The narcissism diagnosis fails to name the structural misery of our era

Evidence

The psychic peculiarity of contemporary life, according to a certain trendy leitmotif, is an abundance of narcissism—“Generation Me” aggrandizement, measured definitively on the Narcissist Personality Index and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. But, just as the most essential aspect of its pathology is false self-centering, our era of narcissism does not perceive its own structural causes. Nor does the narcissism hypothesis adequately comprehend the irrepressible crisis in mental experience at present. Ours is a miserable society (though the very palpability of this misery can prioritize psychological categories as somehow more primary or immediate than structural ones). — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 81

Categorization

• XREF: Her point that palpable misery prioritizes psychological categories over structural ones echoes the Frankfurt School insight about how felt experience obscures systemic cause — connects to The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance coverage.