Egotism
Egotism (borrowed from the English egotism , French égotisme ) describes the exaggerated tendency to put oneself in the foreground. It is to be distinguished from the term egoism .
origin
The term was coined in 1714 by the English essayist Joseph Addison . In his literary-moral weeklies, Addison used the term to criticize the excessive use of the ego pronoun and the egocentric self-representation of some of his contemporaries. In the 18th century it was not very common to use the word “I” in literary works. For example, Horace Walpole wrote in the foreword to the second edition of his novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764 : "The inclined recording, which the reading world appreciated this little story, asks the poet to explain the principles according to which he wrote it." The use the “third person” instead of the word “I” does not prevent the author from referring to himself, until then known to the public as a politician, as a “poet” in the first sentence and from following a rambling self-portrayal .
The term was taken up in 1832 by the French writer and philosopher Stendhal (1783–1842) in his autobiographical text Souvenirs d'Égotisme (Eng. Memories of an egotist ) and differentiated into an honest and a hideous egotism. With the honest egotism he questions his own literary work and the importance of his message critically, while he interprets the hideous egotism in the sense of Addison.
In linguistic usage today, egotism is primarily associated with its negative connotations . The term describes the motivation to put only positive characteristics in the foreground for oneself and to describe them in a verbose and intensified manner. This can lead to overconfidence and a loss of reality. In relation to the environment, egotism can be destructive and often achieve the opposite of what was originally intended by self-expression. In this sense, egotism is closely related to narcissism , a term that Sigmund Freud introduced in 1914 as a specialist psychological term.
See also
literature
- Otto Behaghel, Fritz Neumann, Karl Bartsch: The pathological egotism in Stendhal (H. Beyle) , in literary sheet for Germanic and Romance philology , edited by Fr. von Oppeln-Bronikowski, p. 167, 1944
- Otto Flake : Experiment about Stendhal , 1947
- Rudolf Kayser: Stendhal: Or, the life of an egotist , 1928
Web links
- Online lexicon for psychology and education: 'Egotism'. In: Stangl, W. (2020) .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto . Berlin, 1810. Preface to the second edition (German translation at zeno.org)
- ↑ See: Sigmund Freud: For the introduction of narcissism. International Psychoanalytical Publishing House, Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich 1924