Volume 3, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Narrative and Narcissism: Conceptual Framework, Cultural Contexts, and Interdisciplinary Interfaces / Guest Editor: Nora Berning

Since Ovid’s version of the Narcissus narrative, numerous readings and re-narrations have emerged across the globe that are related to the ancient myth of the beautiful youth who unwittingly sees himself in a pool of water and eventually dies staring at the insubstantial image. Generating a wide spectrum of reinterpretations of values, ideas, and aesthetic aspects inherent in the ancient narrative, its reception history has continued to elicit some of the most diverse intellectual responses to Greek and Roman mythology, each of them reflecting the cultural context in which they were produced. The present article is devoted to this issue, providing introductory perspectives on the Ovidian narrative and its ramifications by giving particular examples, especially of works taking up central themes of Ovid’s version, such as reflection and deception, illusion and (self-)cognition, passionate love for another and the incurable desire for oneself. Sensitive to the cultural contexts out of which the examples emerge, the paper conceptually frames the topics of narrative and narcissism, and contextualizes them by drawing on insights from several theoretical strands and academic disciplines.

Taking her cue from Freud’s insistence that narcissism is the “universal original condition” of humanity, Linda Hutcheon argues in her book Narcissistic narrative: The metafictional paradox that narcissism is “the original condition of the novel as a genre” (1984: 8). Such “metafictional” or “self-reflexive” literature is regularly dated to the seventeenth century. However, this essay argues that narrative narcissism has been with us since ancient times, not just since the rise of post/modern novelistic discourse. Narratives from various ages and places, across diverse corpora, draw attention to their own textuality, even if they do so to differing degrees and in different ways. To relegate all considerations of narrative narcissism to overt examples of post/modern “metafiction” is a categorical mistake. Making my case with reference to a wide range of ancient narratives, I argue that narrative narcissism can be a useful, nuanced analytic lens through which to read ancient literature, and that ancient examples of narcissism can nuance our understanding of this narratological concept.

For several decades, the concept of narcissism has been used to criticize society and culture(s). This paper discusses the achievements and limits of such approaches. In a first step, it sketches controversies within psychoanalysis around the notion of narcissism itself. It then proposes a categorization of cultural theories that draw on narcissism in general. The main part of the paper deals with three exemplary theories: Christopher Lasch’s The culture of narcissism ; Richard Sennett’s The fall of public man , and the philosophy of Robert Pfaller. A detailed analysis shows that theories which try to establish causal connections between society and the occurrence of personality disorders usually fail to explicate this connection in a satisfactory way. Theories that criticize society because it supposedly fosters narcissistic personalities prove to be unconvincing. Approaches that use the notion of narcissism in a broader, metaphorical sense, however, have the potential to cast a new light on certain developments in culture.

In this paper, I argue for a particular reading of narcissism that challenges the privileging of narrative as a sense-making device, with important consequences for an evaluation of the story paradigm in psychotherapeutic work. I lean on the psychoanalytic mechanisms of Nachträglichkeit and trauma to trouble dominant therapeutic logics that support the primacy of the (narcissistically centered) narrative “I.” Rather than endorse the story of “me, me, me” that popular readings of narcissism invoke, I explore the possibility that, in psychoanalysis, narcissism’s modes destabilize the I, making the narrator constitutionally unreliable, and her accounts of all subject-object distinctions uncertain and constantly shifting.

Under the sign of “the journeying self,” I offer a sketch of a Christian pilgrimage from narcissism to solidarity and doxology. Developmental psychology can help frame questions about growth in self-awareness from childhood (Fivush) to early adulthood (Habermas). Often this kind of growth is expressed in the language of narrative (Ricoeur), but a “minority report” summarizes several different critiques of life narratives – in the work of Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, Hayden White, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others. Nevertheless, a positive assessment of narrative recommences, thanks in part to Twenge’s interest in how human beings can reach out beyond themselves to others and to God (Josselson, McAdams). A reflection on Psalm 51 seeks to help pilgrims further along a path from narcissism to solidarity with others and further on toward doxology.

