Narcissistic defences

Narcissistic defences are processes whereby the idealized aspects of the self are preserved, and its limitations denied.

Quotes

• Some of our brethren are so very full of learning, that you cannot mention any thing to them which they do not know better than yourself!!— nothing is strange to them!!— they knew every thing years ago! ... All this is the result of ignorance and ill-breeding; for a man of good-breeding, sense and penetration, if he had heard a subject told twenty times over, and should happen to be in company where one should commence telling it again, he would wait with patience on its narrator, and see if he would tell it as it was told in his presence before—paying the most strict attention to what is said, to see if any more light will be thrown on the subject.
  • David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1830), pp. 37-38