Scan barcode
eeclough's review
2.0
Well researched but was structurally challenging. I felt it needed a strong thesis and better organization.
jordanrisa's review
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.25
I love the concept of this book — this idea that the word narcissist has lost all meaning because of how overly used it is. It was just so hard for me to read and get into. It felt all over the place, too academic… I like that it made me think about the ways we label those who have wronged us, or are different than us, as evil while we think of ourselves as good, as empathetic, when it’s that quick labeling without trying to understand that shows the moments we are actually lacking empathy. I don’t recommend — I’d try to find a good article on this subject instead.
margaret_adams's review
I had just checked out Dombek’s book on the fear of narcissism when Leslie Jamison mentioned it during an interview with Claire Dederer at the Seattle Public Library. (Did my interpretation of this chance occurrence as a directive to read said book immediately constitute a belief in signs, or a kind of narcissism? Quick, let me do an online quiz…) This was interesting. Some of my favorite quotes:
In a 1979 critique of Freud's "On Narcissism," Girard suggests that what Freud diagnosed was not a kind of personality at all, no something some people are or have, but the ordinary dynamic of all desire. We're all performing self-sufficiency as best we can, Girard argues, though we've become selves by imitating others, in the first place; such dependence on others is our fundamental, existential state. We become friends and fall in love with people upon whom we can project our fantasies that there are some selves that are, unlike our own, replete unto themselves, and thereby irresistible. But it is we who've made a mask for them, and when they turn away, the mask inevitably falls, and we call them fake, as if they've tricked us. It's easier to diagnose them as narcissists than to admit to this, but there aren't any narcissists, according to Girard; it's only in relation to the fullness we fantasized they had that we then call them by the name of what our desire makes us feel: empty.
#
In Greek, apocalypse means a tearing away of a veil to reveal the truth. We've made a shorthand of it: violent cataclysm, the end of the world, as if the truth will always be a disaster.
#
It is something you'll come to months or years later, if at all: the possibility that the way he was with you was real, and that it was love; that the way he was with the other woman, real or imagined, was real, was love, as well. You might understand this in the middle of the next time you fall in love with someone else, and find yourself, still, in love with him. You've just spread your love out in time, and he has spread it out in space.
#
For years, whenever he turned away, I filled in the blanks with the script, but now he is here all the time, he won't leave, and even so close by, his mind--the other's mind--can turn strange and blank. You can fill in the blank with stories about coldness and stories of evil. You can try to chase it down, rope it, you can make war on it, but it will still be blank. You can rage against your dependency, the absolute need for the other that can never be satiated, but the other is, in their own way and not through their own fault, the very center of their universe, and there is a part of that centrality that will always be empty of you. You can study it and theorize it, but if the blank were not still bottomless, love would not ever go on long.
tinkerer's review
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
This book means it when it says it is an essay on the *fear of narcissism. It sees that fear as a phenomenon that is worthy of investigation in itself. I believe the treatment of this topic was selective and somewhat heavy-handed. It made a few good points, but I feel there was a lot the author missed, on narcissism and why it is feared. For example, she asks how can narcissism both be a facade covering emptiness, and being full of the self? Research on grandiose and vulnerable narcissism was available at the time this was written, which would go partway to answering that question. The author uses the trope of the “maybe my date or partner is a narcissist”—she circles back to the insecurity she feels with her partner and whether he’s a narcissist because he disconnects from her. Having desires warp and doubts arise is different from having your reality warped because someone insists on hearing you only if you stay on script and agree to commiserate with their victimhood. In a basic way it’s like speaking only after one is spoken to. Perhaps her partner does have narcissistic traits but she was not able to see and describe them. Instead this book treads a lot of the same water and breezes by the deep stuff: the chapter titled “The Murderer” hardly earns that title. I think if she had actually delved into the murderer, and focused on a chapter titled “The parent” that might have led somewhere. But it would have been a messier essay, and the author was clearly invested in having the threads braid a certain way. It just kind of lost steam.