387. The truth about narcissism ...
The Psychology of your 20s
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When did ‘narcissist’ become the go-to explanation for every difficult person - and what do we lose when one word starts covering everything from basic selfishness to genuine psychological harm? In this bonus episode, we break down what psychologists actually mean by narcissism: where the term came from, what it truly means, and how the term has been adopted in our society.
We explore:
• Differences between Narcissistic Personality Disorder and narcissistic traits
• The two main forms of narcissism
• How has the term become overused?
• The dangers of simplifying the term
• Can narcissists ever change? Or is it all pretend?
Listen now!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. |
| 0:23.8 | Hello, everybody. |
| 0:24.9 | Welcome back to the show. |
| 0:26.3 | Welcome back to the podcast. |
| 0:28.1 | It is so great to have you here back for another episode. |
| 0:31.6 | I think this is the first episode in like five episodes where I'm no longer sick and |
| 0:37.3 | you guys don't have to listen to like a |
| 0:39.2 | disgusting nasal noise come into your ears. So for that I am grateful and for that I am |
| 0:45.0 | excited for today's episode. We have another, well I should say I have another mini episode |
| 0:53.3 | for you today. |
| 0:59.9 | If you are not familiar with our mini episodes, they're basically kind of smaller bite-sized episodes where we break down a certain phrase, a certain psychological concept |
| 1:05.7 | that gets thrown around a lot online in TikToks, in dating discourse, in group chats, and essentially |
| 1:14.5 | we dissect what it actually means according to the psychology rather than according to the pop culture. |
| 1:22.9 | And today, we are tackling, let's be, let's be honest, the most requested, the most weaponized, |
| 1:30.8 | and probably the most misunderstood term and label of them all. |
| 1:35.9 | We are talking about narcissism. |
| 1:39.3 | I'm not going to waste any time today because we have so much to talk about. |
| 1:42.8 | But narcissism is such a fascinating term |
| 1:47.3 | when you scratch even below a tiny inch below the surface. And it's also such an ancient term, |
| 1:54.2 | which I think a lot of people might not know, probably maybe no, given its modern day popularity. |
| 1:59.7 | So you may have heard of the Greek |
| 2:02.8 | myth of narcissus before. Basically, this is where the term comes from. Narcissus was this |
... |
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