The pursuit of wealth and fame is widely prevalent and can be healthy if it is not all-consuming. But if achieved beyond the aspirer’s wildest dreams, he/she may reach an inflection point conducive to a pathologic degree of acquired narcissism. That’s what the French refer to as “les risques du métier” (ie, occupational hazard). I recall reading about celebrities who became enraged when a policeman “dared” to stop their car for some driving violation, confronting the officer with “Do you know who I am?” That question may be a clinical biomarker of acquired narcissism.
Interestingly, several years ago, when the American Psychiatry Association last revised the DSM—sometimes referred to as the “bible” of psychiatric nosology—it came close to dropping NPD from its listed disorders, but then reverted and kept it as one of the 275 diagnostic categories included in DSM-5.3 Had the NPD diagnosis been discarded, one wonders if the mythical god of narcissism would have suffered a transcendental “narcissistic injury”…