First published, 13th February 2015
When the gods turned Narcissus into a flower, Ovid forgot to mention that they turned Echo into the girl from Ipanema.
The DSM-V has given narcissism a bad name or, when I reflect on it, has turned a name into a bad word. Maybe it started with Freud’s deliberate – or otherwise – misreading of the Ancient Greek fable. No, Freud, himself, cites Paul Näcke’s use of the term in 1899:
The term narcissism is derived from clinical description and was chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated—who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities. Developed to this degree, narcissism has the significance of a perversion that has absorbed the whole of the subject’s sexual life, and it will consequently exhibit the characteristics which we expect to meet with in the study of all perversions.
1914 Zur EinfÜHrung Des Narzissmus
Not that Freud’s paper spends too much time explaining his contention that narcissism is a necessary stage in our own metamorphosis from self-love to the objectified love of others. Much effort is expended in attacking Jung and Adler in order to defend his libidinous obsession with the libido…
Hmm.
Since then, poor old Narcissus has been tied to corporate/banker greed (Blackburn’s Mirror, Mirror), movies about the American nightmare like No Good Deed, and there is, of course, Christopher Lasch’s best-selling The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1978). More recently (last year), Elizabeth Lunbeck, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, has decided to defend so-called narcissism in her The Americanization of Narcissism (Harvard). The blurb:
American social critics in the 1970s, convinced that their nation was in decline, turned to psychoanalysis for answers and seized on narcissism as the sickness of the age. Books indicting Americans as greedy, shallow, and self-indulgent appeared, none more influential than Christopher Lasch’s famous 1978 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. This line of critique reached a crescendo the following year in Jimmy Carter’s “malaise speech” and has endured to this day.
But as Elizabeth Lunbeck reveals, the American critics missed altogether the breakthrough in psychoanalytic thinking that was championing narcissism’s positive aspects. Psychoanalysts had clashed over narcissism from the moment Freud introduced it in 1914, and they had long been split on its defining aspects: How much self-love, self-esteem, and self-indulgence was normal and desirable? While Freud’s orthodox followers sided with asceticism, analytic dissenters argued for gratification. Fifty years later, the Viennese émigré Heinz Kohut led a psychoanalytic revolution centered on a “normal narcissism” that he claimed was the wellspring of human ambition, creativity, and empathy. But critics saw only pathology in narcissism. The result was the loss of a vital way to understand ourselves, our needs, and our desires.
Narcissism’s rich and complex history is also the history of the shifting fortunes and powerful influence of psychoanalysis in American thought and culture. Telling this story, The Americanization of Narcissism ultimately opens a new view on the central questions faced by the self struggling amid the tumultuous crosscurrents of modernity.
‘Normal narcissism’? Yikes. I mean, ‘narcissism’ is bad enough, but normality? (Actually, I’ve never understood why ‘normality’ isn’t in the DSM…)
If you pick up Ovid’s original version of the fable and leave narcissists to one side (they muddied the water, after all) what you see is that Narcissus wasn’t narcissistic at all. How ironic is that?!
Maybe I need to explain. Here’s a new analysis specially for St Valentine’s Day:
The fable of Narcissus is in Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the story begins in Part VI with the birth of Narcissus to the nymph Ciphesus, raped by Liriope. Liriope asks the soothsayer, Tireseus, whether Narcissus will live into old age. The prophecy is that he will if he doesn’t recognise himself. When Narcissus reaches sixteen, much to his annoyance, he is adored by many, not least Echo. He rejects all admirers. One young man calls up to the heavens in his frustration and invokes the gods to curse Narcissus in such a way that he suffers the pain of unrequited love he has caused in others. Nemesis indeed condemns Narcissus and the rest, as they say, is muddled history.
I’m not sure that what Narcissus goes through actually captures anything we might want to identify as being somehow manifested in any modern sense of psychotic or neurotic state. Narcissus goes through a far more complicated experience. There is, also, of course, a context to Narcissus’ frenzy. Most importantly there is Echo. But there is also the curse thrown at Narcissus: “Thus though he should love, let him not enjoy what he loves.” The effect of the curse is that Narcissus should have a taste of his own medicine, namely to suffer unrequited love. Narcissus sees the image of himself but as an unattainable ‘other’. Sure, the image is a reflection of himself but the torture for Narcissus lies in the fact that, because it is just a reflection, it is unattainable almost by definition. He doesn’t want to be who he is because he desires (the image of) someone who happens to be himself. The experience for Narcissus is, in terms of the physics of optics, that he falls in love with himself. But the whole point is that Narcissus would much prefer not to be himself. He pursues the sixteen year old youth as Echo and others had done but is doubly cursed because the object of his desire is unobtainable not through stubborn pride but because it is a reflection. There is much description of the fact that the image has no corporeality. It’s an illusion. A phantom. At least Echo had some hope, during the course of her unrequited love mission; Narcissus’s unrequited love is, of course, hopeless from the start.
So what? A subtler reading of the fable doesn’t really change the possibility that human beings can be and are narcissistic (normally or pathologically). It’s just nomenclature. Who cares what the conditions of self love are called? So what if there might be an argument that Narcissus suffered from unrequited love, not narcissism?
Hmm.
Well, what might be interesting is that we might want to look at the mirror again. What does it mean to say a person is in love with themselves? The mythic Narcissus metaphor suggests that a self-loving person should experience two selves and that the one is in love with the other who is unattainable. The pursuing, unrequited self should feel all the frustration of a spurned lover. So extreme is the frustration that it drives the victim to suicide.
