Trust, Trustworthiness, Narcissism and Moral Blindness: An Examination of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Michael S. Katz

What is at stake for a teacher to function as a positive moral role model for her students? How does one earn the appropriate trust of ones students in this complex moral enterprise of teaching? Similarly, how might one betray the trust of ones students? (1) These issues will be examined through an analysis of the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. a novel that reveals the dangers of a powerful personality seeking to dominate the lives of young impressionable girls. (2) It is also a novel that reveals how a lack of self-knowledge about ones sub-conscious motivations and needs can lead to using ones students inappropriately to meet those needs; in this regard, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie reminds us how moral philosophy and psychological insight, or the lack thereof, are bound up with the efforts to treat students well and to behave in ways that morally warrant the trust most of them typically grant their teachers. Trust is based, in part, on individuals living up to the legitimate expectations that are placed upon them in the roles they play. In most instances, teachers are clearly expected to follow an established curriculum. Moreover, they are expected to initiate their students into mastering the subjects they are hired to teach; at the elementary and sometimes at the middle school level, they may teach several subjects, not merely one. In the early grades, a teachers role may more closely resemble that of a surrogate parent in that she is concerned directly with her students moral, social, and psychological development as well as their cognitive growth. A teachers trustworthiness as an employee seems to be clearly connected to how well she performs her job-related functions and how well she protects and maintains the well being of her students; their well being is something that is entrusted to her. In this regard, we must remember that teachers are entrusted by school officials to act in the best interests of their students. Legally they are in loco parentisin the place of a parent. They are morally obligated to act in ways that insure that the intellectual, social, physical, psychological, and even spiritual well being is not harmed, and preferably enhanced. Without doubt, teachers are in especially privileged positions either to promote or harm a students well being; and they can do so both intentionally and unintentionally. In this regard, teachers make hundreds of decisions and judgments every day and every week. Even teachers acting with the best intentions are capable of making bad judgments that can be harmful to ones students. Thus, it seems critical for teachers to understand the nature of their influence on their students; they must consider how this influence can be either beneficial or harmful. The failure to do so puts teachers at risk of doing harm to students, even if it is not their intention to do so. The case of Miss Jean Brodie is clearly a case where a teacher believed that her influence was essentially beneficial, but did not understand its potentially harmful aspects. What I shall argue in the paper is this: because she did not understand her negative influence on her students, Miss Jean Brodie, although heroic in some respects, was ultimately untrustworthy. This essay focuses upon several questions: What kind of a moral role model is Miss Jean Brodie? Does she earn her students trust? Her employers trust? Does she warrant such trust? Or not warrant it? Is she trustworthy? If so, why? If not, why not? What can we learn

about trust and trustworthiness from examining her case in its three-dimensional complexity. It should be noted that only a small sub-set of philosophers of education in general, and ethicists of education in particular, draw heavily on the analysis of literature in their teaching and writing. However, this papers analysis of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has a programmatic thrust as well as an interpretive one. It is to invite philosophers and ethicists of education to draw more heavily on appropriate, excellent novels in their teaching since these novels are excellent vehicles for examining the three dimensional complexity of human relationships. In responding to a novel, the reader is invited to participate imaginatively in the story and to respond emotionally as well as rationally to the moral situations it dramatizes. As I see it, one thing that makes teaching moral issues through literature so compelling is that the complexity of interpreting good literature well renders thoughtful disagreement about moral character and moral responsibility unavoidable. Good novels with characters developed in their three-dimensional complexity seem consistently to bring about the following educational conditions: reasonable people disagree about what is going on in a messy situation and disagree about what is at stake in treating others well. Exploring the reasons underlying these disagreements, in my view, makes teaching these issues through literature so rewarding. With this introductory comment, a caveat for my own interpretation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is in order: many of my students and my readers will likely disagree with some (or much) of my own interpretation of Miss Jean Brodie as a heroic, flawed, well-intentioned, but self-deceived and ultimately untrustworthy teacher of young Scottish girls. Or they may agree with some of my conclusions but disagree with the basis on which I drew them. Now, on to the novel itself. