresting form, playing to his weaknesses as an actor as he gives a narcissistic performance of pain, sporting a permanently zonked expression of anxiety and torpid self-pity at the misery that surrounds him. He plays Beau, a middle-aged man now living in squalor and stricken with depression, regularly seeing a therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) for anxiety and taking meds.
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Caroline, who had just enrolled at university in Greece, was barely 20 at the time of her death. During a six-week trial before a mixed jury court in Athens, Anagnostopoulos, who gave testimony for a marathon 10 hours, was repeatedly described as narcissistic and controlling.
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In this way, Renfield efficiently sucks only the best and bloodiest lore from decades of Hollywood monster movies. A black-and-white preamble, in the stye of Bela Lugosi’s 1930s heyday, nicely sets up the master-servant relationship, while the whole “lifeforce-draining monster” metaphor is comically reinvented for Renfield’s therapy support group for victims of narcissistic personalities. (So very What We Do in the Shadows.)
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Sick of Myself follows Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a young barista living with her self-obsessed sculptor boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther). Convinced that “ narcissists are the ones who make it”, she sets out to yank back the spotlight from Thomas by taking inordinate quantities of an unlicensed drug that triggers a mysterious skin disease. Having honed his visual effects, Borgli recalls the film’s premiere: “We got into Cannes and I thought, ‘Yeah, we’re probably the outlier in body fluids at this festival.
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Signe has no discernible talent on which to hang her narcissism but, browsing the internet one afternoon, she has a bizarre idea: a certain drug has been taken off the market for causing horrific skin disfigurements. Signe gets her dealer to procure a black-market batch which she duly consumes in great quantities, creating shocking welts and scars on her face, and for a while this gives her a kind of grotesque online fame.
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Then there is the matter of mobile phone selfies, and the perennial temptation to avail myself of all wrinkle-minimising options whenever the image is destined for social media dissemination. While the use of such editing features can easily be ridiculed as an exercise in narcissistic self-delusion and false advertising, it can also be a manner of compensating for an overriding sense of shame and the sense that one is somehow failing at life by getting old.
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Hamm isn't the only previous Trump ally turning to help Haley. Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who said last year that the former president was a "deeply wounded narcissist ," donated {$}5,000 to the Haley joint fundraising committee. Leonard Stern, the CEO of real estate firm Hartz Mountain Industries, contributed the same amount as Hamm to Team Stand for America in March.
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For many writers, talking about Ernest Hemingway is like talking about an embarrassing ancestor. Hemingway comes burdened with baggage, lots of it; pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms, an obsession with a pure and “clean” prose, a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism . And then there are all the dead animals. There they are, heaping up behind the great man’s hulking physique: Key West marlin, and bulls, and elephants, and antelope, and lions.
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S. House member who represents parts of Silicon Valley, has learned about trying to organize relations between the Democratic Party and tech billionaires is that it is often easier to leverage the narcissism of founders than to disabuse them of it. “You have to understand the mind-set of people who are entrepreneurs,” he told me recently, over lunch on the Hill.
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Just think of Elmo in the children’s TV show Sesame Street, or the intensely irritating Jimmy in the sitcom Seinfeld – hardly models of sophisticated thinking. Alternatively, it can be taken to be the sign of a narcissistic personality – the very opposite of personal wisdom. After all, Coleridge believed that it was a ruse to cover up one’s own egotism: just think of the US president’s critics who point out that Donald Trump often refers to himself in the third person.
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Coverage of his candidacy will no doubt devolve into snide predictions of his unelectability. Sure, his “lane” might be a narrow bike lane in a party trafficking in crazy. However, much as dissents on the current Supreme Court stand as a rebuke to the right-wing majority, the Hutchinson-Cheney message serves to prick the conscience of Republicans who still have one — offering a reminder that they are not doomed to follow a narcissistic demagogue over the cliff.
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Reviewers of successive volumes of John Richardson’s “A Life of Picasso” found themselves unable to ignore the issue. The writer Siri Hustvedt, reviewing the fourth and final volume, spoke of Picasso’s “malignant narcissism ,” adding that, despite his brilliance, “the emotional repertoire of the work, especially as he aged, is far narrower than often perceived.”
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In one study, Schumann and others wrote that people who are less narcissistic and who have more empathy are more likely to apologize. Those who apologize more often are seen by others as friendly and moral, as compared with those who don’t.
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Several of Suzuki’s women suffer from depression; some are in mental hospitals. Others are shallow narcissists , as is the protagonist of “My Guy,” one of the strongest stories. It follows roughly the same plot beats as the warmhearted ’80s movies “Starman” and “Splash”: A human whose life is unfulfilling meets a being of the opposite sex who seems human but isn’t, and the nonhuman teaches the human how to love.
16
Talking down expertise was, of course, crucial to Brexit. But it’s not just that. There is, you would think, a corrosive effect on having to watch, for long years, a politics which is increasingly populated by people who appear to be at best highly ambitious but otherwise mediocre narcissists , and at worse actual demonstrable idiots.
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It’s not just that he’s deranged, dishonest, and delusional to the point of psychological diagnosis. It’s not that he’s obsessive and narcissistic , though his post-indictment speech was an extreme manifestation of that customary state of the Trump mind. It’s not even that he speaks of himself in the third person, something known as illeism, which also suggests a detached frame of consciousness.
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This appears to have been exposed in spectacular fashion through one individual’s narcissism , experts say.
