"I Feel Like A Loser Right After Winning"

Thinking carefully about narcissism after a slow news day.

The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily health-themed newsletter. Yesterday was a very slow news day. I had to come up with some completely out of the blue content. Today, I'm going to address narcissism. Not the narcissism of disrepute on the Internet. This is not an article about "the narcissist" or “narcissistic abuse.” It's not about other people. It's about me. It's about you. It's about us. All of us have a personality. That personality includes a variety of different dimensions, and I like to break up personality functioning in my mind into four domains. I didn't make this up; it comes from the DSM-5’s alternate dimensional model of personality disorders.

This model conceptualizes personality function across the domains of:

• Identity

• Self-Direction

• Empathy

• Intimacy

It lays out, quite nicely, what impairment looks like across those dimensions. Personality traits are not necessarily good or bad in and of themselves. Let's take a look at healthy narcissism and where it can cross ov…