Transcription
I wanted to read a passage from the myth of Echo and Narcissus. The most important things about pathological narcissism are in this myth, and that's why it was taken up by Freud and was the inspiration for his original essay, which was called On Narcissism. It's a source of endless fascination. Interestingly enough, at the time that it was written, it was not one of the most popular myths. We can't forget that we're living in a society where narcissism is also a personality trait that's very predominant.
He lay like a fallen garden statue, gaze fixed on his image in the water, comparing it to Bacchus or Apollo, falling deeper and deeper in love with what so many had loved so hopelessly, not recognizing himself. He wanted only himself; he had chosen from all the faces he had ever seen only his own. He was himself the torturer who now began his torture.
One thing we forget very readily is that narcissists, those with narcissistic pathology, actually do experience tremendous pain, and there is a kind of torture about their self-encapsulation, their self-preoccupation, their inability to get out of themselves, the rigidity of the grandiose self, the way it isolates them from others—that is not readily apparent. He keeps reaching into the water; the love object doesn't respond. He finally recognizes that actually what he thought was a separate person is actually not a separate person, and so he, out of sheer frustration and longing and despair, starves himself to death and then is turned into a flower—the Narcissus flower. But in another version of the myth, he actually commits suicide and plunges a dagger into his breast.
The other thing that's very important also about the myth is that Narcissus is born from a rape of the river goddess; um, so there's trauma in his history, and he then inflicts trauma on himself and commits suicide. Now, those with narcissistic pathology don't have high rates of suicide, but they have high rates of lethal suicide. So there was a study done at Columbia, which followed patients who had been hospitalized at Columbia over a 5-year post-hospitalization period. The borderline patients, of course, made more parasuicidal gestures. For borderline patients, suicidality and parasuicidality does become a way of self-soothing, even and self-regulating, and also self-punishment, of course. But those who had a primary diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder had more lethal suicidality and had actually completed suicide attempts.
So there's actually quite a few papers that have been written about suicidality and narcissism that you don't hear so much about. You hear a lot about parasuicidality and borderline pathology, but not so much about narcissistic pathology. Some of these patients are the highest risk for suicide if their grandiosity collapses. So the pathological grandiosity is a stabilizing structure, but when it collapses, the collapse is dire and drastic, and that's when people can become severely suicidal, lethally suicidal. Is it a stabilizing structure because essentially it's living in a fantasy, though, right? I mean, it's part of it is living in an elus narcissistic world.
Yes, that's definitely part of it. So the grandiose self is a stable structure, but at the cost of living fully in reality. Realities that don't actually affirm the grandiosity are rejected.