Modern Narcissism and Buddhism I was reading about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and related conditions like Borderline Personality Disorder. Some qualities seemed in direct opposition to what I've read in books by Thich Nhat Hanh. I was wondering if there were descriptions of Modern Psychological Narcissism in Buddhist works (as opposed to vanity in the Greek myth)? Is it closely tied to notions of Ego? 

For example, we are encouraged to cultivate Equanimity in Buddhism. BPD has erratic and extreme emotional shifts. Its sufferers have extremely dichotomous, dualistic thinking. 

Some notion of objectivity is encouraged in Buddhism, a realization that one is observing a phenomenon, and one may have thoughts, judgments, etc about the phenomenon, but this isn't really the thing being observed. People with NPD and the like may be considered extremely subjective, unmindful that they are having opinions and so failing to distinguish between the observation and the judgments. 

Envy is extremely common among narcissists. On the path to liberation, envy is one of the first emotions to disappear. 

Are there teachings of Buddhism that could be especially helpful for such people?
There's a passage from the daodejing that I always find appropriate on questions like this. It goes, roughly:

When one man hears of the dao, he sets out to embrace it.
When another hears of the dao, he is interested, and thinks about it sometimes.
When a third hears about it, he laughs out loud at how silly it sounds.
If no one ever laughed at it, it wouldn't be the dao.


In order to appreciate the philosophy of Buddhism, we have to appreciate the problem of Buddhism: the problem of discontent and its cessation. And it isn't enough to appreciate the problem intellectually — in that, "Yeah, I know, a lot of people are miserable" sense — we have to feel the problem. We have to embrace the problem down in the core, because until we embrace the problem, we will have no reason to embrace the solution.

Not everyone can embrace the problem in this visceral way, and so we find a wide range of 'intellectual' Buddhists, who are quite devout (in their own way) but carry on a shallow practice. And we find other people who cannot even appreciate the problem intellectually, and write the philosophy off as mere farce. That is... what is.

When we talk about people with personality disorders, we are talking about people with (in general) a pervasive debility in both self-reflection and other-reflection. At best they make a mental beeline towards immediate gratification without considering secondary consequences; at worst they see the world as a zero-sum game of misery, where the more misery they inflict on others the less they think they will experience for themselves. Such people would have no interest in Buddhism (which they'd probably denigrate as 'sop for losers'). You couldn't get them to sit on the cushion without offering them some immediate, tangible reward (which would be counterproductive). I'm not saying it wouldn't be good for them in the long run — practice benefits everyone — but we'd have a job getting them to take the idea seriously in the first place.

I sometimes find it helpful to remind myself that we can't always help damaged people, but we can aim for a world that damages people less. That is (I think) the essence of the bodhisattva .