"Talk to them about them/themselves": pronouns bound to a pronominal object

Question

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")?

Answer 1

"Talk to them about themselves" is a correct, natural and unambiguous sentence.

In the context you've provided, it means you're suggesting talking to some people on the topic of those same people.

"Talk to them about them", without the reflexive pronoun is clear enough in the context, so you could use that too, but "themselves" is preferred.

Answer 2

In short, no.

As it stands "talk to them about themselves" is pretty meaningless. For a start, when you use any pronoun you need to define who 'they' are. Who is doing the talking, who are they talking to, and if both parties are 'they' it might not even be clear who is meant by themselves'. In a sentence like "parents talk to children about themselves" one would assume that the parents were talking about themselves to the children, which is the opposite of your original quotation which is ultimately about self-reflection and learning about oneself rather than telling others about oneself.

Further, in your original quotation, 'ourselves' is the widest possible use of the term and means all of humanity. The speaker would naturally be including themselves among humanity, but they couldn't do that by using 'they' or 'them'.