Of course, for any psychological designation, there’s a spectrum: One can have a mild, chronic, acute, or even grave condition. What, then, are the symptoms—as defined by modern psychiatry—of this condition? Here are some: grandiosity (exaggeration of their achievements), a need for admiration, a lack of empathy, a sense of entitlement, manipulative behavior, a fragile self-esteem, and a difficulty in maintaining relationships.
The Origins of the Term
The concept of narcissism comes from a Greek myth, and as with virtually all Greek myths, there are always variants. But the essential story runs something like this: Narcissus was the beautiful son of the river god Kephissos and the nymph Liriope. With this god-infused parentage, his beauty was more or less guaranteed; and, indeed, he was so astonishingly lovely that by the time he was 16, many young men and women had hopelessly fallen in love with him. But he never reciprocated.
When Narcissus was still a baby, his mother went to see the blind prophet Tiresias to ask whether her son would live to a good old age. At the time, Tiresias wasn’t well-known as the great seer and prophet that he was to become, but his response to this inquiry was one of the reasons that he subsequently became so famous.
Tiresias replied, “Yes, so long as he never comes to know himself.”
This answer totally baffled the mother and those attending: What could the “so long as ...” possibly mean? How does one come to “know oneself”?
One of the rejected lovers of Narcissus was the nymph Echo. Her history is that she had been a busybody chattering to the queen of the gods, Hera, to distract her from noticing that Hera’s husband, Zeus, king of the gods, was pursuing love affairs with other nymphs. As punishment, Hera cast a spell on Echo so that she could never speak except to repeat what somebody had said to her—an echo, if you will. When Echo fell in love with Narcissus and was rejected, she pined away until her body was completely wasted and only her voice—her echo—remained.
At this point, having rejected so many, Nemesis (or Artemis, the chaste huntress, or Aphrodite, goddess of love, depending on the version) enters the story. For having rejected so many, Narcissus was going to be made to understand what it felt like to never be accepted by the one whom you love. Exhausted from a day’s hunting and sitting down beside a pool to take a drink, he becomes spellbound with his own reflection in the pool: Seeing his own image, he “knows himself” and falls in love with that reflection.
In fact, he falls desperately in love with his own image, so much so that he can’t tear himself away from admiring it and yearns for it as the object of his love. Eventually, of course, he dies there.
A Message for Us
Perhaps the most important aspect of the story is the fact that (in the Apollonian sense), Narcissus doesn’t really know himself at all. What he knows is what he can tangibly see: his own image.
All of us have a self-image—a projection of who we want the world to think we are. But it isn’t what we might call our true self, or using more ancient language, it isn’t our “soul.” To the extent to which we become fully integrated and psychologically healthy human beings, the distance between our self-image and who we are in our souls is narrowed. Living in truth means that how others perceive us is actually how we are. Nobody—with the exception of religious geniuses—manages to do that with much degree of precision.
But Apollo’s injunction—to “know thyself”—didn’t just mean to understand yourself psychologically; it had a specific spiritual sense: It meant to know your limits. In other words, to know the extent of your abilities, to know your place in the social system, to know that you’re mortal. And knowing that you’re mortal means, as a vital corollary, that you must know that the gods are above and that they’re NOT mortal: We owe them worship and obedience. Indeed, the most heinous crime in ancient Greek thought was the crime of hubris, where gods were mocked or explicitly disobeyed.
A Lack of Balance
Either way, however, there’s an unsolvable problem. Whether we consider Narcissus to be someone who didn’t know himself in the sense that he didn’t understand his limits and so transgressed the divine order and through hubris effectively worshipped himself or as someone who could only see superficially and so couldn’t understand his soul and thus be totally dominated by the surface, the material, and the obvious (or to put the material and the obvious another way: by the nonspiritual), we find someone who’s doomed to grief and ultimate despair. He can never have what he so desperately yearns for, since what he yearns for is beyond the limits of human possibility.
However, a secondary point relates to Apollo’s second maxim: “not too much,” or to avoid extremes. When we look at Narcissus clearly, we see that he was completely preoccupied (to the exclusion of everyone else) with himself; but, interestingly, we see exactly the reverse with Echo. She’s completely besotted with someone else, Narcissus, at the expense of her own existence; she becomes an echo, a mere shadow of a personality, indeed of reality itself.
Narcissism Today
In the second paragraph of this article, I talked about seven symptoms of clinical narcissism, and they’re bad enough: Just take the first symptom, grandiosity. Who likes anyone who exaggerates their accomplishments and trades on their “doings,” their accomplishments, rather than their “being” human? No one, except possibly the greatly deceived and deceivers themselves.
I also mentioned the increasing use of the term narcissist. There seems to be a lot of it going around. Think about it: What are all of these utopian groups, projects, and “woke” virtue-signaling activities with which we’re beset, other than profound forms of narcissism?
Those who undertake these projects all desperately yearn to do what I’ve outlined above as going “beyond the limits of human possibilities”: to make people “equal,” as if that could ever be the case; to annul sexual differentiation, as if nature had no say in the matter; to stop the temperature of the Earth from rising, as if this were solely a human choice; and so on.
Narcissism is a profound and debilitating condition, and the terrifying thing is that more and more people seem to be cursed with it. They were born beautiful (like Narcissus), but in their overweening pride, Nemesis has cut them down. In time, like Narcissus himself, they'll fail, because their true love or pet project will never materialize.