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie takes place in the early pre-WWII years of the 1930s in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1931, we find Miss Jean Brodie at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, a conservative, traditional private school, with a class of ten year old girls, girls that she will teach for two years before they will graduate to the Senior School and no longer be under her direct instruction. Jean Brodie is a dedicated, charismatic teacher, a Romantic, a nonconformist to traditional conservative Scottish values; she is an Edinburgh spinster of the deepest dye, and a person determined to make a deep, lasting impression on her students. In fact, she aims to take a small sub-set of her ten year old girls and mold them in her own image. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life, Miss Jean Brodie was proud to boast when she was in her prime.(3) She would imbue them with her passion for art, for music, for beauty, and for truth, and she would make her sub-set of Brodie girls the crme de la crme. The elite sub-set of Brodie girls were quite different from each other; they consisted of the following: Monica Douglas, with her fat, peg-like legs, long dark plaits, and very red nose, would become famous for mathematics; Rose Stanley was a pretty girl, who Miss Brodie envisioned becoming a great lover, famous for sex; Eunice Gardiner, small neat, and famous for her spritely gymnastics and glamorous swimming might entertain the group by doing cartwheels; Sandy Stranger, a girl with little pig-like eyes was famous for her vowel sounds; she would betray Miss Jean Brodie, cause her to be fired, and later become a nun. Jenny Gray was the prettiest and most graceful girl of the set. Finally, Mary McGregor, the scapegoat of the group, was a girl whose fame rested on her being a silent lump, a nobody who everybody could blame.(4). The Brodie girls stood out both by what they knew and what they didnt. They were imbued early on with Miss Jean Brodies values; these values manifested themselves inside

the classroom where Jean Brodie often deviated from the prescribed curriculum and outside the classroom, where her selected students were invited to tea, attend the theatre, take walks through Edinburgh, and make weekend visits to Cramond where Miss Brodie maintained an ongoing affair for several years with the music teacher Mr. Lowther. This is how the Brodie girls were described early in the novel: These girls formed the Brodie set. This is what they had been called even before the headmistress had given them the name, in scorn, when they had moved from the junior to the Senior School at the age of twelve. At that time they had been immediately recognizable as Miss Brodies pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorized curriculumand useless to the school as a school. These girls were discovered to have heard of the Buchmanites and Mussolini, the Italian Renaissance painters, the advantages of skin cleansing cream and witchhazel over honest soap and water, and the word menarche; the interior decoration of the London house of the author of Winnie the Pooh had been described to them, as had the love lives of Charlotte Bronte and Miss Brodie herself. They were aware of the existence of Einstein and the arguments of those who considered the Bible to be untrue. They know the rudiments of astrology but not the Battle of Flodden or the capital of Finland. All of the Brodie set, save one, counted on its fingers, as had Miss Brodie, with accurate results, more or less. (5). How did Jean Brodie select the special group of girls that would make up her Brodie Girls? Her selection revealed a special recognition of which girls could be thoroughly dominated by her charismatic personality without serious parental objections: Miss Brodie had already selected her favorites [by 1931], or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy; these parents being either too enlightened to complain or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation (6) Three components make up the core of trusting relationships: 1)the one trusted; 2) that which one is entrusted within this case, the well-being of ones students; and 3) the ones trusting. Miss Brodie clearly picked students whose parents, for very different reasons, would trust in a very uncritical way, how their daughters teachers behaved. That these women did not raise questions about