Reflecting on Narcissus
Summer 2025 blog, a little late
Narcissist? If we look to the armchair clinicians of social media and pop culture, everyone has met one; and sometimes it feels like anyone who has ever been inconsiderate toward us or hurt our feelings deserves to be called one. I am not a clinical psychologist, and I’m not trained to diagnose people. Instead, I have spent a lot of time over this past year reconsidering the myth of Narcissus, and how some of the lessons of that myth have been passed over in silence by the modern idea of narcissism.
Narcissus was a man who was unusually beautiful, who rejected romantic advances from both women and men. Ultimately, he gazed at his own reflection in the water and became transfixed. The flower, narcissus, is so named because it tends to look down over the water, and in some versions of the story, Narcissus inspired the flower, being forever kept away from the object of his desire—himself.
Narcissism in plain language just means someone who has a big ego, who is vain and self-obsessed, who is full of themselves, who doesn’t seem to care about the feelings of others. But as a personality disorder, a narcissist isn’t just someone with a big ego; it’s someone with an unduly big and weak ego, a person whose sense of self is constantly out of touch with the reality of their circumstances. A person with a weak ego is deeply insecure. The outward arrogance of the narcissist is a front; it betrays an inner feeling of inadequacy. The narcissistic personality craves constant outside approval and validation from others and seeks out people who will help to hold up the illusion of their superiority. They may also be callous and manipulative, constantly working to hold up this illusion at the expense of other people and their feelings.
The idea of the ego comes from Sigmund Freud—the ego is the “realistic” part of the self that balances the biophysical drives (the id) with the demands of conscience (the superego). A person with a strong ego is highly realistic, knows themselves, and understands what they have to do to pursue their interests, meet their needs, satisfy their desires. Freud definitely had some kooky ideas too, but this model of the self still offers valuable lessons for both psychology and sociology. For psychology, a sociological lesson: there is no bright line that divides the self from society. Human beings are inherently social; they become who they become based on their ongoing interaction with the outside world. This is the fundamental lesson of sociology. As I like to put it in the classroom: people learn to be people from other people. For sociology, a psychological and biological lesson: there is such a thing as human nature. It is rooted in biological drives and desires, and people often pursue these drives and desires without being fully consciously aware they’re doing so.
The problem with the clinical, psychological idea of a narcissistic personality disorder is that the narcissists aren’t really self-obsessed; they’re obsessed with how they appear to others. The clinical narcissist doesn’t love themselves as they are; they want to love themselves, but can never live up to the image of themselves that would be worthy of that love and need other people to do this for them. When Narcissus stared at himself in that pool; that’s not what he was really doing. He literally fell in love with himself, as he was, as he appeared to himself.
But if narcissism as disorder is really social, interactive, then this leads in some very different directions from the original myth. A society that valorizes spouting opinions and taking selfies and posting them all over social media might be narcissistic in the clinical sense, but not in the myth of Narcissus sense. If you were actually in love with yourself like Narcissus you wouldn’t need the external validation in the form of likes and clicks and shares. Maybe social media is turning us all into people with big and fragile egos who need constant external validation. That’s obviously a problem, but again, not in the original myth-of-Narcissus sense.
Freudian historian Christiopher Lasch argued we are living in a culture of narcissism, which lines up with and predicts this. It started with the baby boomers after the 1960s (he, too, was a baby boomer)—the former middle class activists, failing to change the world, were coopted by a kind of self-obsession that made them ready participants in a society conditioned for consumerism and conditioned by expert control. Put simply, if I grow up in a big and complicated enough society, in which my needs are mostly met, I can be taught to focus on what makes me feel better and not worry so much about what happens to other people. By doing so, I gradually give up control of my mind, body, and life to systems outside me that hijack both my instinctive drives and my moral compass. I can feel free to consume the desires manufactured for me, and can be expertly adjusted when that does not fulfill me. If this all sounds very Brave New World or 1984, that’s because it very much is: a comfortable unfreedom conditioned by manipulating human desire on a massive scale. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s the result of particular economic, political, cultural, technological, and social forces coming together in this time and place.
The point here is that a narcissistic culture conditions people to have large and weak egos, in which validation and fulfillment are the most important things, and in which these must constantly be sought outside oneself. Again, the narcissist found in the human sciences only seems self-obsessed. Narcissism actually requires a social setting that feeds the unduly large and fragile ego. But again, this doesn’t fully get at the myth, or the lessons of it.
Narcissus the myth actually is self-absorbed. He in fact does not need external validation from the outside world, having rejected human companionship and erotic love. I think he gets an unfairly bad rap from us human scientists; I’m not the first person to have noticed this. The controversial philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote on Narcissus in his 1955 book Eros and Civilization. He found another kind of narcissism in this myth; a “primary narcissism” that reconnects the ego to nature and all the cosmos, the ability to see beauty in oneself that is reflected in the world all around us. This kind of narcissism is more like the mysticism of the great religions of the world, seeing oneself as part of something transcendent and divine, no longer separate from or dominant over creation. This kind of narcissism isn’t a disorder; it’s not something to be healed or treated or cured, nor something to be papered over with consumption and manufactured desire. It is the hallmark of constructive, creative self-reflection, to be found not in the buzz and noise of the human social world but in the occasional still pools and flowering plants of the natural world. It is a kind of narcissism worth—dare I say it—occasionally aspiring to, as refuge from, and alternative to, an increasingly pathologically narcissistic society and culture.
Sources and further Reading:
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Chistopher Lasch, 1977, The Culture of Narcissism
Herbert Marcuse, 1955, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Reading of Freud
Lukas Szrot, 2026 (under review), Rethinking Technology, Nature, and Society through Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization
