He killed 77 people - then asked for a Band Aid for his cut finger.

Far from being the work of a madman, Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage in Norway was the action of an extreme narcissist. As the dead lay around him, he held up a finger asking for a Band-Aid. In her fascinating book The Life of I , essayist and author Anne Manne provides a compelling account of the rise of narcissism in individuals and society.  Anders Breivik is just one of the cases she explores.

Just then, news of a bomb blast came across the radio, shattering the calm of the day. Terrorists, it seemed, had struck at the very centre of the peaceful Scandinavian nation. Eight were dead, many more injured. Frightened parents texted their children, telling them how glad they were that they were safe at Utøya.

A handsome blond man, heavily armed and dressed in police garb, walked calmly towards the youngsters, beckoning them to come closer, telling them, ‘You will be safe with me. I’m a cop.’ Alarmed by news of the bomb, and reassured by the fact of his uniform, many of them began to move towards him. Then he shouted, ‘You all must die!’ And opened fire.

As their friends fell dead around them, the survivors took flight and ran, screaming in terror as the uniformed figure whooped with joy, laughing and cheering, as he picked them off one by one. They ran onto beaches and sheltered anywhere they could find: in tents, in buildings and under rocks. Some hid beneath corpses of the fallen. They dived into the icy lake, trying to swim away. Some could not bear the cold and turned back, only to find him standing above them, spraying bullets into the swimmers.

As the water in the small coves turned red, they begged for their lives. Then the killer turned and pursued the others, who had fled through the trees before realising that, on the island, there was nowhere to run to. They hugged each other, sent text messages to parents saying they loved them, then turned off their mobile phones lest any noise - a tell-tale beep or even the sound of their ragged breathing - give away their hiding place.

Few of those shot survived; the killer had chosen his weapon with care, using special dum-dum bullets that explode inside the body, causing maximum internal damage. And he shot each person multiple times.

The bomb and the holiday combined meant that police were horribly slow to arrive, allowing the killer over an hour to continue his rampage unimpeded. By the time they arrived, the gunman surrendered easily, showing the same calmness as when he had pulled the trigger. He stood with his hands above his head, his weapons lying a little way off behind him.

At the end of his killing spree, 69 young people lay dead on the island and eight by the bomb blast downtown. In a photograph appearing around the world, the gunman was shown being driven away, wearing a bright red sweater, unshaven, flanked by two heavily armed policemen. His expression was serene; he looked pleased, satisfied with a job well done.

The political Right around the world quickly declared, in advance of the evidence, that it was Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who were behind the attacks. However, the killer, Anders Behring Breivik, was no Islamist. Rather he was a 32-year-old Norwegian with a reasonably privileged and conventional background. His parents, a diplomat father and a mother who was a nurse, were divorced. In fact, he was much more sympathetic to the Right’s own attacks on ‘political correctness’ than anything else.

All this was clear from Breivik’s own words. Just before his crimes, he had posted on the internet a bizarre, rambling but coherent 1500-page manifesto he entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence.

Far from being an Islamic fundamentalist, Breivik quoted copiously from the Right’s own ideological and populist rants - from the US Tea Party to the German-speaking PI-News blog, a European website devoted to ‘politically incorrect’ views. As one of the bloggers on PI-News admitted after the killing, everything in Breivik’s manifesto could largely be found on this forum: virulent anti-Muslim sentiment; the desire to purge not just Norway but all of Europe of its Muslim invaders and their treasonous allies; a hatred of all those progressives and multiculturalists Breivik called ‘Cultural Marxists’, who supported immigration, feminism, sexual liberalism and the European Union.

In a curious echo of the Islamic fundamentalists he opposed, Breivik saw his massacre as a pivotal historic moment in the clash of civilisations: between Christian Europe and the invading Muslims; between the old patriarchal order and modern sexual depravity and promiscuity; between male domination and supremacy and what he saw as the disorder of the ‘matriarchal, feminised’ world that he had endured growing up, a civilisation brought undone by feminism.