their daughters regularly accompanying an unmarried woman on weekends to an unmarried teachers estate reveals a part of their overly trusting nature, something Jean Brodie could exploit as she crossed the traditional boundary of not exposing ones students to the intimate details of ones private life. That Jean Brodies ten year old girls would be disinclined not to fully trust her seems almost too obvious to mention, but it must be duly noted. Overly trusting relationships open up increased possibility for the abuse of such trust, as ones skeptical guard is not raised very high; conversely, ones vulnerability to a powerful, trusted person is simultaneously increased. In her analysis of trust and trustworthiness, Annette Baier reminds us that several aspects of trustworthiness cut across most of the trusted roles that people play These aspects are : incompetence, negligence, and ill will.(7) Consider negligence. If one does not regularly perform ones duties responsibly, one cannot be trusted. Consider a person who does not turn

in work when it is expected or does not prepare properly for her duties. Clearly this person would not be trusted to execute her appropriate role. How does this consideration apply to Jean Brodie? She is clearly negligent when she does not follow the prescribed curriculum, but deviates from it while still pretending to the headmistress to be following it. Early on, she tells her students: If anyone comes along.in the course of the following lesson, remember that it is the hour for English grammar. Meantime I will tell you a little of my life when I was younger, though six years older than the man himself. (8) As Miss Brodie tells about her lovers fatal accident in WWI and as several ten year old girls begin crying in response to it, the headmistress, Miss Mackay makes a surprise visit and asks What are you little girls crying for? They are moved by a story I have been telling them. We are having a history lesson, said Miss Brodie. Clearly Miss Brodie is lying; moreover she demands that her girls participate in the lie to conceal that she is not following the established curriculum. This behavior is clearly untrustworthy. Now, let us consider Baiers other two candidates for untrustworthiness: negligence and ill will. It is unclear the degree to which Jean Brodies deviations from the required curriculum would constitute negligence. It certainly might; however, the fact that her girls can pass the required exams to enter the Senior School prevents that charge from being made. With regard to ill will, she certainly escapes that charge. She seems to harbor little ill will towards her students, albeit she has little tolerance for attitudes or conduct she does not approve of. However, at times she does seem to be remarkably insensitive to Mary McGregor, embarrassing her frequently in front of her peers. So, the charge of ill will may be open to question. Nevertheless, with most of her students, and her selected set in particular, Jean Brodie seems quite dedicated to them. She views herself as a person who has renounced opportunities for private self-fulfillment to dedicate herself to her girls education. Moreover, she expects her special girls to dedicate themselves to some noble pursuit as she has done. At one point she compares her own dedication to the famous ballet dancer Pavlovas, insisting that Pavlova is a model both for her and for her girls: Pavlova contemplates her swans in order to perfect her swan dance, she studies them. That is true dedication. You must all grow up to be dedicated women as I have dedicated myself to you.(9) But herein lies the subtle form of self-deception that prevents Jean Brodie from caring for her students in a healthy way. (10) It also demonstrates a critical psychological feature of Miss Jean Brodie that seems to be rarely mentioned in analyses of teaching--narcissism. Miss Brodies form of narcissism is so powerful, in fact, that it functions, I believe, as the primary cause of her pervasive moral blindness and underlies her need to dominate her favored students lives. What is narcissism? In a penetrating analysis of the subject, Sam Vaknin defines it as follows: A pattern of traits and behaviours which signify infatuation and obsession with ones self to the exclusion of all others and the egoistic and ruthless pursuit of ones gratification, dominance or ambition. (11) If we view Miss Jean Brodie through the lenses of narcissism, we see quite clearly how everything she does and says is designed to meet her insatiable need not only to be thoroughly loved but to be greatly admired, even revered, by her students, especially her favored sub-set of Brodie Girls. She sees herself as a heroine who will save them from the pedestrian depths of conventional Scottish morality; she will be the person who inspires them to view the world exactly as she does, colored by her aesthetic preferences, her philosophical commitments, and her grandiose and rather distorted views of heroic accomplishment, two versions of which are those of Franco and Mussolini.

