Broke: Richard II was a narcissist
Woke: Henry IV was a narcissist
Bespoke: we need to stop psychoanalysing people who died 600 years ago as if we can gain any real insights into who they really were privately from the public image they projected or had projected onto them. We also need to stop slinging out “narcissist” as our byword for “basically evil”.
#also we need to take historical context into account when talking about MEDIEVAL KINGS - @shredsandpatches
I mean they were kings. There's inevitably going to be a sense of entitlement and self-obsession and a need for excessive admiration and attention. In fact not getting crazy devotion/ attention might have been the first signs of revolt and resentment for them. But at the end of the day, reducing a historical personality, who died feckin ages ago to one word is a bit.... excuse me for saying this but.... stupid.
I mean, yeah. This post is a commentary on a tendency by historians (Nigel Saul, Ian Mortimer, Helen Carr, Helen Castor, etc.) who call Richard II a narcissist in the clinical or pseudo-clinical sense, i.e. they're using the DSM, Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness or pop-psychology articles and TikToks like "9 Signs You're Dating A Narcissist" to diagnose him with Narcissistic Personality Disorder which they basically take to mean "irredeemable garbage-person disorder". Not in the sense of "he was to probably some degree self-absorbed and entitled".
There are a whole lot of issues with this. Leaving the whole quagmire of issues brought about by people who have no mental health training to speak of diagnosing a 600+ year old dead guy whose life was subject to heavy propagandistic rewriting following his deposition aside though or that they effectively interpret historical evidence of Richard's life through the belief that he was a narcissist instead of the evidence leading them to that conclusion or that they're effectively contributing to the stigma around NPD... the DSM, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness and 9 Nines You're Dating A Narcissist are all written from a modern-day, western viewpoint talking about modern, western individuals. The DSM is not designed to deal with medieval society, much less diagnose medieval kings, lol. Yeah, Richard might have believed he was "special and unique" (one of the DSM criteria for NPD) but he was a king living in a society that genuinely believed in the divine right of kings so that belief reflected the reality of his society and culture.
I'm not saying "the divine right of kings" is a fine and dandy piece of political or societal dogma or that Richard couldn't have possibly been a selfish asshole with entitlement issues. What I am saying, though, is if we want to have some hope of understanding who Richard was and why he acted the way he did, we need to keep his political, social and cultural context in mind and not base our understandings of his personality on pop psychology articles. The same goes for Henry IV should the pop history gods pull a uno reverso and start calling him a narcissist instead of Richard.
