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Egotism is defined as the drive to maintain and enhance favorable views of oneself and generally features an inflated opinion of one's personal features and importance distinguished by a person's amplified vision of one's self and self-importance. It often includes intellectual, physical, social, and other overestimations.Robin M. Kowalski ed., Aversive Interpersonal Behaviors (1997) p. 112 The egotist has an overwhelming sense of the centrality of the "me" regarding their personal qualities.William Walker Atkinson, The New Psychology (2010 1909) p. 30
Egotism differs from both altruism – or behaviour motivated by the concern for others rather than for oneself – and from egoism, the constant pursuit of one's self-interest. Various forms of "empirical egoism" have been considered consistent with egotism, but do not – which is also the case with egoism in general – necessitate having an inflated sense of self.Kowalski ed., p. 113
With respect to the developing individual, a movement takes place from egocentricity to sociality during the process of growing up.J. C. Flügel, Man, Morals and Society (1973) pp. 242–243 It is normal for an infant to have an inflated sense of egotism.Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 11) p. 85 The over-evaluation of one's own egoOtto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) pp. 38, 57 regularly appears in childish forms of love.Robin Skynner and John Cleese, Families and how to survive them (London 1994) p. 91
Optimal development allows a gradual decrease into a more realistic view of one's own place in the world.Skynner & Cleese, Families p. 63 A less optimal adjustment may later lead to what has been called defensive egotism, serving to overcompensate for a fragile concept of self.Kowalski ed., p. 224 Robin Skynner however considered that in the main growing up leads to a state where "your ego is still there, but it's taking its proper limited place among all the other egos".Robin Skynner and John Cleese, Life and how to survive it (London 1994) p. 241
However, alongside such a positive trajectory of diminishing individual egotism, a rather different arc of development can be noted in cultural terms, linked to what has been seen as the increasing infantilism of post-modern society.R. Bly and M. Woodman, The Maiden King (1999) pp. 85–88 Whereas in the nineteenth century egotism was still widely regarded as a traditional vice – for Nathaniel Hawthorne egotism was a sort of diseased self-contemplationMalcolm Cowley, ed., The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin 1977) p. 177 – Romanticism had already set in motion a countervailing current, what Richard Eldridge described as a kind of "cultural egotism, substituting the individual imagination for vanishing social tradition".Richard Eldridge, The Persistence of Romanticism (2001) p. 118 The romantic idea of the self-creating individual – of a self-authorizing, artistic egotismScott Wilson, in Patricia Waugh, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism (2006) pp. 563–564 – then took on broader social dimensions in the following century. Keats might still attack Wordsworth for the regressive nature of his retreat into the egotistical sublime;Henry Hart, Robert Lowell and the Sublime (1995) p. 30 but by the close of the twentieth century egotism had been naturalized much more widely by the Me generation into the Culture of Narcissism.
In the 21st century, romantic egotism has been seen as feeding into techno-capitalism in two complementary ways:Wilson, pp. 565–566 on the one hand, through the self-centred consumer, focused on their own self-fashioning through brand 'identity'; on the other through the equally egotistical voices of 'authentic' protest, as they rage against the machine, only to produce new commodity forms that serve to fuel the system for further consumption.
At the same time, it is very apparent that egotism can readily show itself in sexual waysSchmalhausen, p. 34 and indeed arguably one's whole sexuality may function in the service of egotistical needs.Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) pp. 516–517
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