But this is not the experience of someone suffering from, say, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) in the modern age. There is no frustration in a ‘selfie’ culture. Self love in the modern age has none of Narcissus’ suffering. No bank CEO, celebrity bimbo, Facebook selfie addict suffers like Narcissus did. Modern narcissists smile and pout into the camera and into the mirror, feel smug and self-satisfied. They’re not all pining away and starving themselves to death (well, excepting Italian models).
So, if there is (apparently) an increase in narcissism in western culture/society, why aren’t there more people pining away? Why are the most narcissistic also the most self-satisfied? In fact, self-satisfaction is almost synonymous with the modern sense of narcissism. And this seems diametrically opposite to what the eponymous teenager of ancient times experienced. Narcissus is driven to suicide; corporate chairmen to party on. Something ain’t right…
The modern Narcissus doesn’t want to love an image of themselves; be loved in return by some unattainable super ego. Why is Narcissus crying but David Beckham smiling smug as a Cheshire Cat? Why didn’t Narcissus see himself and, like his modern day counterpart, exclaim: “Whoa! You’re one sexy son of a bitch. Yeah baby, yeah!”
How did Narcissus turn into Austen Powers (what Lunbeck and Kohut would call the ‘normal’ narcissist – not that there’s anything ‘normal’ about the swinging International Man of Mystery)?
There is certainly more of a sense of self as ‘other’ in the Narcissus fable; more of a sense of self as simply self in ‘selfie’ celebrity self-celebration. But I don’t think that this is what really captures the cultural paradigmatic shift between ancient and postmodern times.
In stating that narcissism is self-love, there is a crucial difference and the difference lies in the one word we’ve overlooked until now. Love. The sense of the enormous shift from Ovid to Oprah in the Narcissus metaphor is captured in that one word. There is no love in the modern age, at least not of the sort that fills the pages of Metamorphoses. The mystery of the weeping narcissist lies in the fact that, in a time before there were iPhones, social network sites, commercial exploitation, the love of materiality; a time before there were even mirrors – goddammit – human beings loved. They really, really did love in them days.
The term ‘love’, in the way it is now used, is as shallow, hollow and meaningless as the marketing executives who abuse it almost as a trademark – particularly at this time of the year. It has been leached dry by cheap riff-driven lyrics. When one looks back to more primitive times, it’s startling to see how far we have come. How far we have fallen.
The modern Narcissi can’t love themselves. Love is not what they experience. Love has been replaced with something for which we don’t have a word, actually. The nearest idea/word I can think of is ‘power’.
We need a new/modern word for love that captures the sense of ‘power’ or empowerment. It’s interesting that there is no transitive verb connected to the meaning of empowerment. We need one. When we say: ‘I love you’ or ‘I love myself’, we mean something closer to: ‘I power you’ or ‘I power myself’. The nearest verbs might be ‘coerce’, ‘control’, even, maybe, ‘possess’. They’re very close but in a condition like NPD, the sense of superior self-worth or superior self-value isn’t quite captured. With NPD there is a sense of something totally self-absorbed, disconnected from any sense of social self.
Take a look at the couple at the table in the restaurant: both on their iPhones texting. These are the new Narcissus and Narcissa. What is going on in their heads? The still pond of Narcissus has been replaced by a hand-held scroll screen. The screen is a kind of mirror. Possibly the weeping of Narcissus has been replaced by a distant feeling of emptiness. Depression. Certainly a deep but vague sense of the shallowness of it all. There is some equivalent experience in the lack of a sense of fulfilment in the modern Narcissus but the love is of course absent. Instead there is this ‘power’ thing. What is it? What joy is there to be found in dissing?
Well, there’s a thing. Was Narcissus dissing Echo and all his other frustrated admirers? No. I don’t think Narcissus’ shunning of his adoring fans was quite the same thing. There’s a sense of empowerment in dissing. We don’t know why Narcissus shunned his admirers. He seems oddly hermetic and self-contained. A bit like Adonis. But the NPD texting disser is not hermetic or self-contained. Quite the opposite except that, perhaps, their motives and inspirations are as enigmatic. The modern texting Narcissus feels undervalued. Because they themselves are not celebrated celebrities, they will ‘undercelebrate’ those around them. They act as their own Nemeses: all celebrators of celebrities are to be themselves uncelebrated. The neologism for a ‘power’ verb is beginning to emerge: I will only esteem those I acknowledge as having more fame and material worth than myself. Material wealth and the fame that comes from having that material wealth are the only criteria needed to determine where one is placed in the pecking order. This is all a long way from the world of Narcissus.
Narcissus rejects Echo not because he fears subordination. To be adored, is to be elevated after all – as any celebrity privately admits through the smug smiles. The Arcadian Narcissus didn’t want his celebrity status; today, he yearns for it. Narcissus the hermit has been metamorphosed into Narcissus the onscreen star.
The modern Narcissus who acknowledges and celebrates the material worth of celebrities is also a modern Echo. We can’t really understand the modern Narcissus without attaching his echo, Echo. Echo, the modern Echo, is as unloving as the modern Narcissus. Because love relations have been replaced by power relations, to celebrate is to subordinate oneself. The girl chasing the rock star, the fan jostling to get closer to the red carpet doesn’t love their idol. They just want to be close to the radiation of power – a radiation that might warm their cold anonymous world just a little. The selfie is immediately uploaded onto the antisocial social site. The pathetic little trophy that it is, is displayed like a baboon’s blue backside. Damn, only fifteen likes. Must try harder!
Well anyway, true lovers are rare and vulnerable creatures to be sure. As for the objects of their love, I think the real modern narcissist – true to Narcissus – is the girl in Rio who remains blissfully, enigmatically unaware of what she has and, of course, is as beautiful.