While living in London and working full-time, I pursued an interest in psychology alongside my engineering career and did a master’s. My dissertation looked for links between personality and coping with stress.
I’d always liked health psychology, and had an interest in clinical psychology too. Reading Alexander Lowen’s Narcissism: Denial of the True Self, I theorised that if the psychoanalytic frameworks of narcissism actually reflect the real mechanisms behind that personality style, they should predict specific coping behaviours. In my experiment, I found evidence that narcissistic traits are linked to maladaptive coping — specifically, denial.
A year later, Bruce Fernie picked up the project and wrote it up properly, with me as second author and my professor, Ana Nikčević, as third. It was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders and has since picked up 31 citations. My agent told me this is a useful study for clinicians — and why would it lie to me?