A letter from an alum about the history of narcissism, Faculty File, January 29, 2003

March 13, 2003

Your interesting sidebar notes history professor Elizabeth Lunbeck citing the psychological disorder of narcissism as having first surfaced in post-World War I London and Vienna. This may very well be true from a purely clinical and medical perspective. But isn't it culturally narcissistic for the recent century to rashly take credit for what Roman poet Ovid himself so marvelously and vividly described some two millennia earlier?

Rocky Semmes ’79
Alexandria, Va..

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