The massacre on Utøya, Breivik declared, was no less than the opening salvo in a war in defence of Western civilisation, on behalf of a group he called the Knights Templar. Breivik claimed he had travelled to the United Kingdom, where the group had recently reactivated the medieval order of knights to fight the modern scourge, the conspiracy of global Muslims and their treacherous allies, Cultural Marxists. Breivik had, he claimed, been ‘ordinated as the 8th justicar knight for the PCCTS, Knights Templar Europe’. It was this name that Breivik used to sign off his last diary entry before carrying out his attacks.

The Knights Templar, an elect group of fighters and assassins drawing their identity and inspiration from medieval times - one called himself Richard, after Christian crusading king Richard the Lionheart - would fight against European treason, depravity and disorder, against sexual licentiousness and the usurping Islamic infidel. ‘God will anoint you with his power to go into battle,’ Breivik told his fellow knights. Breivik, then, was a political assassin who had wanted, for political reasons, to execute the flower of Norway’s leftist youth.

All political assassins, however, have a cradle. The first real clues to Breivik’s family background emerged in the passages of his manifesto concerning women. Feminism was a central modern evil for Breivik. European women, he argued, had been ruined by it. They no longer had enough children to keep at bay the threat from the faster breeding Muslims. To this end, in his future utopia they would be discouraged from having anything above a bachelor’s degree. They would have just three options: ‘be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry men and bear children’.

His most vindictive chapters were aimed at his mother and sister. He derided the materialism of his half-sister, who now resided in the United States: ‘The acquisition of wealth is the driving force in her life.’ He railed against them both as ‘promiscuous’ and representatives of a degraded, degenerate modern humanity. He condemned his half-sister Elisabeth for contracting chlamydia ‘after having more than 40 sexual partners (more than 15 of them Chippendale strippers who are known to be bearers of various diseases)’.

His mother, he claimed, had multiple sexual partners before developing meningitis from a venereal disease, contracted from his stepfather, who was a ‘sexual beast with over 500 partners’. This had left her with ‘the mind of a 10-year-old’ and a stent in the brain. Rather than express compassion for his mother’s predicament, Breivik was concerned only with male family dishonour: ‘Both my sister and mother have not only shamed me, but they have shamed themselves and our family, a family that was broken in the first place due to the secondary effects of the feministic/sexual revolution.’

Despite borrowing from Far Right thinking, the gun-toting Breivik did not appear familiar with the conservative body of thought that argues that one response to a father-absent childhood may be a hyper-masculinity marked by misogyny and violence: ‘I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and contributed to feminise me to a certain degree.’

Perhaps this fear of being feminised can account for Breivik’s hyper-masculine photos at the end of his manifesto. He smiles and poses in profile shots, wearing a self-designed Knights Templar uniform or military garb festooned with medals, or, perhaps weirdest of all, a tight wetsuit, as he brandishes a sniper’s rifle, with a caption on one sleeve, ‘Marxist Hunter’. Presumably the wetsuit was designed to give him extra muscle definition. These carefully stage-managed photos were also posted on Facebook.

Soon other facts about Breivik’s life began to emerge. The word ‘ordinary’ occurs again and again. Yet although he seemed to be a quiet, mild and undistinguished product of the Norwegian middle class, from an affluent area of Oslo, his background was not quite as placid as the oft-mentioned manicured window boxes and neat apartment buildings implied. It transpired that his father, Jens, had deserted Anders and his mother when he was about one year old. Jens then fought Anders’ mother, Wenche, in an ugly custody battle for the son he hardly saw.

The custody bid failed. Over the years, Breivik saw his father off and on, before Jens abruptly severed all contact with him - and indeed all his children - after Breivik became a teenage graffiti artist. The young man expressed resentment of his father and the severance of the relationship: ‘I have not spoken to my father since he isolated himself when I was 15 - he was not very happy about my graffiti phase.’ Commenting on the fact that his father had also cut off contact with his other children, Breivik remarked, ‘So you can see whose fault that was.’

Evidence emerged of rejection, of failure and of extreme sensitivity to slights. Breivik left higher education before finishing a degree, preferring to self-educate. In his teens he was rejected by the army as ‘unfit’, for undisclosed reasons. While in his manifesto he claimed his business ventures were a success, it is abundantly clear they were a disaster.

