Paul Conti

I've been a psychiatrist for 20 years and I practice in so many different settings and I consult in different settings.

I've been fortunate to have a very wide purview of what's going on in people and in the world around us.

And I am struck with amazement that of all the things I see that are, say, abnormal, let's say, from the mental health perspective, this could be depression, panic attacks, hearing voices, addiction, but there's so many things that cover everything.

that narcissism is not frequent compared to a lot of other things.

So it's small in terms of, say, a narcissistic diagnosis, right?

It's much less than many other things.

But it causes the lion's share.

I don't just mean the most compared to anything else.

But I think more than 50%, the majority of people

bad things, evil things, destructive things that I see in the world around us.

I think narcissists are wildly destructive because they are driven completely, they are lodged completely in the lane of envy.

So narcissism is a deep, pervasive, and unquestioned sense of inadequacy.

in the self that comes along with anger and fear and vulnerability, fear of destruction, fear of annihilation, that is compensated for by aggression, by the mechanics of envy, by trying to make the self seem better at the expense of others, by

taking from others by being completely cavalier to the thoughts and feelings of others.

That narcissism is not arrogance.

Narcissism is the opposite of arrogance.

There is such a deep sense of inadequacy and incompetence in the self that the defensive structure around that becomes dominated by rocket-fueled envy.

Narcissistic people definitely care about other people, right?

It's the people who are schizoid, right?

And say that don't necessarily register other people, right?