The Diagnostic Interview for Narcissistic Patients

Abstract

This report describes the content and development of a semistructured interview, the Diagnostic Interview for Narcissism. The interview evaluates 33 features of pathological narcissism covering five domains of function: grandiosity, interpersonal relations, reactiveness, affects and moods, and social and moral adaptation. Its utility is established by reliability studies and by developing a scoring system from a sample of 24 prototypic narcissistic patients who were compared with 58 others. Because narcissistic personality disorder is a widely used diagnosis whose inclusion in DSM-III-R was without reference to an empirical base, this instrument offers a method for doing much-needed research.