By his early 20s he had gambled in the stock market, invested in a bogus Nigerian internet scam for ‘blood diamonds’, lost a lot of money (more than a million kroner) and been declared bankrupt. It was at this point, the psychiatrists evaluating him said, that Breivik became increasingly isolated.

He had few relationships with women although mentioned using the services of prostitutes just before the massacre. The only evidence of a girlfriend was an internet date he brought to Oslo from Belarus; he treated her so badly that the relationship went nowhere. She decried his ‘male chauvinism’. He had no idea, she said, how to treat women except as inferiors. After this rejection, Breivik made no more attempts to have any relationships with women.

Friends referred to his large ego, and his anger when women at his workplace preferred men of Asian descent. He wore makeup, and wanted to look like the British soccer star David Beckham. He feared he was ‘ugly’, and had undergone plastic surgery in his early 20s, producing an Aryan nose and a perfectly cleft chin. He was obsessed with bodybuilding, took testosterone and steroids to build muscle, and moved in social circles of gym buddies equally obsessed.

At the time of his crime, however, he had lost touch with all friends. He had moved back to live with his mother, was rarely able to be prised out for even a coffee, and devoted a year of his life to playing the violent video game World of Warcraft night and day. His friends were worried about him, and about his increasingly extreme anti-Muslim ideas. By the time of the attacks, he was an isolated loner.

Once in jail, when he was asked by psychiatrists what he thought his victims might have felt, Breivik spoke only about his own suffering. Enacting all that carnage had been traumatic: ‘On this day, I was waging a one-man war against all the regimes of Western Europe. I felt traumatised every second that blood and brains were spurting out. War is hell.’

His greater interest was in how his death toll stacked up against similar mass shootings. And Breivik had other preoccupations. He was extremely sensitive about his appearance, and was highly disturbed by being unshaven while interviewed. His one moment of regret was over his earlier decision to have plastic surgery, which resulted in the ‘loss of his great Nordic nose’.

When the first team of psychiatric experts gave their verdict, they declared that Anders Behring Breivik suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. They argued he was in a state of psychosis when he committed the crimes. He was of unsound mind and therefore unable to stand trial. Rather than being imprisoned, he should be detained in a closed, purpose-built psychiatric facility. The prosecutor concurred, offering no opposition.

Their report caused an immediate controversy. The opposition fell into three categories.

For the victims’ grieving families, it seemed - after all they had suffered - a monumental cop-out. How could justice be done unless Breivik faced trial, judgement, and punishment for his crime? It seemed as if he was escaping responsibility through the ruse of mental illness.

Indeed, some argued, this was the intention. No trial meant no publicity or grandstanding; it denied the oxygen of attention not just to Breivik but also to other right-wing extremists and copycat psychopaths. The Norwegian justice system, which provided for a maximum sentence of only 21 years - too humane to deal with a crime of Breivik’s enormity - could be sidestepped. In permanent psychiatric detention he would not be eligible for release - perhaps ever. Very quickly there were reports of a new, specialist, purpose-built psychiatric facility to house him. He could be detained indefinitely. The conclusion that he was a paranoid schizophrenic was likely a profoundly political one.

Others felt the diagnosis robbed the crime of its clear political dimension. This argument was perhaps best expressed in the e-book On Utøya, published shortly after the event, edited by Guy Rundle, Tad Tietze and Elizabeth Humphrys. Breivik’s purpose, the book argued, was a mass assassination of the young political Left. It was a clear, unequivocal political act. To treat it as a matter of ‘madness’, as if it had no meaning beyond his individual psychoses, was to rob the culture of an opportunity to understand its significance. For decades, the conservative political class, from conventional politicians to Far Right extremists, had been upping the ante with increasingly virulent anti-Muslim and anti-political correctness rhetoric. Breivik’s ideology was a horrifying end point of a veritable hate fest occurring in blogs, magazines and even mainstream publications.

Across the internet for decades, extremists on the Right had given nourishment and succour to each other, raging against Islam, multiculturalism, tolerance, openness, feminism and other values emerging from the great cultural revolution of the 1960s.

