ABSTRACT
Machiavellianism is a construct born of the social psychology laboratory and social psychology’s psychometrics. This chapter explores the social psychology construct, Machiavellianism, and its relationship to the psychoanalytic concept of the narcissistic personality. Psychoanalytic self-psychology, as are all forms of psychoanalysis, is concerned with “inner life,” the complex internal mental states of human beings and the dynamics determining their harmony and disharmony, leading possibly to internal senses of well-being or disturbance. In their creative and balanced interplay between empirical study and speculation, Christie and Geis began work from the premise that certain general characteristics could safely be attributed to the successful social manipulator. Machiavellians display a social independence, especially under social pressure. The depth-psychological picture can provide a supplementing and unifying perspective from the study of narcissistic disturbances, which can account for the contrast between the inner and outer self-images associated with this Machiavellian profile.