Jean Brodie, perhaps without realizing it, cannot care for her students in healthy ways, and, from my viewpoint, healthy caring lies at the heart of effective, trustworthy moral relationships with students. In teaching about caring and being a trustworthy teacher, I draw heavily on both the work of Nel Noddings and Milton Mayeroff. In this regard, Miss Jean Brodie is incapable, because of her narcissism, of demonstrating what Milton Mayeroff describes as the essential intention of caring for anotherhelping that person actualize herself as an independent person, one capable of making her own decisions about her life. (12 ). What she ultimately seeks is to have her students become thoroughly dependent on her guidance and completely willing to meet her own selfish needs for being the most powerful figure in their lives. Jean Brodie, in sum, is blind to the ways in which she exploits her students admiration of her as a gifted teacher, a brilliantly cultured woman, and a towering force of rebellious individualism. At the heart of Miss Jean Brodies failure to warrant the appropriate trust. of her students lies her self-deceived, self-centered control of her students; she does not respect them as unique individuals who should be educated to make own independent judgments about their lives.(13) Quite the opposite. Jean Brodie narcissistically seeks to make her girls extensions of her own values, dreams, fantasies, and delusions of power. The tragic effect of Jean Brodies misunderstanding of her dedication to her girls is that she ultimately makes them into instruments for meeting her own deep psychological needs; she fails both in caring for them as unique individuals and in showing them anything like a Kantian respect for persons. (14) In so doing, Miss Jean Brodie, I believe, forfeits her warrant to be trusted. She forfeits the possibility of being viewed as morally trustworthy. As Miss Brodies girls leave her direct instruction after two years, she is not willing to free them from her dominating influence; she still seeks to influence how they decide which activities they should invest time in or which causes they commit should themselves to . She still sees herself as the guiding force in making romantic heroines of each of them. And when they dont behave in ways that fit her distinctive vision for them she is either disappointed, frustrated, or angry. Notice how she responds to Eunice Gardiner not becoming a pioneer missionary: All that term [the one after Eunice enters the Senior School] she tried to inspire Eunice to become at least a pioneer missionary in some deadly and dangerous zone of the earth, for it was intolerable to Miss Brodie that any of her girls should grow up not largely dedicated to some vocation. You will end up as a Girl Guide leader in a suburb like Corstorphine, she said warningly to Eunice, who was in fact secretly attracted to this idea and who lives in Corstorphine. (15) (Bold and underlining mine) Ironically, according to Sandy Stranger, Miss Jean Brodies intolerance of the girl guides and their willingness to submit almost blindly to their leader may have been marked by jealousy; she speculates that Miss Brodie admired Mussolinis fascisti and had unconsciously made her girls into a form of fascisti marching behind Miss Brodie. Sandy recalled Miss Brodies admiration for Mussolinis marching troops, and the picture she had brought back from Italy showing the triumphant March of the black uniforms in Rome. They were dark as anything and all marching in the straightest of files, with their hands raised at the same angle, while Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress and watched them.It occurred to Sandythat the Brodie set was Miss Brodies fascisti, not to the naked eye, marching along, but all

knit together for her need and in another way, marching along. (16) Notice Sandys observation: Miss Brodies girls were all knit together for her need. One might say that Miss Jean Brodies dedication to her special set of girls is based not on one particular need but on several deeply felt psychological needs: for leadership; for approval; for love; for adoration; for influence; and ultimately for sexual sublimation Ultimately, only one of the girls, Sandy Stranger, sees the serious moral danger in Miss Jean Brodies effort to impose her will on her girls; she realizes quite painfully how Miss Brodie seeks to satisfy her own frustrated. sexual desires through influencing the direction of Rose Stanleys life. Towards the end of the senior school, Sandy had experienced the power of Calvinism through her readings and experience. This religious perspective began to transform her perception of, and her relationship with, Miss Jean Brodie. Sandy concluded that John Calvin believed that he having made it Gods pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation so that their surprise at the end [the Day of Judgment] might be the nastier.(17) Sandy had always been described by Miss Jean Brodie as the one with insight. In fact, Sandys Calvinistic intuitions about Miss Jean Brodies life were largely implicit; they were not something she could clearly articulate in propositions. Sandy was unable to formulate these exciting propositions; nevertheless she experienced them in the air she breathed, she sensed them in the curiously defiant way in which the people she knew broke the Sabbath, and she smelt them in the excesses of Miss Brodie in her prime. (18) Sandy realized something that none of the other girls realized: namely that Jean Brodie, in renouncing her own passionate love for the one-armed Catholic art teacher Teddy Lloyd, still aimed to sublimate her erotic attachment to him by having Rose become his lover; in this devious Brodie scheme, Sandy would become the informant reporting to Miss Jean Brodie how the love affair was progressing. It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyds lover, and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crme de la crme. