Scholars who think about monsters have long noted that vampires and zombies reveal something to us about ourselves and about our humanity (The Washington Post).
But what about a sentence like this:
Talk to them about themselves.
The context could be that they like to talk with people about themselves, and so the speaker is informing the addressee about this. Or it could be that the speaker intends to say that the addressee should talk with them first about their affairs (like a father talking something over with his child).
Regardless, if the meaning is that the addressee should talk about them when he is talking with them, should a reflexive pronoun ("themselves") be used after "about" in a sentence like that or an objective one ("them")?