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Juanita's avatar

I think that narcissists lack emotional intelligence and are usually immature.

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Meghan Bell's avatar

Are you familiar with Sam Vaknin's theory of cerebral narcissism?

You might also find Iain McGilchrist's work on the differences between brain hemispheres interesting. McGilchrist claims that the left hemisphere is more narcissistic than the right hemisphere, as well as more abstract, reductionist, bottom-up, and detail-oriented. In a recent conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman, Kaufman points out that IQ tests (and academia in general) favours left hemisphere cognition. Similarly, another researcher named Christopher Badcock argues that IQ tests only really capture mechanistic cognition -- and social conformity to Western ways of thinking (The Imprinted Brain). I wrote an essay explaining how excessive reading (books, screens, text communication) especially in childhood may exacerbate left hemisphere dominance and mental health issues associated with right hemisphere dysfunction. (See: https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-reading-too-much-part)

Another interesting aspect to all of this is that childhood "IQ" tests measure "IQ" by determining the child's "mental age" (based on, as you note, spatial skills, mathematical skills, and mechanistic verbal skills) and divide it by the child's physical age. So a 10 year old who performs similarly to a 14 year old will be said to have an IQ of 140. The problem here is that precocity can get confused for general intelligence, and there's significant evidence in scientific literature that early childhood stress can speed up the rate of development. There's some evidence many "gifted" kids go through puberty slightly earlier than their peers, and I think the poor mental health outcomes associated with childhood "giftedness" also suggest that early childhood stress might be a cause. Stress and dysfunction in early childhood, along with disrupted attachment, is a well known cause of narcissism (and being told you're smarter than almost everyone else as a child will feed narcissism). Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good etc) describes intellectualization as a symptom of being raised by narcissistic parents. I'm working on an essay about this topic right now.

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