Narcissistic and Obsessive-Compulsive disorder: a different angle.

Abstract

The attention trained on psychopathological disorders (both clinical and of the personality) has always focused mainly on identifying the so-called symptoms. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (the DSM in all its editions) sets itself the main objective of giving a detailed description of the symptomatological situations that can be linked to a certain disorder so as to be able to help the clinician to formulate the correct diagnosis.  
To give an example, if we as psychotherapists find at least five of the following nine symptoms in our patients: 1) great sense of importance, 2) feeling that he is special and unique, 3) fantasies of success, power, fascination, beauty and ideal love, 4) excessive demands for admiration, 5) feeling that everything is owed to him, 6) tendency to take advantage of others to achieve his own goals, 7) lack of empathy, 8) envy, 9) arrogance and presumption, we can say that we are looking at a subject presenting a narcissistic personality disorder.
From our point of view, while the help of any kind of diagnostic manual (ICD 10, DSM IV, etc.) can be useful in making an accurate diagnosis, it is insufficient in understanding the complex psychological dynamics that are at the source of our patients’ suffering.
In other words, the narcissist is not only the sum of five symptoms; the narcissist is first of all a person with a history of his own, with his own culture, and with his own suffering, that makes him an absolutely unique person.
Having stated this premise, aimed at affirming the importance both of not stopping at the symptom, and of avoiding generalizations that do not take the specificity of every single individual into account, in this article we will try to extend the field of knowledge about two specific personality disorders: narcissistic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.