This toxic political phlegm, which had spread across the globe via the internet, was characterised by similar arguments to those in Breivik’s manifesto, which he used to legitimate mass murder. But this was not just any mass murder of random people, as in a school shooting. Rather this was a mass assassination attempt of a highly political nature, a deliberate act to wipe out the flower of Norway’s young leftists, a future progressive leadership.

The third strand of objections to the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia came from psychological experts.

Leading forensic psychiatrists and psychologists maintained that his behaviour was not consistent with schizophrenia and argued for a reassessment. At the point of psychotic breakdown, paranoid schizophrenia is rarely consistent with the high-functioning behaviour Breivik needed to demonstrate in order to plan and execute the bombing and mass murder.

His manifesto is weird but cogent, researched and logical. Its 1500 pages show a real ability for mental organisation and order, however diabolical its premises and conclusions. The manifesto shows intelligence, a capacity for marshalling evidence, and sophisticated cognitive skills. It does not exhibit the kind of ‘word salad’ typical of schizophrenia - odd pairings and parsings of words and phrases that are connected only by associations known to the sufferer rather than by logic.

The executive function in people suffering from schizophrenia, when in acute psychosis and confronted with significant organisational demands, is often disintegrative, whereas Breivik was meticulous, thorough, exhaustive, obsessive, even compulsive in his attention to detail - all adding to his capacity to execute a complex, highly coordinated plan.

He had no auditory or visual hallucinations. Most schizophrenics, contrary to popular belief, are not violent. Nor did Breivik show the ambulatory restlessness or the elevated mood common to the acute psychotic phase of schizophrenia. Despite the argument that he was in a state of acute schizophrenic psychosis, which almost always needs medication to bring under control, Breivik was given no medication in jail. The psychiatrists admitted that at that time he was ‘not in a psychotic state’. Psychotic states in schizophrenia do not simply switch on and off without treatment.

According to Norway’s most famous forensic psychiatrist, Randi Rosenquist, the diagnosis was a political decision. In an interview with Der Spiegel, she likened it to the former Soviet Union’s use of paranoid schizophrenia for political ends. There were grave implications of such a ‘diagnosis’.

‘As far as I am concerned,’ she said emphatically, ‘this diagnosis doesn’t follow the facts.’ There was a much better case, she said, for diagnosing an extreme narcissistic personality disorder - perhaps the most extreme ever seen. One of the leading aspects of this disorder is a lack of empathy for others. Others include grandiosity, obsession with personal appearance, willingness to exploit others for one’s own needs, a sense of entitlement, a belief in the importance and superiority of self over others, a determination to use any means for self-aggrandisement, and a destructive rage when thwarted.

Rosenquist highlighted Breivik’s response when he had been asked to feel empathy for his victims. Breivik’s reply was straight from the all-about-me handbook. It was all about his trauma. This bespoke the radical lack of empathy of someone at the extreme end of the narcissistic continuum, the malignant narcissist.

This opinion - that he suffered from an extreme narcissistic personality disorder, of the kind that has overlaps with psychopathy - as echoed by other leading Norwegian psychologists and psychiatrists.

Svenn Torgensen, professor of psychology at Oslo University, agreed. He highlighted especially Breivik’s ‘delusions of grandeur and his belief that he was singled out to be a knight in the crusade against Islam’. Torgensen said that Breivik ‘found an ideal place to nourish his delusions of grandeur’ in his ‘messianic purpose of the Knights Templar’. All the staged photos at the end of the manifesto, in grandiose poses with weapons and medals and bogus uniforms, left Torgensen in no doubt: ‘Breivik must be a narcissist.’

A narcissistic personality is not simply selfishness or vanity. Rather it is a distinct pathological syndrome where so much of the narcissist’s life - events, conversations, actions and relationships - is conscripted into the maintenance and bolstering of the grandiose self.

One test that psychologists have developed for narcissistic traits is the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (N PI). It offers forced choices between items. The first item asks respondents to choose between ‘The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me’ and ‘If I ruled the world it would be a much better place’. Another is ‘I am much like everybody else’ versus ‘I am an extraordinary person’.

