Epistemic status: Speculative

TL;DR: Narcissism in Lasch's sense is unhappiness with the essential embeddedness of agency in our universe, "solved" by a denial of agency that leads to non-agency.

Three examples

Person A works long hours. For years, they've wanted to find a long-term relationship, but they don't have much time to find candidates, so they have a Tinder date around once a month.

Person B has immigrant parents but doesn't speak the inheritance language. They want to learn it to connect with their roots. A perfect occasion to learn it appears, but they don't make time for it.

Person C is very popular. Many people want to spend time with them, and above a minimum threshold they accept all proposals to hang out. They feel unhappy about how they end up distributing their hanging out time.

What do these people have in common?^[1]

What is narcissism?

Christopher Lasch^[2] defines narcissism as the emotional^[3] incapacity to accept the inevitable limits to the self imposed by the world. Lasch explores different aspects of his concept of narcissism:

In a social context in which some social roles (for instance, family relationships) imply some duties, one is determined by such duties. If I live in such a context and my mother Alice is sick, and it is social fact that I have to take care of her, then I am determined=limited by this duty, even if I don't fulfill it.^[4] One aspect of narcissism is the aversion towards such identity-defining relationships.^[5]

Another aspect of narcissism is irony, in a very broad sense. If I have been working as a waiter for years, then I am determined=limited by the fact that I am a waiter and not any of the more glamorous jobs than I could have. One narcissistic defense against this is to see myself as somehow who, yes, happens to work as a waiter, but doesn't take their job seriously (doesn't take pride in doing their job great, for instance), and thus is not really a waiter.^[6] The narcissist doesn't see themselves as one finite history, but as infinite potential.

A third aspect of narcissism is the lack of self-knowledge. Knowing what something is means, by definition, knowing things that it isn't (if a thing is red, it isn't any other color). The narcissist, says Lasch, doesn't emotionally understand the border between themselves and the world and has trouble dealing with situations in which the world is full of significance for others but he has no role in it.^[7]

What is embeddedness?

Agents inside a universe are faced with many constraints not faced by an agent playing a video game. The most relevant one^[8] here is bounded rationality, i.e., the agent thinks inside the universe. In particular, every decision between A and B is really a decision between "A at time " or "B at time ", and thinking for a time length of s transforms the choice into "A at time " and "B at time ". This also means that when an embedded agent chooses A, they essentially renounce the chance of getting B ever again.^[9]

Embedded preferences

I advance the claim: Lasch's narcissism can be understood as unhappiness with the essential embeddedness of agency in our universe, "solved" by a denial of agency that leads to non-agency. This is a big claim, and in this post I just want to sketch a potentially useful distinction: embedded vs. unembedded or narcissistic preferences:

An agent aware of their embededness knows that the process of making their goals concrete is bounded. They have e.g. a vague goal of "cooking tasty food that I haven't tasted in a while", and every night this has to output one concrete recipe. After a finite amount of time they will be "satisficed" with whatever they have ended up with, knowing full well that some marginal time spent on more thinking has a marginal likelihood of finding a better option, but rejecting as meaningless the comparison with the counterfactual pseudo-scenario in which "they" are unbounded and find the "perfect" option.

In Lasch's terms: A non-narcissistic person is able to find happiness in a limited object, which means accepting that one is renouncing the infinite set of alternative objects that one "might" have gotten instead.

Narcissistic preferences

A narcissistic preference means wanting something without renouncing everything, wanting X and all its alternatives. Embeddedness being an essential property of agents in our universe, there is no way around it. So how does acting on narcissistic preferences look like? Since acting on unembedded preferences is impossible, it looks like not (really) acting, like not being an agent.

But humans usually have several preferences pointing to different directions, so not (really) acting on one preference can have effects on acting on other preferences.

Shard narcissism

Lasch proposes narcissism as a general condition: person X is very narcissistic, person Y is not at all narcissistic. Without denying that such cases of homogeneous narcissism may exist, it might be more helpful to think of narcissism not as a property of an agent, but as a property of one of their preferences, of a shard.

