The different levels of the human psyche are explained, as well as  how recent European intellectuals have invented political strategies to cope with this reality.  What we call "narcissism" may have more to do with traditional historical and cultural norms than with any individual aberration or pathology.

I've had bosses who put those little blocks in the way.  It's a way of pulling down the intellect of someone they fear.  After I was totally destroyed in the original workplace (lost my capacity to digest solid food) I eventually recovered over a couple of decades, whilst still holding off narcissistic abuse.  More recently when another boss tried this on me I caught him in his own trap, by noticing a contradiction he had built into his claims about reality.  He became totally paranoid after that for a few weeks, and I hadn't had to say a word, except to use silence to indicate my knowledge.

To the extent that people do not experience themselves to be whole, and to have thereby have sufficient resources to deal with complexity, they will resort to narcissistic defences.  This is only natural, that a simplified and false self will handle the problems for which one is not yet well-equipped.  The problem is that society has normalized this state of not being whole, so that educational systems are geared toward those who are fragile and incomplete, rather than being designed to cater to robust personalities or to facilitate the development of whole people.  Even the term, "robust", now has the opposite meaning, since it tends to evoke a sense of one who is virulently narcissistic, rather than of one who is whole and reslient.  Our very language has been co-opted .by the systematization of abnormality as the new normal.