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How To Cure John Edwards' Narcissism

It's been hard to feel much shock about John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter: Every other month, it seems, we receive the revelation that a powerful politician has risked his career to get a bit on the side. Edwards would almost seem to be the norm rather than the radical exception. But the literary critic in me is interested by one new-ish element: the plea of "narcissism." Whereas political mea culpas have often been cast in the language of sin and redemption, this one was explicitly cast in the language of disease and recovery. On Friday, Edwards told Bob Woodruff on ABC's Nightline that he "went from being a young senator" to "running for president ... becoming a national public figure, all of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want; you're invincible." 

From one perspective, it was a perfectly spun rationale for our recovery-story ridden age, filtering Machiavelli through Freud, so that what we end up with is the idea that power doesn't just corrupt, it makes us narcissists. (We are all patients now.) From another perspective, though, it's a flop of an excuse: You can't forgive narcissists, you can only learn to live with them—or not. Do we really need to know whether Hunter's child is his? Do we really need to wax on about the harm Edwards would have caused if he had been elected and the affair had come out? No, we already know that he is a narcissist. that he had an inflated sense of self-importance that obscures the worth of those around him—campaign staffers, donors, volunteers. And so in a sense the perfect retort to Edwards would be to respond to him as one might to a clinically diagnosed patient: You thrive on attention and drama. So we're not going to be your enablers anymore; we're just going to turn away.