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea which fascinated Sandy in her present mind. After all, it was only an idea. And there was no pressing hurry in the matter, for Miss Brodie liked to take her leisure over the unfolding of her plans, most of her joy deriving from the preparation, and moreover, even if these plans were as clear to her own mind as they were to Sandys, the girls were too young. (19) Ironically, Sandy participates fully in the spirit of this plan, visiting the Lloyds frequently and reporting to Miss Jean Brodie how things were proceeding with the portraits of Rose, portraits which resembled Jean Brodie. It seemed that Teddy Lloyd was secretly in love with Miss Jean Brodie and she was in love with him; however, since he was a Catholic with six children, Miss Brodie could never allow herself to have an active love affair with him as she could with the unmarried music teacher, Mr. Lowther. As we interpret the issue of trust and trustworthiness in the moral lives of teachers, we should note that trust is primarily a psychological concept while trustworthiness is a moral one; trustworthiness is the quality or the condition that warrants our trusting another. As a psychological feature of relationships, trust usually seems to be that which must be built up over time; yet, it may be shattered through a single actan act of duplicity, an act of

malice, or even a betrayal of confidence. Thus, although trust seems critical to most important, satisfying ethical relationships, including teacher-student relationships, it can be much more easily destroyed than established. In the case of Miss Jean Brodie and Sandy Stranger, however, the deeply powerful bonds of trust that had been built up between them over many years would not be easily broken; they would start to erode gradually. Several factors made Sandy realize ultimately that Miss Jean Brodie was untrustworthy and that her powerful influence over young girls must end: 1) Sandys emerging Calvinistic perspective; 2) her grasp of Miss Brodies devious plans for Roses sexual relationship to her secret lover Teddy Lloyd; and 3) her realization that Miss Jean Brodie had influenced another girl, Joyce Emily, to experience an untimely death by blindly committing herself to one of Miss Jean Brodies misguided political causesFrancos civil war in Spain. Let us briefly explore the path that led Sandy Stranger to betray Miss Jean Brodie. Sandy noticed that Teddy Lloyds passion for Jean Brodie was greatly in evidence in all of the portraits he did of the various members of the Brodie set. (20) Nevertheless, in spite of Sandys realization of Miss Jean Brodies plan for Rose to become Teddy Lloyds lover and her to be her private informant of the affair, Sandy remains close and affectionate with Miss Brodie in the early stages of the plan going forward. The author writes: Sandy felt warmly toward Miss Brodie at these times when she saw how misled she was in her idea of Rose. It was then that Miss Brodie looked beautiful and fragile, just as dark heavy Edinburgh itself suddenly could be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets. In the same way Miss Brodies masterful features became clear and sweet to Sandy when viewed in the curious light of the womans folly. (21) Think of how extremely difficult it might be for a young impressionable girl to betray the person who has mentored her for several years and who has showered countless hours of affectionate attention on her. Such betrayal requires considerable mental clarity, resoluteness, and courage. Nevertheless, Sandy Stranger finally resolved that Miss Jean Brodies domination of young girls must be ended. But breaking away from Miss Brodie would not be easy for she had become an intimate part of each of these girls lives and personalities: By the time their friendship with Miss Brodie was of seven years standing it had worked itself into their bones, so that they could not break away without, as it were, splitting their bones to do so. (22) A turning point in Sandys break with Jean Brodie occurs when she suddenly grasps the passion behind Miss Jean Brodies plan for Rose to become Teddy Lloyds lover. In a conversation with Jean Brodie. Sandys heart and mind awaken. : And Miss Brodie said to Sandy: From what you tell me. I should think that Rose and Teddy Lloyd will soon be lovers. All at once Sandy realized that this was not all theory and a kind of Brodie game, in the way that much of life was unreal talk and game-planning, like the prospects of war and other theories that people were putting about in the air like pigeonsBut this was not theory; Miss Brodie meant it. Sandy looked at her, and perceived that the woman was obsessed with the need for Rose to sleep with the man she herself was in love with; there was nothing new

