In reply to Lantys Tarn:
There's a few books that take a real shot at explaining psychological explanations for climbing, such as Phil Bartlett's 'The Undiscovered Country', which is worth a read.
There used to be (very) occasional articles in some of the *older* Alpine Journals that touched on simlar topics and the occasional magazine article, from Mountain etc. I don't know any that specifically dwelt on narcissism above all others, they tended to be more general.
There was an interesting one in Mountain in the 80s that got all the then-top 8000m climbers together (Messner, Kukukcza, Loretan, Rudi) and did lab physiology tests, that proved/showed very little outstanding, but did touch on common outstanding psychological traits (persistence, self-belief etc).