ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 examines the history of the gendering of “narcissism,” the pathological version of selfishness, from Freudian psychoanalysis to present-day American psychiatry. It shows how women’s problematic relationship with “self” leads to a focus, in the case of female narcissists, on their roles as mothers rather than their status as “selves,” saying much about how women are perceived as relational beings, rather than as individuals. Contemporaneous examples from creative literature (especially the experimental writings of Decadent female writer Rachilde, a contemporary of Freud) are used to problematize psy science discourses about the nature of narcissistic women. The chapter also examines how, for more than a century, cultural commentators have described modern society as becoming increasingly narcissistic. Examining writings by Christopher Lasch in the 1970s and Paul Verhaeghe in the 2000s, it argues that a pervasive misogynistic nostalgia underpins some calls for a return to more traditional community and family values.
