“He’s a Full-Blown Narcissist:” Tracing an Emerging Cultural Narrative in Action
Abstract
Abstract The terms “narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” have skyrocketed in popularity over the past several years. What does narcissism discourse accomplish for people who use it? In this paper, we trace the rise of “narcissism” through interviews with victim/survivors of psychological abuse. We find that using the language of narcissism allows people to: 1) reclaim their rationality, or make the case that they are not “the crazy one”; 2) cast the person who harmed them as ontologically “bad”; and 3) justify their decision to leave the relationship. Narcissism discourse therefore helps people organize action. We argue that even as “narcissism” promotes essentializing explanations about abusers and shifts responsibility for intimate abuse onto the victim – who must research narcissism and learn how to avoid narcissists – it also offers a way to make meaning about interpersonal imbalances of power, giving people resources to analyze the politics of intimacy in their lives.
Metadata is indexed. Open-access discovery has not completed for this record yet.
No local PDF is available.
GROBID Extracted text; discontinued.
This text is generated from TEI extraction for accessibility, search, and TTS. Formulas, tables, figures, page layout, and references may not perfectly match the original PDF.
No accessible text representation is available. The text extraction service has been discontinued for the time being. If you require this service, for accessibility or any other reason, please submit an issue/request on this page.
Metadata
Issues
No public issues have been filed for this DOI.
Submit an issue
Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-000-6150030 |