Breivik was intending, through his revolution, to rule the world, even describing himself as ‘Europe’s most perfect Knight since WWI I’ and future ‘Regent’ of Norway. Another trait identified by the measure is an inordinately high sense of entitlement. Breivik felt entitled to be the solitary, selfappointed judge and jury, to execute ‘Cultural Marxists’.

Narcissism at the extremes, argues Otto Kernberg, the famous American psychoanalyst, becomes ‘malignant’, resulting in behaviour similar to psychopathy. Both states share a profound lack of empathy, a willingness to exploit and destroy others for the benefit of the self.

A narcissist, however, is preoccupied with how they are seen in the eyes of others; their dastardly acts are performed before a fantasised, admiring audience. Slinking off to ruthlessly kill again after a quiet, anonymous crime is not for them. Hence Breivik’s video of his manifesto, his Facebook postings, and his anxious, vigilant attention to how he compared with other mass killers. He wanted the number one spot, to be the worst in history.

One of the most interesting aspects of the narcissist is their susceptibility to feelings of humiliation, their desire to retaliate after suffering a narcissistic wound. Psychologists have found that subjects scoring high in narcissism were far more willing to give electric shocks (simulated) to those who had judged their performance harshly on a test than were those who scored lower. This rage after a wound or blow to self-esteem is natural to the narcissist—if things don’t go their way, the world will pay.

One N PI item says ‘I will never be satisfied until I get all that I deserve’ versus ‘I will take my satisfactions as they come’. Demanding that respect and fame - or infamy - has also been evident in other mass killers such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed the Columbine High School massacre. In videotapes filmed before the attack, Harris made several statements horrifyingly similar to items on the N PI. ‘Isn’t it fun to get the respect we’re going to deserve?’ he asked, as he picked up a gun and made shooting noises.

Likewise, Breivik demanded at his trial that he be granted the respect he deserved - indeed ‘hero’ status - for what he had done to save Norway and Europe. He was more terrified of the humiliation of being declared insane than of being a mass murderer, despite the fact that such a psychiatric evaluation would lead to a much easier life in a hospital, rather than prison, after sentencing. He wrote a letter to several Norwegian newspapers: ‘I must admit this is the worst thing that could have happened to me as it is the ultimate humiliation.’

The second and final psychiatric evaluation, published in April 2012, concluded he was not psychotic and diagnosed him with concurrent narcissistic personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder. Expert witness Ulrik Fredrik Malt, a professor of psychiatry, also declared to the court that Breivik was suffering from narcissistic personality disorder and possibly paranoid psychosis.

We need to talk about Anders.

How did no one know what was coming? There seem to have been a number of We Need to Talk about Kevin moments among those close to Breivik. His half-sister Elisabeth and his mother’s best friend tried to alert his mother, Wenche, to the danger of Breivik’s deteriorating state of mind.

Wenche’s friend expressed her concern over his isolation and lack of friends and girlfriends. It seemed abnormal at that age. He had no sexual or romantic relationships of a lasting kind.

Wenche dismissed her friend’s comments, preferring to see him as just a little shy, something he would grow out of and a sign of his high intelligence. Elisabeth was more blunt, writing an email to her mother about Anders’ weird, paranoid political views and warning her about his erratic behaviour, observing that he was obsessed with the violent video game World of Warcraft, playing online for 16 hours a day, living in his own fantasy world.

Breivik’s relationship with his mother, it soon became evident, was far from the simple case of a spoiled ‘Mummy’s boy’ first suggested by the British press. From prison, Breivik expressed a profound ambivalence towards her, saying she was his ‘Achilles heel’ and would undo him, and that she was the one person whose presence he could not tolerate at the trial. ‘She is the only one who can make me unstable.’

It is in his relationship with his mother that we find clues to his radical aggression towards women and his misogyny. As his mental state had got worse, he had returned home to live with his mother. He was highly dependent on her; she said he was ‘uncomfortably intense … I felt like I was in prison with him'. He wanted to be so close physically to his mother that he would ‘sit on top of her on the sofa’, while trying to kiss her on the face.

