Has anyone here heard of TheLastPsychiatrists definition of narcissism?

alone wrote:If it's not grandiosity, then what is narcissism?

Shame over guilt; rage over anger; masturbation over sex; envy over greed; your future over your past but her past over her future...

Imagine what you look like to another person.  Now recall what you looked like in the mirror this morning-- that's really what they see.  They are making instantaneous judgments about your personality based on that mirror image.  They are hearing your voice like it comes form a recording, not as you hear from your mouth.  You're the only person who experiences yourself as you do.

The narcissist feels unhappy because he thinks his life isn't as it should be, or things are going wrong;  but all of those feelings find origin in frustration, a specific frustration: the inability to love the other person.

He's a man in a glass box, unable to connect.  He thinks the problem is people don't like him, or not enough, so he exerts massive energy into the creation and maintenance of an identity: if they think of me as X...

But that attempt is always futile, not because you can't trick the other person-- you can, for an entire lifetime, it's quite easy.  But even then, the man in the box is still unsatisfied, still frustrated, because no amount of identity maintenance will break that glass box.

If the other person is also in a glass box, then you have a serious problem.  If everyone is in their own glass box, well, then you have America.

alone wrote:
I guess Facebook is a kind of glass box?  
Facebook is a neutral tool, it's what you do with it that matters.  You think the "I'm better than everybody!" status updates are evidence of narcissism, and maybe they are, but the deeper pathology exists in those who derive their identities from that online presence while simultaneously retreating from the real world.  Show me a man or woman who posts pictures of themselves in bathing suits and I shrug my shoulders.  Show me a person who spends more than an hour a day on Facebook and it isn't their job and I'll show you a future divorce even if they're not married yet.  Show me a middle aged person who spends >1 hr a day on facebook, and I'll show you someone who has been to a psychiatrist.  It's not an insult, it is a statement of fact.  Each person tries to find ways of affirming themselves; but when it is done through identity and not behavior, it always leads to misery.  

Sure, you can convince 5000 people you're anything.  Then what?  

It is self-reinforcing.  The type of person who withdraws into facebook is already stunted in their potential for happiness; and if you're spending all your energy on facebook then you're not spending it in ways that might actually work.  The problem isn't facebook, the problem is you.

What can psychiatry do about this?

Do about what?  According to it there's nothing wrong with you, don't you see? You're not grandiose.  Maybe you get diagnosed with "depression" or a touchy-feely therapist tells you you have "self-esteem issues" but that's like being told you have a hairy back, you make some cosmetic adjustments or you just don't go to the pool, life goes on.  Psychiatry has nothing to say about why you get so enraged when you hear about welfare cheats, or how your wife's giggle at that one joke on TV hit you the wrong way, how everyone seems like shallow, phony jerks  and no one is worth getting to know-- how adamant you are that the government do X or Y, neither of which are feasible or even matter but to you it's the most obvious thing in the world to do and the fact that they're not doing it must mean they are either idiots or corrupt--  and while you're yelling at the TV or the monitor or in your own head your wife is mauling a vibrator or you don't have a wife at all.

But I never yell.

Your rage may not score on the decibels but it is triple digits on the wattage.  Psychiatry can't measure that.  And while this rage makes you miserable there's also a societal effect:  hating black people, hating white people, blaming Goldman Sachs, blaming your parents, declaring war.

And deserving things: shouldn't you be in a nice car? Nautica/Zegna/Underarmor/Polo shirts?  Restaurants?  The fact that you can't get them is someone else's fault; but if you get them, why aren't you happier?  Meanwhile there are bills to pay.  

And you can't make the connection between these things at all.  Even as I say it, you resist: it's not that simple, you don't know her, you don't know them......................................... it can't be all me.

It is you, it is all you, it is always you. Isn't it odd how narcissism turns everything inward, except blame?

It's not odd, it is by psychic design, and psychiatry has failed you all in this. If individual narcissism is self-defensive, one might presume that societal narcissism will find it's own way to hide in plain sight.  Narcissism became synonymous with grandiosity because that facilitated its measurement.  But in so doing, the most significant social pathology in two generations was rendered undetectable.