An arrogant youth spurns the love of a nymph, Echo, and is punished by the Gods to suffer the same fate. He duly catches sight of his reflection in a pool of water one day and falls in love with it. Of course this image fails to respond to his affection. Like Echo, he pines and dies of unrequited love.
Some of the small details of this story are easily overlooked. The youth, Narcissus, does not fall in love with himself but with his image, his persona, an idealised self-construct that has little to do with his true self. He’s therefor easily fooled, not simply because he is so preoccupied with appearance but because Echo represents a human characteristic that is essential to psychic life, the capacity to listen to oneself, to hear what you are saying.
Echo is a chatterbox who has been punished by Hera, queen of the Gods, for trying to protect adulterous Zeus whilst he consorts with the other nymphs. When his jealous wife comes looking for him Echo waylays her with endless conversation. Eventually Hera uncovers the ploy and punishes Echo by silencing her voice, all except the capacity to repeat, to mirror, what others have just said.
So Narcissus’ falling in love with his reflection is a substitute for the capacity to reflect. The death of Echo represents the loss of being able to listen to himself. His capacity for an internal dialogue, essential to weighing up situations and arriving at informed decisions, is suddenly gone.
Its said that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sitting yourself down for a good chat is the beginning of mental hygiene, autonomy, consciousness itself. In 1941 both Hitler and Stalin introduced ‘muttering laws’ that forbade talking to yourself because they understood that anyone capable of self-reflection was of the greatest danger to Autocracy.
Without internal dialogue you are left with a single point of view belonging to a disneyfied persona that suddenly has no points of reference by which to chew things over. Its like trying to find yourself on a map with only one compass bearing. This means that the narcissistic character, despite his grandiosity, is easily lost and led by the nose.
Narcissus’ fate is predicted by the wise seer Tiresius who prophecies that he will die when he sees himself. Its an important detail because it helps to understand the resistance of the Narcissist to look at his own behaviour with any objectivity. Not only has he lost the capacity for reflection, the prospect of regaining it means death, the end of an inner tyranny upon which his personality rests, the shattering of a nucleus around which his sense of self is condensed.
The do or die attitude of the Narcissist can make him appear quite tough and dynamic, though it points to an inner truth, an inner threat, which accounts for his otherwise fragile reactivity and eternal doubling down. If it seems as though getting his own way is a matter of life or death that’s because it is. From the point of view of the false self with its single perspective, its one track mind, any deviation from reality-as-I-know-it is immediately an encounter with annihilation, any admission of fault, a catastrophe.
Pliny the Elder wrote that the Narcissus plant was named for its fragrance (ναρκάω narkao, “I grow numb”) not the youth. Its an instructive amplification because this refusal to deviate from his proscribed self-image or entertain any perspective other than his own has a numbing effect on the true self which is now experienced as life threatening rather than as a source of renewal.
When Echo reaches out to Narcissus he responds..
”Away, touch me not! May I die before you have power o’er me.” Ovid
Her invitation to intimacy, the prospect of vulnerability and dependence, is experienced as so destructive because it compels him from the brittle self construct upon which his life is so precariously balanced and to entertain feelings that would contradict and destroy it.
He has to misconstrue her intentions as the wish to have power over him in order to dismiss her and find a recipient, no matter how unlikely, for his own unconscious need to dominate. Such power play is not for its own sake, or to make anything great again, but so as not to face the mortal blow to pride that awareness of what is actually going on would bring. So reality has to be distorted, any number of deceptions propagated, fake news spread like manure.
He has to make out that Echo is a slut, despite the fact of her virginity specified in other versions of the story where she is enviously attacked by Pan for similar reasons, because she’s beautiful, talented and chaste.
Everything outside the preferred frame of reference, every scrap of selfhood that is not allied to the ideal, must be split off and projected onto others where they become eternal sources of threat and disruption giving rise to all kinds of paranoia and persecutory anxiety. This is why pointing to hurtful behaviour is often received with a hurt expression and any attempt to simply state your own point of view experienced as an attack.
Aspects of the narcissistic character that are not loyal to the idealised persona must be attributed to others where they are perceived as an attempt to undermine and broach the ever diminishing circle of self-awareness. Walls must be built and people expelled en masse, even if their youth, education and clean records suggest model citizenship necessary to a strong future economy.
In some versions of the story Narcissus commits suicide. Failing to listen to oneself, being unwilling to have that inner dialogue can have destructive, even fatal consequences.
Unfortunately the damage is rarely confined to oneself. Others must go down as well, a schoolyard at a time maybe but perhaps also in their incandescent millions.
Still, if you’re not listening… perhaps they’re not screaming.
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