Yet Breivik also feared contamination by his mother, and wore an antiseptic mask at home to prevent her from infecting his sinuses. He even rang a local doctor to complain of it. He refused to eat anything she cooked.

The early reports of his happy, ‘normal’ upbringing in an affluent Oslo suburb, of the ‘quiet but normal’ little boy, began to give way to a very different picture.

In 2012, the novelist Aage Borchgrevink published a new book, A Norwegian Tragedy, causing considerable controversy when it revealed new and very personal information about his childhood. Borchgrevink drew on the expert assessment of Wenche Behring and Anders Breivik by the state Centre for Child Health and Youth Psychiatry (SSBU) in 1983.

It turned out he had almost been removed from his mother twice by the age of four, at social workers’ requests, for severe neglect and suspected sexual abuse and because of a highly ‘sexualised atmosphere’. The psychological assessment of her at that time described a deeply unstable and vulnerable woman, with an ‘extremely difficult upbringing’, a borderline personality disorder, and an ‘all-encompassing’ depression, who ‘projects her primitive and aggressive fantasies onto him’.

She was on an ‘extreme emotional roller coaster’, constantly changing her mind about Anders going into care. She had little self-insight: ‘everything was someone else’s fault.’ Borderline personality disorder is a condition marked by extreme emotional reactivity, mood swings, wild anger, a lack of empathy and, most significantly, fear of abandonment. At this point in her life, Wenche had actually been abandoned by Jens and left to rear Anders alone as a sole parent. Even before that though, she’d had a relationship with her son marked by ambivalence and hostility, with severe attachment problems.

While we can never know the precise contribution of nature and nurture, the psychologists wanting to remove him had reported that Wenche had had difficulties from the time he was a breast-feeding baby. By the time he was two, he was violently jealous of his older sister. By four, his mother was frightened of the hyperactive and aggressive boy, who actively avoided physical contact with others. He was defiant and unmoved by discipline, laughing in his mother’s face when she tried to impose limits. Unusually for a small child of this age, he was ‘without pleasure or joy’. Wenche would speak to him in ‘a sugary voice’ one moment, only to tell him the next she wished he were dead, something she said often.

She also took him to bed with her in what is described coyly as inappropriately ‘close physical’ contact. There were reports from social workers and neighbours of ‘a lot of fighting’, and that the children were left alone in the apartment. He was sufficiently neglected that social welfare workers wanted him removed into foster care - something that rarely occurs in Norway - but their intention was never carried out.

His father might have offered a nurturing alternative relationship, but he cut off all contact with Breivik when he was a teenager, over a relatively minor misdemeanour. When interviewed about the massacre, his father gave a grotesquely insensitive interview that resonated with Breivik’s narcissism. Jens disowned his son and spoke of wanting to ‘move on’ and to ‘turn the page’.

He did not comment on or show empathy for the victims or their families. He spoke only of the sorrow he felt: ‘He should have taken his own life, too. That’s what he should have done … I will have to live with the shame for the rest of my life. People will always link me with him.’

Breivik, then, had a far more troubled childhood than it had first appeared.

Freud thought the answer to the maladies of the soul that threaten every individual was to immerse oneself in love and work, to find therein a reality principle, which enables the individual to overcome the solipsism of self. By his early 30s, Breivik had failed at both love and work.

Rather than face those defeats and consider the imperfections of judgement and character that had led him there, Breivik took flight from reality and sought refuge in the ether of the internet and, in the rage he found there, located blame for his world going awry outside of himself: in Muslims, feminists and Cultural Marxists. Rather than begin again, responding to life’s blows with the hard slog of building a life based in reality, he sought solace in a grandiose fantasy that removed him from the sites of his failures and humiliations - and into the grand and glorious delusional world of the crusading Knights Templar and their mission, of which he was a leader, a ‘Judiciar Knights Commander’.

This insignificant young man - people who knew him characterised him as ‘a nondescript individual who people quickly forgot’ - believed his crimes would bestow not just significance but immortality. His self-designed gravestone was to laud him as a great martyr, reading: ‘Born into Marxist Slavery on xx.xx.19xx. Died as a Martyr. All Free Europeans in your Eternal Debt.’