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At best, a woman who is not also a mother is a strange bird, faulty goods,” writes author Ruby Warrington in her new book Women Without Kids. “If she can’t have kids she is often portrayed as sad and damaged; if she simply won’t, she is either deluded, destined to regret it, or written off as cold-hearted, narcissistic and career-obsessed. What a selfish c***.”
20
No matter how many times some con artist dating “expert” tries to tell you that women are cookie cutter narcissists who can be hacked with the right input of commands, it’s worth remembering that some clichés stick around for a reason: a charming personality and a half-decent sense of humour have about as much relationship capital as good looks and an over-inflated bank account.
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While we can all have a nice laugh at Elon’s profoundly public narcissism , the silencing of an entire community at a moment in history when forces around the world seek to roll back recent gains in civil rights for LGBTIQ+ individuals is not funny. Where it becomes harder to share one’s own story, that story can be framed as marginal, unimportant - even dangerous. It’s a profound ‘othering’ that can, thanks to an algorithm, be greatly amplified.
22
Does Donald Trump have a narcissistic personality? Was Joan of Arc schizophrenic? What was the cause of Richard III’s hunchback? And even, does Winnie the Pooh have obsessive compulsive disorder?
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Early in the final season, as Barry fumes behind bars and the show's other characters react to his unmasking and incarceration, the show retains its cheeky balance of absurd humor, jarring violence and bold drama. And there are some sterling performances here – Goldberg's Sally veers from shock to hyperventilation to disappointment as the meaning of Barry's arrest sinks in, while Winkler offers a deft depiction of Gene's towering narcissism , fed by the plaudits he gets for helping catch his former student.
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The story is told via excerpts from her diaries (read by Gwendoline Christie), archive footage, clips from the best-known Hollywood screen adaptations, and a visit to extended family still living in Texas where Highsmith was born, even if they seemed to know little. Mostly, it’s Vitija telling them things while they exclaim: ‘Oh, shut up!’ The main talking heads are Highsmith’s lovers, like the writer Marijane Meaker, who is particularly good on Highsmith’s mother, Mary, a sinister narcissist and ‘bitch’ who was appalled at having a child and told her daughter she’d tried to abort her by drinking turpentine when pregnant. She refused to accept that Highsmith was a lesbian and even once found her a boyfriend.
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It’s a bad time for soporific narcissists in office. Just weeks after the self-indulgent grandstanding of Nicola Sturgeon’s farewell press conference, Jacinda Ardern has today followed suit. The New Zealand premier treated her long-suffering public to one last display of egotistical over-excitement. Swathed, bizarrely, in a traditional Maori cloak and fighting back tears, the world leader whose pronouns are me/me/me gave her final speech as Prime Minister in parliament. She told legislators in Wellington’s House of Representatives that:
26
He asked Wilson if she liked to make McFarlane jealous. He asked about her drinking and what she wore to bed. He asked if she had narcissistic personality disorder – not based on medical evidence, just his own analysis. Then he asked if she’d heard of cluster B personality disorders – the judge instructed Wilson not to answer.
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We are experiencing now the greatest uncertainty humanity has ever known.” Nine years ago, this statement by Yuval Harari provoked explosive laughter from my teenage daughter. She whispered to me, “what about the blitz? The Black Death? Come on …” I was torn between embarrassment, as heads scowled at a young woman who clearly didn’t know her place, and pride in her critical thinking. That instinctive rejection of Harari’s generational narcissism was valid then and more than justified today: 2014 was a cakewalk compared to 2022.
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“Pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms … a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism . And then there are all the dead animals.” David Barnes considers the baggage of Ernest Hemingway, 100 years after his first published work. | Lit Hub Criticism
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Sometimes manic, sometimes depressive, poetry might indulge in bouts of narcissism and embellishment, but most of all, it must be earnest, singular and unpredictable.
30
Adapted from an online discussion. Dear Carolyn: My sibling is a narcissist , and because of that, I was raised to never ask for or expect much of anything. I have finally set boundaries with my sibling, and now I have been essentially excluded from an upcoming holiday with my parents and siblings. I was invited and told in the same breath that they were sure I couldn’t come, and given only hazy details about where and when.
31
Others are less convinced. Among the critiques Twenge has fielded is that she distorted common idioms just to make a point, citing, for instance, the increased usage of the phrase “I love me” as proof of the rise of narcissism among millennials. As the critic Annalisa Quinn pointed out in her review of “iGen,” how often have you actually heard someone say “I love me”? It turned out, Quinn wrote, that there had been no rising incidence of the more natural phrase: “I love myself.”
32
“Where whining, taking offence and narcissistic victimhood have become the defining characteristics of our times – as the uncomplaining and silent majority look on in disbelief…”
33
Where the slightest upset or annoyance is indulged with endless reports and inquiries. Where whining, taking offence and narcissistic victimhood have become the defining characteristics of our times – as the uncomplaining and silent majority look on in disbelief…’ Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid Bedfordshire: ‘To add context to what I’ve already said today – the least desirable qualities in any politician are disloyalty, weakness, self preservation and a lack of principle.’
34
“Kepnes gleefully portrays the most back-stabbing seminar yet, dropping literary names with abandon as she twists the plot. Joe Goldberg might be a narcissistic , manipulative, murderous, utterly unreliable narrator, but he’s damn entertaining.”
35
‘My parents were liars,’ the narrator Ruthie says at the beginning of Sarah Manguso’s unsettling debut novel. Looking back on her abusive childhood in a New England town near Boston in the 1980s, she recounts how her father wore a fake Rolex that didn’t work, and her narcissistic mother was obsessed with social climbing, pinning the wedding announcements of local Mayflower descendants on the fridge as if she knew them.