in the idea; it was the reality that was new. (23) Sandy realized that in her own way, Miss Jean Brodie had anointed herself as the providence for her girls and had a right to control their destinies. She thinks she is Providence, thought Sandy, she sees the beginning and the end.(24 ) The other incident that made Sandy see Miss Jean Brodie as a dangerous, untrustworthy influence involved Joyce Emily, a rich girl who sought unsuccessfully to join the Brodie set but was never accepted; they viewed her as a delinquent whose parents had dumped her on the school, but Miss Brodie found time to take her up. She took Joyce Emily to tea and the theatre on her own. (25) . Joyce Emily boasted that her brother had gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War and that she wanted to go to; everyone assumed that she was anti-Franco. Then, it was reported that Joyce Emily had run away to Spain and had been killed in an accident when the train she was traveling on was attacked; later, Miss Brodie confesses to Sandy that it was she who urged Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for Franco: I admit, and sometimes I regretted urging young Joyce Emily to go to Spain to fight for Franco, she would have done admirably for him, a girl of instinct, a ----. Did she go to fight for Franco? said Sandy. That was the intention. I made her see sense. However, she didnt have the chance to fight at all, poor girl. (26) Miss Brodie had clearly caused a young girl to die prematurely fighting for one of her misguided heroic causesFrancos victory in Spain. Sandy could bear it no more. Ultimately she revealed to headmistress Miss Mackay that Jean Brodie has fascist ideas which she shares with her students. Ironically, Miss Brodies fascist ideas provide the justification for her longsought resignation, not her amoral conduct nor her disregard for the standard curriculum, nor her bizarre domination of a sub-set of young girls. However, Miss Jean Brodies ultimate demise results from one of the Brodie girls concluding that she was deeply untrustworthy as a teachera judgment that is hard to refute. Ironically, Miss Brodie never knows which of her girls has betrayed her. In teaching this novel, I ask students to consider the many dimensions that underlie trustworthiness in a teacher: competence, negligence, and ill will (Annette Baiers categories); and some of my own: healthy caring; showing students respect; a proper set of boundaries; good judgment in acting in the students best interests; not exploiting students to meet ones own psychological needs; and not deceiving oneself in the process; however heroic she was in many ways, Miss Jean Brodie could not meet the serious demands of trustworthiness; she also could not view her own conduct or her own motivation honestly; ultimately she is victimized by her own thoroughgoing narcissism, the source of her moral blindness and self-deception. Finally, however inspiring she is for her talents, philosophical commitments, and dedication to teaching, she remains a seriously flawed moral role model and an essentially untrustworthy one. ________________________________________________________________________ 1. It should be noted that minimal attention has been paid to the topic of trust and trustworthiness by philosophers of education. In perusing many books on the ethics of education, I seldom found the topic of trust or trustworthiness in the index. 2. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (N.Y, N.Y: Harper Perennial, 1999). 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Ibid., 3-4.

5. Ibid., 1-2 6. Ibid., 39. 7. See Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), 1994. Baiers account is the seminal work in this area. She pointed out in 1994 how seriously neglected this topic was in the general field of ethics. Her work has inspired renewed interest in the topic among general ethicists. See also Nancy Nyquist Potter, How Can I Be Trusted: A Virtue Theory of Trustworthiness (N.Y.,N.Y: Roman & Littlefield), 2002. 8. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, op. cit., 9 9. Ibid., 60 10 For a provocative philosophical analysis of self-deception, see Herbert Fingarette, SelfDeception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1972. 11. Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited (Prague: Narcissus Publications), 2005, p. 23. If we remember, the legend of Narcissus, the young Greek boy fell in love with his own reflection in a pond; the mythological Narcissus had rejected the nymph Echos advances and was subsequently punished by Nemesis. Vaknin points out that narcissists are not in love with themselves (that would be healthy) but are in love with their reflections, or their projected images of themselves; thus, they depend, mightily, on constant approval, along with other emotions such as awe, respect, admiration, attention, or even being feared. (see Vaknin, op. cit., pp. 31-32). For a classic and penetrating analysis of narcissism that has less technical detail than Vaknins analysis, see Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (N.Y., N.Y.: Basic Books), 1996. 12. Milton Mayeroff, On Caring (N.Y., N.Y.: Harper), 1971. See also Nel Noddings, Caring, A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press), 1984. 13. For a conceptual account of showing students respect, see Michael S. Katz, Respect for Persons and Students: Charting Some Ethical Territory,in Philosophy of Education 1991: Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, Margaret Buchmann and Robert E. Floden, eds. (Normal, Illinois: Illinois State University), 1992, 185-196. 14. For Kant, to show respect for persons was to treat them as moral agents capable of making free, rational decisions in their own interests. 15. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, op. cit., 65. 16. Ibid., 31. 17. Ibid. 115-116. 18. Ibid. 116 19. Ibid. 116. 20. Ibid. 118 21. Ibid. 118 22. Ibid., 123. 23. Ibid., 128. 24. Ibid., 129. 25. Ibid., 126. 26. Ibid., 133 San Jose State University June 5, 2006 Address: 4080 Villa Vista, Palo Alto, Ca. 94306 Email: mskatz1944@yahoo.com Tel. 650-494-1136