Rather than being insignificant, unable to leave home or separate from his mother, rejected by his father, scorned by women, a flop at business, he would stand as a Heroic Being, a brave knight, a man so powerful he could live as a god, with the capacity to give life or death to the young Norwegian progressives who had come to Utøya to share comradeship and love, full of hope, promise and plans for the future. They would never fulfil that promise for he had killed them. They were not the Chosen Ones. He, Anders Behring Breivik, was.

Christopher Lasch, in an afterword to his classic work first published in 1979, The Culture of Narcissism, remarked that his book had often been misunderstood. It was not merely about the ‘Me Decade’.

‘Narcissism,’ he said, ‘was not just another name for selfishness.’ Childrearing patterns and the structure of authority had been changed so profoundly by consumer capitalism over the 20th century, intensifying in the 1960s, with ‘far-reaching psychological repercussions’. Our very character had changed.

While my account differs from his defence of the patriarchal family, Lasch located his early study on the precise ground of my own inquiry: the effect of culture upon personality. Lasch pointed to the new character traits of shallowness, self-preoccupation, an incapacity to make commitments, a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose, a dislike of depending on anyone, and an incapacity for loyalty or gratitude.

All this was combined not with a strong sense of self, but with what Lasch described as the problem at the heart of Werner Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kasper Hauser - an absence at the core, a ‘hollowness’, an ‘inner emptiness’ and feeling of inauthenticity so profound it left one feeling utterly at life’s mercy. There was something else, perhaps most important of all, emerging: ‘the theatre of everyday life’. In a prophetic passage - long before the world of the internet, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the rest - Lasch wrote:

The proliferation of visual and auditory images in a ‘Society of the Spectacle’ as it has been described, encouraged a similar kind of preoccupation with the self. People now responded to others as if their actions were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present in everyone …

During the course of the last century, the old hysterias, the classic neuroses analysed by Freud, were giving way to new disorders of the self.

‘You used to see people coming in with hand-washing compulsions, phobias and familiar neuroses,’ the New York psychoanalyst Sheldon Bach said in 1976. ‘Now you see mostly narcissists.’ By the early 2000s the celebrated British psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy observed, ‘In recent years issues of narcissism have taken centre stage.’

While Breivik is undoubtedly an extreme case, narcissism has become the go-to diagnosis for a host of modern ills. It is our modern ‘hysteria’. As well as the more serious work by psychologists and psychoanalysts, there is an emerging genre of self-help books for those suffering at the hands of the narcissist - bosses, co-workers, parents, lovers, husbands, wives, teenagers and children.

The titles have a plaintive wail. Psychotherapist Eleanor Payson’s The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love and Family promises to be a ‘source of relief, hope and understanding to the countless adults living with the pain and confusion that occurs when dealing with the narcissistic individual’. In Why Is It Always About You? The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism, Sandy Hotchkiss offers insight into ‘one of the most prevalent personality disorders of our time’.

Such people are chronically self-focused; they monopolise conversation, put their own needs first, and exhibit a childlike quality of tyrannical rage when thwarted. A narcissist may seem confident and attractive, until some apparently minor offence triggers a fleecing, annihilating rage like no other. Empathy - that recognition of another’s pain - is missing. So too is the capacity for reciprocity - giving as well as receiving. Relationships tend to be one-way streets.

The narcissist must be the centre of attention. They soak up admiration like a sponge, need and use others as a narcissistic line of supply. Whatever is good for the self is good. They are prone to magical, grandiose thinking about their life: it is all or nothing. Greatness is what is desired; to be average is despised. Part of this derives from an exceptional sense of entitlement, of being uniquely special. And, being so ‘special’, it is hardly surprising they usually feel superior to other people. They can only be up if the people around them are down. They are the ‘captain on a ship of fools’. But they are also prone to savage envy. Their arrogance means that apologising, taking responsibility for a wrong, is impossible, for the narcissist is never wrong. At the end of any argument, the narcissist will see only that you have injured them. The capacity to place themselves in another person’s shoes is limited or missing. Often people around them give in to them, always walking on eggshells, as offence is taken so easily. They are Arthur Koestler’s ‘mimophant’—the term he coined for those who are as delicate as mimosa about their own feelings but display an elephantine hide of insensitivity towards the feelings of others.

