Since ancient times, a myth has warned us of the lethal consequences of contemplating oneself too much: Narcissus and his deadly love of self. Perhaps Caravaggio was the painter who best portrayed this seductive fascination of someone who becomes so enraptured by his own reflection that he drowns and turns into a flower. Today, it is the best representation of our society, which has replaced life with images.

Ninety-five million photographs are uploaded every day to Instagram, according to data from the network itself. Many of them, as on other platforms, are anecdotes that lack the slightest importance: ‘Me, eating at this restaurant’, ‘Me, with my best friend’, ‘Me and my dog’, ‘Me, alone’; the capitalised ‘I’ has become a hollow fractal image. If every single thing we do is important enough to share in cyberspace, none of it is. But this society forces us to be entrepreneurs of ourselves, to sell ourselves, to self-promote ourselves, because narcissism ‘is the giving of ourselves to be seen and to be looked at’, as psychoanalyst Constanza Mayer asserts.

This image we project worships gyms, forced smiles, beauty treatments, the slavery of fashion, and consumes experiences with bulimic anxiety (exhibitions, films, series, travel, gastronomy...). In Spain alone, the beauty business moves 9,250 million euros, and exports more than wine, footwear or olive oil. The country is the world's second largest exporter of perfumes and the tenth largest of cosmetics. The body as a symbol, as a socially added value, as packaging and advertising design.

In their essay The Epidemic of Narcissism, the American psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell compare the origin of narcissism to a four-legged stool. One, the permissive upbringing in which everyone learns to take their place without concern for others; the second, the culture of instant celebration; the third, the internet and social networks; and, the last, consumerism and easy money, which lead one to think that all dreams can come true.

It takes on such disproportionate dimensions that nothing else matters but oneself.

‘The real tragedy of Narcissus is not that he fell in love with himself, but that he does not see the other, the other becomes an object that he uses at will, he stops seeing him as an equal, as a human being,’ explains psychologist Rodolfo Acosta. And this has terrible consequences.

‘Fierce egoism disdains love and social bonds, it makes it impossible to establish ties with others, because if nothing is lacking, not in the sense of need but in the sense of the absence of something, little room is left for bonds and love for others,’ continues Mayer. She warns of the risk: ‘The exaltation of a strong self, entails the risk of megalomania, as seen in political leaders, who are elected for their audacity to enhance rugged individualism in the coordinates of the law of the jungle, and totalitarianism as a system, which excludes difference and diversity among people, promoting segregation.’

If the others are absent, because we have banished them from our intimacy, we will not be able to ask ourselves how to change the world, concerned only with telling ourselves without critical distance. We will withdraw from public life, turning to purely personal concerns.

Love, the antidote

Narcissism as a pathology was described by Freud. Self-esteem, or a ‘healthy narcissism’, that benevolent view of oneself through which one's talents can be displayed and which is achieved with attention and affection from others, is one thing; narcissism, ‘an exaggerated and pathologically overloaded relationship to oneself’, in the words of the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, is quite another. Hence it weakens the idea of the collective. Narcissism occurs when trust in the ‘you’ fails. The subject will be his sole caretaker and his absolute boss. He needs nothing, not even anyone. ‘This fantasy of self-sufficiency denotes a great fragility and an immense lack. Nor is it true that he or she does not need others: above all, he or she needs their recognition and admiration,’ Acosta points out.

Narcissists feel they are exceptional, important, unique. But the truth is that we are only so for those who love us. Love is going out to meet the other. If one remains turned in on oneself, there will be no possibility of any relationship; no real affection either. It takes time to build relationships, and this society, in which immediacy and profit take precedence, robs us of that time.

Zygmunt Bauman reminds us that commitment is necessary for a relationship to last, although anyone who commits unreservedly risks being damaged if the relationship breaks down. But we will have lived through it. Today's society does not allow for the mourning, the truce, the parsimony that what is important requires. ‘Today the exaltation of the self is promoted. If the individual is self-confident, he is supposed to progress, to succeed. This position leads to the abandonment of interest in the common, in others, in everything that is not oneself, and this is reflected in the family, social and political spheres. The narcissist generates the paranoia of feeling that he or she is being managed by another who wants to take away what is his or her own, that is the narcissistic danger’, explains psychoanalyst Carmen Bermúdez. This paranoid structure, which distrusts the other by default, which keeps us always on the lookout, and even invites us to attack first, is sustained by narcissism.

A world of mirrors

In the 1970s, the American sociologist Christopher Lasch already warned in The Culture of Narcissism that the neurosis and hysteria that characterised the societies of the early 20^th century had given way to the cult of the individual and the fanatical and insatiable quest for personal success. ‘For the narcissistic personality, only rights, their rights, count, and this can lead to the perversion of doing evil to others for the pleasure of seeing them subjected,’ says Francesc Sáinz, psychoanalyst and professor at the University of Barcelona. This is why intolerance to frustration is related to narcissism.

If the other only exists as a mirror that returns a grandiose image of us, if it becomes a logistical value, there is a lack of sensitivity to the needs and desires of others, an inability to love and respect the other as different. Narcissism results in ‘moral minimalism’, in Lasch's words.

Societies in which citizens are encouraged not to satisfy their needs but to consume alter the perception of the ego, creating a world of mirrors. A culture whose axis is consumerism breeds narcissism, ‘not because it makes us ambitious and self-assertive, but because it makes us weak and dependent, because it undermines our confidence in our own ability to understand and modify the world and to project our own and our common needs,’ Lasch writes. This society infantilises and incapacitates us emotionally.

A society of consumerists views choice not as an act of freedom, but as the possibility of choosing anything and everything on the spot. But freedom is more than choosing the brand we wear, even if the narcissist does not see it.

The transformation of politics into management, the replacement of skilled labour by sophisticated machinery, the redefinition of education as a set of job skills and, in short, the absolute assimilation of all activity to the demands of the market, Lasch asserts, have generated a new and dangerous way of ‘being oneself’.

See, La sociedad narcisista