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Most people are narcissistic.

I’m not using that word in the clinical diagnosistic way, nor in the common sense of egoistic or conceited. What I mean is that most humans are almost exclusively focused upon themselves, their private interests and their own emotional needs for attention. A certain amount of engrossment with oneself is common and healthy; it becomes a problem when you’re not truly interested in other folks or ideas and exclusively want to talk about yourself.

Here’s a fairly ordinary experience for me: I’m at a party or gathering, speaking to someone I’ve just met, or an acquaintance I haven’t seen in a long time. I’m asking questions, inquiring about the person’s history or catching up since we last met. Fifteen, twenty minutes run by … we’re still talking about the other person. I get the impression that I could be anyone; I’m just a repository, a mirror or an audience. I lend needed attention to the other person; he or she has no interest in getting to know the otherperson who’s listening.

As a therapist (by temperament as well as profession), I’m a first-rate listener and dexterous at drawing humans out. As a student of human nature, I’m actually curious and, for the most part, fascinated by the variety of persons I meet. Sometimes I feel solitary, though. I used to be surprised and disappointed that the person I’d just met didn’t want to get to know me. Now I look for a lot less. Lack of genuine interest in others — that’s what I mean when I say I find most persons to be narcissistic.

Even with close friends, conversation tends to mean waiting your turn to launch into your own tale, waiting for the gap or the conversational trigger that will make the passage over to you seem more or less natural. With some extremely narcissistic people, the transition seems forced — they’ll use any reason to change the subject. It can even seem funny if you look at it from the right point of view, although painful when you recognize the reasons for that kind of behavior.

For these individuals, their families were so deficient and the common parental attention so absent that there’s an ravenous need to have other persons listen and make them feel important. In this way, narcissistic needs go along with many other psychological problems.

In my practice, I of course expect my clients to be absorbed by their own needs. Of course they are! After all, they’re paying me to listen and my personal emotional needs have no place in our relationship. In my own therapy I found it deeply satisfying to be able to go on about myself as much as I wanted without feeling obligated to ask questions back. My clients are typically needy and narcissistic and so was I.

What I wish for, and find unfrequent, is the kind of conversation where we’re not talking about me or you but about an idea or current event, maybe a first-rate book one of us has read. I enjoy the back-and-forth of argument, one person contributing to or disputing what someone else has just said. I long to feel I’ve learned something, or that in the conversational ebb and flow, we’ve both arrived at a new understanding.

I’m an ordinary narcissistic, too — every now and then, I want to tell my stories — but for the most part, I know all my own anecdotes and they don’t interest me. I want to hear your anecdotes, too — but after we’ve caught up, let’s discuss something bigger than either one of us.