Narcissists wreak havoc in other people’s lives. All of us have our moments, of course, where we might be self-centred, or vain, or envious, or give way to temper, without having a full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissism exists along a continuum: from the self-important nuisance at work to a psychopath like Breivik. But it is not simply a matter of the individual psyche. This is a problem of cultural significance.

There is very good evidence that the problem of narcissism is growing worse. Changes in our culture have created an economic, social and relational world that not only supports but actually celebrates narcissism, cultivating and embedding it as a character trait. While a malignant narcissist like Breivik is undoubtedly an extreme case, there is also an increasingly common syndrome, the ordinary, everyday narcissists who have their very own cult of personality. Scholars have found that narcissism is rising with each succeeding generation of American college students. Ordinary folk have been affected too. From the explosion in cosmetic surgery around the world, through the egos on display in the blogosphere and Twitterverse, to popular music lyrics, or the crazy world of celebrities and their imitators—where ordinary people hire paparazzi to give their life significance it doesn’t have—more people now expect red carpet treatment at home and work, and fume over slights and frustrations, even to the point of physically assaulting or killing fellow motorists in outbursts of the new phenomenon of road rage. In short, too many people behave like princes and princesses without the noblesse oblige.

But why? Are they born that way? Or is it the way they are raised? Is there something in contemporary childhood that might predispose them to such a tendency? What about the wider culture that shapes family life? What are the larger implications for our society of increasing narcissism, and how will it affect our response to the great challenges of our time, like climate change? Some are arguing that we spoil children, that the cult of self-esteem and parents over-involved in their children’s lives are at fault for producing an over-entitled generation. Yet no examination of the real facts of Breivik’s life really adds up, in any uncomplicated way, to a life of simple spoiling or too much attention. Rather his life was marked by the dark elements of contemporary life that few want to consider: family fragmentation, troubled early relationships, absent fathers, a strange admixture of permissiveness and neglect, combined with a high degree of material affluence.

When Breivik was arrested he held up a finger. It had a small cut on it. He stood on an island littered with sixty-nine shattered and bloodied corpses, yet as the policemen handcuffed him, he held up that finger. He wanted a Band-Aid. ‘He was really intent,’ said the policeman later, ‘on getting himself that Band-Aid.’

When the second team of psychiatrists ruled that Anders Breivik suffered from an extreme narcissistic personality disorder and was responsible for his actions and should stand trial, Breivik was triumphant. Here was the chance he hoped for: standing centre stage in front of the world’s cameras, avoiding what he called the ‘humiliation’ of being dismissed as mad.

Breivik arrived at the court handcuffed and smiling. He raised his fist in the Far Right salute. At first he displayed no emotion apart from that smirk. He was indifferent to the descriptions of his victims’ last calls to their loved ones, and to the detailed descriptions of their mutilated bodies.

He did not weep at the memory of the sound of the victims’ screams, or at the gasps from their grief-stricken families as they heard him coldly relate the circumstances of his killings, nor did he flinch at the enormity of what he had done. The deaths of all those young people were merely ‘collateral damage’ in the war of his imagining.

Describing his act as ‘spectacular’ - the embedding of spectators in that phrase is revealing - he bragged he ‘would do that all over again’.

Yet there was something at the trial that made him tremble with emotion: his face fell, the tears welled up and rolled down his cheeks. What made Breivik weep was his own rhetoric, as his video manifesto was played in court. What moved him was the sound of his own words.

As Breivik began his 21-year sentence, he complained about his ‘cruel and inhuman treatment’. In one of the most humane prison systems in the world, Breivik did not take long to feel aggrieved. He was not getting the treatment he felt entitled to. His cell lacked a good view. The version of PlayStation given to him was too old. The heating wasn’t turned up high enough. And his coffee was served too cold.

This is an extract from The Life of I: The New Culture of Narcissism by Anne Manne, published by MUP, RRP $32.99, Ebook 19.99. You can purchase the book here