Back to the examples

Person B has many things going on in their life, and they act agentically based on their other preferences. They also have this one narcissistic shard about wanting to connect with their roots, but it doesn't have any effects on the world. Reflecting about the fact that they are (without having chosen it) a third culture child, and "not really an X", will probably be hurtful (otherwise they would have accepted this already), but it probably won't have any concrete effects on their life.

Person C has a narcissistic preference for hanging out with absolutely everyone that is minimally interesting. They haven't understood that they only have time to hang out with a limited amount of time, and hanging out with them has the cost of not hanging out with thousands others. We don't know how agentic Person C is in other domains of life, but in their social life, since there are no competing preferences, they act like a non-agent: they let social life happen to them, and then react with good or bad emotions. Reflecting about their narcissistic shard could lead them to eliminate it by becoming agentic, something which will be probably unpleasant (otherwise they would have done it already), but has the potential to make them much happier.

Person A is the most interesting one. They have at least three preferences:

1. They want professional success

2. They want sex

3. They want a long-term relationship

The unembedded preferences is kinda starting an action here (looking for someone), but the action is, so to say, getting parasitized by their much easier to satisfy preference for sex. In this scenario it's not clear that there is a ground truth of what their real preferences are; rather, they are an agent with incoherent preferences, and reflecting on the incoherence can turn them into different coherent agents, depending on the specific ways in which the reflection process resolves those inconsistencies.

Conclusion

Agents have preferences, and preferences cause specific behaviors. But agents also have a specific failure mode in which a preference slot is filled with something that doesn't have the right type signature: a pseudo-preference that doesn't produce behaviors. I'm not sure yet whether this has consequences to better understand embeddedness. But it seems to me that understanding and eliminating this failure mode has potential to make agents happier.

1. ^{^}

   Real people are more complex than a couple of lines of text, so the exercise is "find a plausible common explanation for these artificially simple descriptions".

2. ^{^}

   Caveat 1: This post is explicitly not about the modern definition of narcissism as self-centeredness, with which it has little in common.

   Caveat 2: Lasch thinks his concept of narcissism has different sides which imply each other, but I'm not convinced. Here I unpack what I see as one self-contained concept.

   Caveat 3: Lasch also claims that the psychoanalytical tradition discusses a single concept of narcissism. I'm even less convinced here and think different authors are talking about different, often vaguely defined things, so I leave everyone else's understanding of narcissism also outside. Parts of what The Last Psychiatrist writes about are similar to my point here, but he also claims that narcissism is a complex phenomenon of different properties implying each other, and I'm again not convinced, so this post is exclusively about narcissism as defined in the main text. I might write more posts about Lasch and TLP in the future.

   I find Sartre very confusing, but this understanding of narcissism discussed in this post is possibly part of what he means with bad faith.

3. ^{^}

   The narcissist might intellectually understand those limits and give "right answers" when asked about them, but their actions don't reflect that understand and/or when faced with those limits they experience deep rage.

4. ^{^}

   I.e. if I am "Alice's son who should be taking care of her and instead goes to the beach", I can't be "a person who lightheartedly goes to the beach", nor (more importantly) can I be "a person who magnanimously decides to take care of their mother without it being their duty", nor any of the infinitely many alternatives.

5. ^{^}

   Which leads Lasch to see the demise of traditional, identity-defining love as one major symptom of narcissism in our culture.

6. ^{^}

   To be distinguished from the situation in which one's passion is, say, rock music, which they do as a side-gig, and works as a waiter to get money. Here the crux of narcissism would be rather accepting that they are a commercially unsuccessful musician.

7. ^{^}

   TLP gives the example of a narcissist in a funeral of a far acquaintance surprised at not feeling sadness, and asking themselves if something is wrong with them. Not feeling sadness at the tragedies of strangers is actually the standard thing, and the narcissistic symptom is that the limitation of the self that manifests itself in this situation (there is a complex network of dozens of people with entangled feelings and life stories, and your self is so small and unimportant that it isn't even in contact with any of it) manifests itself as unreality.

8. ^{^}

   The sequence on embeddedness has lots of other stuff also relevant to the point here.

9. ^{^}

   There are of course many times in life where one can pretty much still get B later. But this is based on approximations ("B after s time" is still pretty much B, or C is pretty much the same as B), and not something essential to the structure of embedded agency.