 29. Narcissism in Contemporary Personality Psychology  631
The classic literature on NPD provides di -
vergent perspectives on the exact parenting 
practices implicated in the development of 
narcissistic tendencies (see Horton, Bleau, & 
Drwecki, 2006, for a succinct overview of 
different clinical theories). Theorists such as 
Kernberg (1998) suggest that a lack of paren -
tal warmth and a high level of control lead 
children to develop an excessive need for es -
teem. According to this view, narcissism is a 
response to unmet needs for acceptance and 
support from caregivers early in develop -
ment. A related psychodynamic perspective 
from Kohut (1966) suggests that parent– 
child enmeshment causes narcissism. Ac -
cording to this view, narcissism results from 
parental overindulgence, because the devel -
oping child never acquires a realistic sense 
of his or her own limitations and genuine 
status in the world. Alternatively, narcissism 
can result from too much parental control, 
so that the child never experiences the frus -
trations associated with trying and failing to 
act upon the world in an independent fash -
ion. The basic idea is that the child’s devel -
opment of an independent sense of self was 
somehow thwarted by parenting that was 
either too lenient or too controlling. Millon 
(1969) proposed a social learning account 
positing that narcissism stems from parental 
indulgence, coddling, and excessive praise, 
such that the child believes that he or she is 
exceptional (see also Imbesi, 1999).
At the risk of oversimplification, many 
existing developmental perspectives predict 
that narcissism emerges from too much pa -
rental control, rejection/hostility, or indul -
gence. These ideas have been tested in some 
cross-  sectional studies that primarily use 
recollections of parenting to operationalize 
early childhood experiences. For example, 
Horton et al. (2006) found a positive asso -
ciation between recalled parental warmth 
and overall NPI scores in college students 
(see also Otway & Vignoles, 2006). They 
also created a variable called unhealthy nar -
cissism by partialing out the effects of trait 
self- esteem from total NPI scores. Unhealthy 
narcissism was associated with recollections 
of increased parental warmth and psycho -
logical control (i.e., parental intrusiveness), 
a finding consistent with enmeshment pre -
dictions. Horton et al. (2006) conducted 
a similar study with high school students. Overall NPI scores were predicted by in -
creased reports of warmth and decreased 
reports of monitoring (i.e., whether parents 
are aware of the child’s friends and actions 
outside the home). Unhealthy narcissism was 
associated with low parental monitoring. 
In a more recent study, Horton and Tritch 
(2014) found that the NPI Entitlement scale 
was positively associated with recollections 
of higher levels of psychological control and 
lower levels of monitoring in a sample of 145 
college students.
Cater, Zeigler-  Hill, and Vonk (2011) 
considered how recollections of early life 
experiences were associated with entitle -
ment, grandiosity, and vulnerability. Thus, 
their study can be integrated with the NSM 
in a fairly straightforward manner. They 
found that entitlement was positively associ -
ated with recollections of harsh punishment, 
negatively associated with recollections of 
secure attachments to caregiver, and posi -
tively associated with threats of separation. 
The findings for grandiosity were more 
ambiguous given that one measure showed 
largely null effects (grandiosity elements of 
the NPI) and another measure (based on the 
Pathological Narcissism Inventory; Pincus 
et al., 2009) showed a positive correlation 
with recollections of harsh punishments and 
separation. Vulnerability was positively cor -
related with harsh discipline and threats of 
separation. Multivariate analyses focused 
on unique associations were generally con -
sistent with these zero-order correlations.
The existing cross-  sectional work seems 
to suggest that entitlement is associated with 
parental control and intrusiveness, where -
as grandiosity is associated with parental 
warmth. However, there are numerous limi -
tations associated with cross-  sectional stud -
ies of parenting and narcissism. First, there 
are very few constraints on the direction of 
causal influence (see Stattin & Kerr, 2000), 
as it is well known that children can evoke 
certain kinds of parenting practices (e.g., 
Bell, 1968). Likewise, retrospective biases 
factor into the interpretation of these stud -
ies. For example, the more adaptive aspects 
of narcissism, which overlap with self-  esteem 
(see Wetzel & Robins, 2016), may contrib -
ute to overly rosy recollections of parenting, 
whereas the more maladaptive aspects of 
narcissism may contribute to overly harsh 