Narcissism and the Bible on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

This week on the podcast, we are talking about a problem called narcissism. Narcissism is a term that comes

from Greek mythology. And if you know the story of Narcissus, he was a man in Greek mythology who was

understood to be incredibly beautiful. Indeed, he had achieved the perfection of beauty,

and people were obsessed with his appearance. As you read about him, women would even kill

themselves when they found out that they

couldn't have him. And as Narcissus would reject these women, eventually a man named Nemesis

lured him to a body of water, to a pool, and encouraged Narcissus to look into the pool. And when Narcissus looked at the pool and he saw

his reflection, he became enamored with himself. He became obsessed with his own beauty and with his own

likeness and he could not leave the pool and ultimately died

from staring at himself. When we think about narcissism, we are talking about this kind of

excessive selfishness where a person is so obsessed with themselves and bent in on themselves that they,

that it becomes even deadly at times. Every single culture, every single society has had a

category for this kind of excessive selfishness, but only in recent history in general and in the recent history of

the West in particular has this obsessive selfishness been understood in the psychologized

terms of narcissism.

We now talk about in the diagnostic and statistical manual, a problem called

narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by several

different manifestations, someone who exaggerates their own importance, who is preoccupied

with fantasies about success or power, someone who requires

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