Femininity and selflessness are so deeply ingrained as twin ideals that even the most “woke” woman feels vaguely guilty when she chooses to do something purely for herself—whether it’s lying in bed an extra few minutes instead of preparing the family’s breakfast, reaping the psychological rewards of wasting time, or refusing to do housework at the office, where women’s work is too often called “help.”
It wasn’t always this way. There was actually a brief window, not so very long ago, in which we may have been able to claim a healthy modicum of self-love without facing criticism. If we had followed that trajectory, women may not have to learn the hard way that what we often think of “selfishness” is a necessary part of life, and even of motherhood. [...]
In the 1970s, a positive take on measured narcissism captured the public imagination. It came from a leading American psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut—the man who gave the world self-psychology theory, which included narcissistic personality disorders. Less well-known is the fact that Kohut also talked up “normal narcissism” as a positive, even life-sustaining aspect of human nature, as Lunbeck explains in her 2014 book. To Kohut, narcissism was “the wellspring of human ambition and creativity, value and ideals, empathy and fellow feeling,” she writes. [...]
Malkin’s book describes all the admirable qualities of moderate narcissism: It enables drive and motivation, for example, and it’s connected to resilience following trauma. Extreme Echoism, on the flip side, is linked to higher rates of depression.
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