RESEARCH ARTICLE


Narcissism and Defending Self-Esteem. An Exploratory Study based on Self-characterizations



Guido Veronese1, *, Rossella Procaccia2, Giovanni M. Ruggiero3, Sandra Sassaroli3, Marco Castiglioni1
1 Department of Human Sciences, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
2 University e-Campus, Novedrate (LC), Italy
3 Studi Cognitivi, Psychotherapy School, Milano, Italy


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Creative Commons License
© 2015 Veronese et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Human Siences, Univesity of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell‟Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milano, Italy; Tel: +39 2 64484800; Fax: +39(0)264484863; E-mail: guido.veronese@unimib.it


Abstract

The present qualitative study aims at investigating the role of socio-relational variables in the construction of threats to self-esteem, grandiosity, and relaxation in a non-clinical sample of 35 young university students. The work provides fresh experimental evidence of the structural analogy observed in clinical settings between constructions of threat to self-esteem and grandiose fantasies. We hypothesize that the relational dimension would be more strongly present than either biological or psychological dimensions.The results show that descriptions of relaxation differ significantly from their characterizations of the other two domains. Specifically we found greater continuity and narrative connection between the aspects of threat and grandiosity, while the domain of relaxation showed a more “isolated” pattern.

Keywords: Grandiose fantasies, threat to self-esteem, non-pathological narcissism, self-characterzation, qualitative methods.