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Selfishness is often demonized in our society.

Sometimes the solution to the problems people bring to therapy is being more selfish, not less.

Is selfishness ever a virtue? We live in a culture that worships selflessness and despises selfishness. Most of us are taught from a very early age that it is bad or sinful to be selfish. Selfishness is denounced by parents, teachers, friends, etc., and children are frequently punished by scolding, shaming, berating, humiliating, criticizing, and, in some cases, even beating them. Religion, culture, and modern psychology have contributed to this exceedingly negative attitude toward the expression of selfishness, whether in children, adolescents, or adults.

Societally, we seem to believe that selfishness is an evil tendency or trait that must be forcibly exorcised as soon as possible in the service of what we euphemistically call socialization—the massive suppression and denial of our most basic, vital, and essential self. Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents (1929), recognized that human beings are naturally and inherently selfish, which can be antithetical to creating community and collective culture, and, therefore, such selfish tendencies, he said, must be suppressed, denied, or repressed.

Yet, despite thousands of years of suppression, pathological or neurotic selfishness, or what we today call narcissism, is even more ubiquitous, pervasive, and problematical than ever. Why? Could we paradoxically be engendering more neurotic or psychotic selfishness in our culture by suppressing and denigrating our innate, normal, or healthy selfishness? Might our entire approach to the problem of selfishness be grossly misguided and ultimately self-defeating?

Clearly, when we are speaking of selfishness as excessive egoism, self-centeredness, greediness, narcissism, cruelty, violence, and being inconsiderate of and insensitive to the needs, dignity, and feelings of others, this is certainly something negative, destructive, evil, and undesirable, though, to some extent, tragically unavoidable in human society. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1978) theorized that,........

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