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The SelfWork Podcast

SelfWork YGTG: How Many Types of Narcissism Are There?

The SelfWork Podcast

Margaret Robinson Rutherford PhD

Education, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Self-improvement

4.81.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2021

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today's "You Get the Gist" explains the four different types of narcissism. All of them share the major features of a constant need for admiration, an unrealistic sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy, and great difficulty forming meaningful relationships. What are they and how are both similar and dissimilar to one another? You'll find out more.. but they are the grandiose narcissist, the covert narcissist, the communal narcissist (I'd never heard of that one..) and the malignant narcissist. I use the excellent work of Darlene Lancer, an attorney and a mental health clinician  (link below). However, I do offer one caveat - be careful about diagnostic labels. They were historically meant to aid in better communication but often go way beyond that.

Links:

Darlene Lancer Psych Central article

Article on covert narcissism

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and welcome to Self-Work. This is Dr. Margaret Rutherford, and today we've got

0:11.2

another YGTG. It's about covert narcissism. In fact, we're going to talk about several

0:16.8

different kinds of narcissism. Let's start first with the major features of a

0:21.3

narcissist, therefore of them, a constant need for admiration, an unrealistic sense of

0:26.8

self-importance, lack of empathy, and difficulty forming meaningful relationships. So this is

0:32.6

true for all four types of narcissism we're going to touch on today. Narcissistic folks don't

0:38.6

have self-esteem. If you have self-esteem, then you don't have to feel important. Again,

0:43.2

there's that self-importance. Maybe this example would be helpful. I was riding in a shared

0:48.2

taxi several years back after a huge blogging conference, and the driver and two other bloggers

0:53.6

who were strangers to me were discussing family conflict and what to do about it. I was

0:58.0

kind of quiet. I was tired. I thought they all made sense, and I hadn't been asked. Finally,

1:02.9

someone asked me who I was and what I did. I told them, and they all immediately said,

1:07.0

oh, we feel silly. We had a real therapist in the car. I stopped them, and said I enjoyed

1:12.0

their conversation and learned from it, just because I had three letters after my name

1:15.8

didn't mail that much. I hope that means I have decent self-esteem. I didn't need

1:20.6

to feel self-important. I didn't need to jump in and put in my two cents. Self-important

1:25.2

people can't help but do that. At first, I was going to do this episode about two types

1:29.9

of narcissism. There's covert or introverted narcissism, and then there's extroverted

1:35.3

or overt narcissism. But when I looked further, the latest research indicates, again, as

1:40.7

I've said, that there may be four different types, in fact, darling Lancer, who's a lawyer

1:45.7

and a mental health clinician, describes these four in a very well-written psych central

1:50.1

article, which you'll have the link to. There's first, the grandiose narcissist. This

...

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