Megalomania: I'm great. Or?
We humans often portray ourselves better than we are. Why?
Specifically in youth, stating is the attempt to be someone and to motivate oneself at the same time. One wants to influence the foreign image. The aim is to receive positive feedback from others in order to strengthen their self-esteem. Swaggering can therefore also stem from wanting to protect yourself because you feel inferior.
When does it get tricky and tends towards overconfidence?
Specifying is a game of reality and wishful thinking. It's about questions like, "What am I ??,? What can I ??,? Where would I like to go ?? However, at the latest in the beginning of the thirties, the so-called "psychosocial identity" should become reality? have developed. Now a person should be able to realistically assess what he is really good at, because he has learned it and there are results. It is important to break away from the fantasy of his youth, okay, in this life I will not become a great musician anymore.
But how do you know if you are a talent or a dilettante?
We need criticism and praise of a social environment. These feedbacks show us limits or support your own assessment. The important thing is that you have people who ground you, because you stick to the "wrong"? Being stuck, one fails to develop into the person that one really is.
Can it go the other way, too, if a child always hears: "Do not admit!"
That's what I call a produced inferiority complex. There is positive and negative narcissism. The one variant is to believe that one is entitled to everything in life because the parents have always praised one over the green clover. The second one evolves because one has always been made small and on it now with? Whom I show it? reacts, a kind of social revenge.
Theodor Itten is the author of the book "Megalomania: The Psychology of Overconfidence" (Orell Füssli)
