Both Christopher Lasch in "The Culture of Narcissism" and Theodore
Millon in his books about personality disorders, singled out American
society as narcissistic. Litigiousness may be the flip side of an inane
sense of entitlement.
Consumerism is built on this common and communal lie of "I can do
anything I want and possess everything I desire if I only apply myself
to it" and on the pathological envy it fosters.
Not surprisingly, narcissistic disorders are more common among men than
among women. This may be because narcissism conforms to masculine
social mores and to the prevailing ethos of capitalism. Ambition,
achievements, hierarchy, ruthlessness, drive - are both social values
and narcissistic male traits. Social thinkers like the aforementioned
Lasch speculated that modern American culture - a self-centred one -
increases the rate of incidence of the narcissistic personality
disorder.
Otto Kernberg, a notable scholar of personality disorders, confirmed
Lasch's intuition: "Society can make serious psychological
abnormalities, which already exist in some percentage of the
population, seem to be at least superficially appropriate."
In their book "Personality Disorders in Modern Life", Theodore Millon
and Roger Davis state, as a matter of fact, that pathological
narcissism was once the preserve of "the royal and the wealthy" and
that it "seems to have gained prominence only in the late twentieth
century".
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