All About Me: Loving a narcissist. Simon Crompton
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу All About Me: Loving a narcissist - Simon Crompton страница 4
Название: All About Me: Loving a narcissist
Автор: Simon Crompton
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Общая психология
isbn: 9780007585977
isbn:
Well, that’s certainly part of the story. Narcissism is a word that’s increasingly bandied around by the media as a means of describing intensely self-centred or image-conscious people. If you saw politician George Galloway’s preening, arrogant performance on Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, it will come as no surprise that David Aaronovitch commented in The Times that ‘it was the narcissist, not the politician, who had turned up to compete’.1
Welsh rugby player Gavin Henson is another modern-day narcissist by popular definition. He was ‘outed’ by girlfriend Charlotte Church in July 2006 as having an extensive beauty regime, including constantly changing the side he sleeps on to avoid getting lines on his face. He’s reported as saying it takes him two hours to get ready before a rugby game. ‘Hot bath, shave my legs and face, moisturise, put fake tan on and do my hair. I need my fellow players to say I’m looking good.’2
You’ll have heard the term ‘narcissist’ being commonly bandied around as an alternative to the tag of ‘metrosexual’, applied to image-conscious celebs like David Beckham, Thierry Henry and even Tony Blair.3 This everyday use is all about image, self-obsession and vanity. Narcissists are just people who love themselves, aren’t they?
Well, not just that. There’s a far more specific meaning of the word narcissist, revolving around the way we live our lives and conduct our relationships. It has been used by generations of psychoanalysts to describe a specific form of human behaviour.
Here’s what a woman called Mandy thinks a narcissist is. She finished with her boyfriend after a two-year relationship. Then, on the internet, she saw accounts from other women who believed their relationships had foundered because their partners had ‘narcissistic personalities’ – not simply vain, but so self-centred that they were incapable of giving love and were only using their partner as a means to inflate their own ego. It rang so many bells for Mandy that it made her view her past relationship in a new light of understanding. This is what she says:
I really thought that I loved him. I thought that telling him I loved him and that I’d never leave him would somehow ease what I perceived to be his fear of abandonment. I put up with him never being loving and I believed him when he said that yelling at me was his way of showing me how much he loved me. He called it passion. When he was with other people, he was completely different. Everyone who met him said he was always singing my praises, saying how much he loved me.
Even now we’ve finished, he’s always in touch, promoting all the great things he’s done, and saying how fantastic he is. But now I get some satisfaction in knowing that he’s a narcissist – an empty shell who must constantly feed off others – and I’m well out of it. He isn’t capable of love. He’s a terrified chameleon who takes on the persona that will best please the person who’s feeding his ego at that particular moment.
It’s a powerful portrait, and illustrates the point that narcissism goes far beyond strutting like a peacock. Narcissistic people have a sense of self-importance that depends on the admiration of others – and often ends up damaging others because of the narcissist’s inability to understand how they feel. Their innate uncertainty about their own worth gives rise to them concocting a self-protective, but often totally spurious, aura of grandiosity. It may not always be as extreme as in Mandy’s description, but it is common.
This more worrying definition is very closely linked to the popular idea of narcissists as self-obsessed clothes horses. Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new and multifaceted understanding of the word is emerging, combining elements of previous interpretations down the decades. As the centuries have passed, new levels of meaning have stuck like barnacles to what originated as Greek myth. And as the idea of narcissism has gained increasing complexity, it also describes something very fundamental about human nature and the relationships we have with each other and our world. It is a concept that allows us to identify and characterise some of the defining aspects of personality.
WHAT ANCIENT MYTH TELLS US ABOUT NARCISSISM
You can’t talk about narcissism without telling the story of Narcissus, the beautiful son of a minor Greek god. The story is found (appropriately enough for a concept that has undergone regular transformation over the decades) in a collection of stories called Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. It’s the story of a boy who can’t stop staring at his reflection in a pond, while the woman who loves him pines away, ignored.
That in itself tells us a lot about the modern meaning of narcissism. It’s not just about vanity, but about the terrible human consequences for yourself and those around you if you are so transfixed by yourself that you are unable to understand the feelings of others, or engage with them.
The details of the story give rise to other fundamental notions of narcissism. It’s about glamour, isolation and terrible unspoken suffering. Self-absorption is at the very root of its tragedy.
Narcissus, the 16-year-old son of the river god Cephissus, is so beautiful that all the nymphs in the woods where he hunts fall in love with him. But he rejects them all. One of the nymphs, Echo, becomes so distraught over his indifference that she withdraws to a lonely spot and, as she fades away in her grief, she prays that one day Narcissus might feel for himself what it is like to love and not have that love returned.
The avenging goddess Nemesis hears Echo’s words, and grants her wishes.
Soon after, while Narcissus is out hunting, he comes to a clear fountain that he has never seen before, and bends down to drink. In the water, he sees his own reflection – and thinking that the image belongs to some beautiful spirit living in the pool, he gazes at the face adoringly. He doesn’t know it, but he has fallen in love with his own reflection.
When he tries to kiss the spirit, it disappears in the ripples. It vanishes when he tries to hold it, thrusting his hands into the water. But, almost instantly, it returns as the water smoothes, renewing his fascination and tantalising him once again.
Narcissus cannot tear himself away from the water, or stop looking into it, and he is so infatuated that he loses all thought of food or drink. But the more he longs, the more he cries. And as his tears fall in the water, they send the beautiful face away again, making him even more inconsolable. As the poet Ted Hughes wrote, in his translation of Ovid: ‘He was himself/ The torturer who now began his torture.’4
Like Echo, Narcissus loses his vigour and beauty. He pines away and dies. But when the mourning nymphs come to collect his body to put it on the funeral pyre, they cannot find it. In its place, at the spot where he died, there is only a beautiful white flower.
WHAT PSYCHOANALYSTS TELL US ABOUT NARCISSISM
The first person to take the myth of Narcissus and give it a specific significance in describing human nature was the British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis in 1898. He used it to describe a form of pathological self-absorption. But it was the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who in the early twentieth СКАЧАТЬ