Robert Pirsig’s motorcycle narrative Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values (1974) revels in narcissism. It is both shaped by the culture of narcissism from which it emerged and, like many other works of motorcycle literature since World War II, it shapes a culture of narcissism in America that goes hand in hand with a widespread desire to turn inward and away from a shared sense of community, identity, and responsibility. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s seminal study Narcissistic narrative (1980), narcissism is used as an interpretive framework for understanding narrative. Narcissism understood in this way is a literary phenomenon. But besides a high level of diegetical self-awareness, on a cultural level the narrative displays a narcissism that is embodied by a self-involved character who lacks empathy. In order to arrive at a nuanced understanding of narcissism understood as a literary and cultural phenomenon, it is necessary to think the two forms of narcissism – textual and figural – together and to draw on insights from literary studies as well as cognitive and cultural studies. Such an interdisciplinary approach makes it possible to define narcissism as an inherent dimension of all motorcycle narratives.

Business executives are stock characters in the film narratives of the Coen brothers. In nearly every Coen brothers film we find a business executive of some type, from small business owners to corporate CEOs. These characters are men of wealth and power, typically corrupt, often criminal, and always antagonistic to the endeavors of the story’s protagonist. Drawing on recent research in business and organizational management science focused on the narcissistic aspects of contemporary corporate leadership, this article explores CEO narcissism and applies it to characters in Coen brothers movies. Blood simple , Raising Arizona , Fargo , The big Lebowski , and The Hudsucker proxy satirize business moguls as “blustering titans,” possessed of an inflated sense of self-importance and superiority, a willingness to manipulate others for personal gain, and a constant demand for self-validation.

Academic criticism of institutional narcissism in business schools is well established. But little scholarly attention has been devoted to insider critics of business schools. Filling this research gap – from an interdisciplinary narrative perspective – is the aim of this article. It draws attention to one of the many autobiographical narratives that have recently been published by MBA graduates. Narcissism here appears as an important theme, both on an institutional and a personal level. What role does narration play for coping with narcissism? To explore this question, this paper offers a close reading of Ahead of the curve: Two years at Harvard Business School (2008) by Philip Delves Broughton. After a brief introduction to institutional narcissism and organizational narrative studies, the article illustrates how narrative functions as a sense-making tool for understanding institutional narcissism and as a means to reconstruct individual moral agency. The study pushes the frontiers of narrative studies by providing an innovative blend of empirical organizational research and literary studies, while also touching upon genre, interdisciplinarity, and the ethical responsibility of business in society.

Authors may be understood as producing stories from their narrative idiolects . Narrative idiolects are sets of principles that enable the simulation of possible sequences of causally connected events. Such idiolects include prototypes that define classes of stories. These prototypes or proto-stories are complexes of cognitive and affective structures that guide the interpretation of real-world events as well as the production of fictions. Like everyone, Rabindranath Tagore had a range of proto-stories. But one was particularly important for him. This was a proto-story based on attachment, the sort of bonding that first of all characterizes the relations of parents and young children. This proto-story centers on the formation and violation of attachment relations, with the ethical and political issues that surround such violation. Specifically, Tagore’s ethical and political imagination was largely guided by the norm of securely developing attachment. It was elaborated into stories by reference to deviations from that norm. Those deviations are caused by attachment threat or loss. In connection with these points, Tagore’s attachment proto-story suggests two key ethical virtues – attachment sensitivity and attachment openness . These, in turn, may be disturbed by the social production of shame, often in relation to gender ideology. This essay examines Tagore’s attachment proto-story and its ethical and political consequences.

This essay is a sequel to “Narrative theory, 1966–2006: A narrative,” Chapter 8 of the 2006 edition of The nature of narrative. Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, it highlights five particular developments in the field, each connected with issues discussed in the 2006 essay, and it illustrates the interpretive consequences of each development by considering its implications for reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement. The first two developments are related to ongoing “instabilities” I identified at the end of the 2006 essay: unnatural narratology and theories of fictionality. The next three developments are related to the three main approaches I discussed in 2006: within cognitive theory, work on theory of mind or mind-reading; within feminist theory, work on intersectionality; within rhetorical theory, work on the narrative communication model.