Descriptive studies on narcissistic personality disorder

This article describes a series of empirical studies on narcissistic disturbances and the narcissistic personality disorder in psychiatric patients. The work began with a survey of the literature and a comparison of three diagnostic systems for narcissistic personality disorder that helped clarify the degree of concordance among the existing systematic descriptions. This work gave rise to the development of a semistructured interview: the Diagnostic Interview for Narcissism. This tool was then used for investigating the following two main questions about pathologic narcissism: (1) Which characteristics identify and best distinguish patients with pathologic narcissism from psychiatric patients with various other diagnoses? (2) Can the Diagnostic Interview for Narcissism identify and distinguish patients with narcissistic personality disorder from patients with other psychiatric disturbances or related personality disorders?