What is narcissism?

The word comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, a young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool, a story told most famously by the Roman poet Ovid. Sigmund Freud explored the idea in his 1914 essay On Narcissism, and narcissistic personality disorder was added to psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, the DSM, in 1980. Everyone has some narcissistic traits, which exist on a spectrum, but the disorder involves grandiosity, entitlement and a fragile self-esteem that depends on others’ praise. Estimates of how many people have the full disorder range from under 1 percent to about 6 percent, depending on the study. Psychologists also distinguish grandiose narcissists, who seem confident, from vulnerable narcissists, who are more anxious and sensitive to criticism.