This is my point of view: Everyone is a narcissist maximally. It's not a spectrum, just a maximum state that is always on, always self preserving, but personality differs quite a bit. Personality causes others to perceive others as being more or less narcissistic. In other words we started using the word narcissistic to start describing personality types.
Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
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Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#12Well great now I'm also a Narcissist today too :|
Do you have any of the listed behaviors and traits?
http://outofthefog.website/personality-disorders-1/2015/12/6...
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#13TIL I'm a narcissist. Not how I expected this morning to go. I think these kind of categories that come from psychology are useful and also dangerous. Our innate tendency towards heuristics makes it difficult to talk about this stuff, especially with words like "narcissist" that have strongly negative connotations. The brain is a complicated mess. Maybe the most complicated mess in the universe. We try to impose some…
Agreed. This striving towards binary classification is so flawed from any broader perspective. I, too, just learned that I'm a narcissist. I had to squint quite a bit at the diagnostic list there, and sort of wedge my own psychological dispositions creatively into the qualifications list there but then yeah -- snap (and crap!) -- I'm a narcissist. Oh, but if I use just a little more nuanced application of thought, th…
By no means is this a universal truism, but in general if you think you have a Cluster B personality disorder, you probably don’t. If you think you’re the smartest, best person in the world and other people are inferior and should know it... then you might.
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#14Statistically, half of all people with Impostor Syndrome aren't suffering from a syndrome at all. They're actually not very competent.
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#15From my experience with "grandiose" narcissists, they share most of the traits of "vulnerable" narcissists, but they try very hard not to show them. If you want to understand their behavior, you have to realize that beneath their self-confident facade, these are extremely vulnerable people as well.
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#16This just smells like using the same word for two different concept, and then conflating them. Thinking that the world only exists for your own benefit, and thinking that you don't fit in the world, both have an aspect of separating yourself from the world, but it's more harm than help to lump them together. If "narcissism" means having any sense of self identity, then the word means very little as a pathology.
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#17Statistically, half of all people with Impostor Syndrome aren't suffering from a syndrome at all. They're actually not very competent.
> Statistically
You got anything to back up that claim? That sounds like a pretty big conclusion that you're jumping to without evidence.
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#18Non-narcissist here, apparently. I do find the premise somewhat troubling. If you’re supremely confident and never doubt yourself, even in situations where you should, you could be described as a narcissist. And if you’re lacking in self-confidence, and constantly think you’ll be found out, you’re also a narcissist. And there’s probably narcissists who experience a moderate level of self-doubt in between.
It’s more likely narcissism and self doubt are just independent variables.
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#19It's notable that over the last couple decades, we've moved to where we refer to diabetics as people with diabetes, schizophrenics as people exhibiting symptoms of a variety of mental disorders, disabled as people with disabilities, the obese as people coping with obesity - but narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths are still othered, and yet still within the domain of detatched clinical assessment.
These are moral assessments of character, and ones that aren't wrong to make. But it's disingenuous to say that we have a medical definition of what is essentially an evil tendency that we can treat (and presumably, eradicate) as a disease.
The more literary theme among the obvious narcissists and psycho's I've met was they lacked self acceptance, and were pathologically actuated by the approval of others, particularly imagined others. They filtered their experiences to only ones that reflected a deep seated idea of a perfect and adorable self, and they had adapted to ferociously attack anything that threatened this perfect and vulnerable self image.
That's not a disease, it's poor parenting exacerbated by a culture that enables it.
People can learn and change, and they do it every day. The popular pseudo scientific discourse around narcissists and sociopaths is politically dangerous and in many cases, I suspect motivated by a purifying urge that is a much deeper evil.
Re: Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
#20Statistically, half of all people with Impostor Syndrome aren't suffering from a syndrome at all. They're actually not very competent.
> Statistically You got anything to back up that claim? That sounds like a pretty big conclusion that you're jumping to without evidence.
"You got anything to back up that claim? That sounds like a pretty big conclusion that you're jumping to without evidence."
It's not a "claim". It's literally the null hypothesis: two traits are assumed to be uncorrelated unless proven otherwise.
If you want to claim that a sense of "impostor syndrome" is actually indicative of increased skill, it's your job to prove it.