The Narcissism Spectrum Model: A Synthetic View of Narcissistic Personality

Abstract

The narcissism spectrum model synthesizes extensive personality, social-psychological, and clinical evidence, building on existing knowledge about narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability to reveal a view of narcissism that respects its clinical origins, embraces the diversity and complexity of its expression, and reflects extensive scientific evidence about the continuity between normal and abnormal personality expression. Critically, the proposed model addresses three key, inter-related problems that have plagued narcissism scholarship for more than a century. These problems can be summarized as follows: (a) What are the key features of narcissism? (b) How are they organized and related to each other? and (c) Why are they organized that way, that is, what accounts for their relationships? By conceptualizing narcissistic traits as manifested in transactional processes between individuals and their social environments, the model enables integration of existing theories of narcissism and thus provides a compelling perspective for future examination of narcissism and its developmental pathways.

Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism in Borderline Personality Disorder

“…Mainly investigated and often discussed as distinct traits, grandiosity and vulnerability have more recently been described as 2 poles of a dimensional, partly state-related phenotypic range of narcissism [11, 23, 73, 81, 82]. This implies more complex interactions with other state- and trait-related features of the self, such as depression and depressive temperament including self-criticism, shame-proneness and low self-esteem [83].…”

“…Defense or coping styles might also be relevant for the large diversity in psychosocial functioning of narcissistic patients. It must be noted however, that a potentially protective function in grandiose narcissism must not necessarily be understood as being more “adaptive” [11, 73]. The quality of coping or defense styles could potentially be seen as a distinguishing factor underlying the phenomenological appearance of narcissism.…”

Issues resolved and unresolved in pathological narcissism

“…Despite the perceived lack of coherence between grandiosity and vulnerability, within the last year there has been two virtually identical proposals, by Krizan and Herlache [1] and Miller and colleagues [2], for integrating grandiosity and vulnerability within a single structural model of narcissism. Each of these proposals arrived at the same structure from separate reviews of the literature with distinct emphases.…”

“…Each of these proposals arrived at the same structure from separate reviews of the literature with distinct emphases. Both groups accentuate an essential core of narcissism, as well as moderation in its expression as a function of underlying temperament [1] or personality [2]. We refer to the core here as entitlement as others have before us [38,39], and refer to the two moderating dimensions as exhibitionism and vulnerability.…”

“…Thus, we would argue that the "triarchic" model of narcissism [1,2] moves the field toward consensus on the dispositional structure of narcissism, suggesting that narcissism covers a range of manifestations that are continuously distributed leading to finely-graded individual differences, and not grandiose and vulnerable subtypes. We suggest that what has been termed narcissistic vulnerability is consistent with the broad deficits described as borderline pathology in clinical theory, and has major implications for differences in level of functioning among individuals who possess the core grandiose narcissistic features (entitlement and exhibitionism).…”