I believe it’s possible for a person to lack both self-awareness and other-awareness. You’re presenting them as if they’re mutually exclusive or that the absence of one necessitates the presence of the other. Not being able to relate to others is no guarantee that you can relate to yourself. I don’t hold myself out to be a clinical psychologist or academic expert, but listening to their discussions of narcissists is where I first saw narcissists described as having poor self-insight and lacking self-awareness, and it resonated with my personal experience. One element of self-awareness I heard a clinical psychologist explain stuck with me. (Sorry, I can’t remember his name.) He said self-awareness involves paying attention to and caring about how your emotions, actions and words reflect your values and affect others. We don’t exist in a vacuum. We affect our environment and it affects us. Excising yourself from that won’t bring about any kind of “awareness” that matters, in my opinion.

The premise (one that I agree with) is that how you interact with and treat others and whether or not you view that as important beyond how it affects your personally is part of self-awareness. If you see and relate only to the self, you’re not self-aware. I suppose whatever conclusion you draw starts with how you choose to define “self-awareness” and how it presents itself. I think how others fit into your worldview and how you believe you fit into the world around you is an integral part of self-awareness. I understand that it’s counterintuitive and that people may disagree. But I’m also not one of those people who buys into the notion that a narcissist knowing they’re a narcissist means they’re self-aware. There’s a deeper quality to it that they struggle and fail to reach, in my opinion. I’m guessing we’ll have to agree to disagree on this.