Rachel Cusk in New Statesman:
Alongside the struggle in the modern era to define and enshrine narcissism as a psychiatric condition, the term has been appropriated as a shorthand for the general idea of self-obsession. This is a diverse concept with a large vocabulary of its own, but that vocabulary is increasingly abandoned in favour of a word whose ill-defined connotations of mental illness give it a strange force. What we think narcissism is, and how much of what we see seems to answer to it, depends in reality on the moral status we accord the self: the very forcefulness of “narcissism” lies in the fact that it illuminates the person saying it as much as the person against whom it is said. And indeed narcissism, classically, is a business of echo and reflection that can give rise to a narrative of maddening circularity, of repetition and counter-repetition, in which self and other struggle to separate and define themselves.
More here.