Why are humans narcissistic and animals not and what can we learn from that?
Translated from an article from Mattias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, he studies and analyzes the role of narcissism in our society, in and out times of crisis.
The term narcissism comes from the myth of Narcissus, a young man who fell in love with his own reflection in the water, he was enticed so deeply that he ignored everyone and everything, and staring into the water, he languished and died. The myth bears witness to sovereign psychological insight in several respects.
Narcissism captivates and thrives, now more exuberant than ever before.
The mirror image becomes addictive and - to use a fashionable comparison - is more dangerous than any virus. Selfies claim five times more victims than sharks, and in the pursuit of an idealized body image through extreme forms of sports, bodybuilding, plastic surgery, or dieting, the body itself often succumbs.
With the classic narcissistic personality, it is mainly the people around them that suffer the most, for example through psychological and physical terror within relationships and abuse of power in the workplace.
Through history we see signs of rampant narcissism, manifested in the merciless exploitation and death of millions.
Narcissism has been the driving force in human cruelty since earliest times. Laws and treaties can temporarily limit its threat, but an intellectual understanding of narcissism is needed to get rid of it.
Narcissism is a psychological conundrum. Where does the human fascination for the mirror image come from? And why is it accompanied by a lack of empathy and excessive jealousy, aggression and abuse of power? And remarkable: Why is the fascination for the mirror image and also the associated phenomenon of cruelty in animals missing?
Most animals do not even recognize themselves in the mirror, they do not notice the reflection or they regard it as a congener - and in those who do, it does not trigger any noteworthy reaction (see, for example, the punctuality test on bonobos and dolphins).
Charles Darwin noted that this is remarkably different in humans: when a human child first recognizes itself in the mirror, typically at the age of six to nine months while sitting on the arm of the mother who enthusiastically points to the reflection, then this is accompanied by an intense emotional release: the child exults and crows with pleasure. It is as if it is having an aha experience, as if it suddenly found the answer to a question.
And it is. In the first months of life a child cannot form a mental-visual image of its own body. As a result, it does not know where its body stops and where the world surrounding it begins, it situates the sensations in it's own body but also in the people and objects surrounding it. Very concretely: if it gets an injection in the arm, it does not look specifically at its arm because it has no idea that the pain sensation is in that place.
The reverse is also true: the child feels the sensations of others directly in his own body. For example, through imitation of the mother's facial expressions, it takes over her world of experience in a curiously concrete and direct way (transitivism: if the child, for example, looks at someone being hit, the same grimace appears on his face and cries as if he is being hit himself). This radical empathic experience leads to a symbiotic bond between child and mother and to deep, mutual love (see, among other things, the mutual enthusiasm each time an imitation happens).
In this symbiotic but also chaotic experiential soup - which in adulthood only occurs in the dream experience, in which I and Other also constantly overlap - the child must get a grip through interactions with the mother figure to ensure her care and closeness. The young animal must also do this, but there too we encounter a fundamental difference with humans - the ultimate difference even.
The animal secures the bond with the nurturing animal through the exchange of signs - a series of cries and postures - that are closely related to what they refer to (one cry means danger, the other that food is on the way, etc.).
The human child, on the other hand, is dependent on a system of exchange through a language use where every sound or gesture - every symbol. - can refer to endless things. For example, the sound "sun" can refer to something completely different, sun as in sunshine and son as in male child. What the care figure tries to convey through gestures and sounds is therefore never as clear to a child as to an animal.
This explains why the young child's face shows something during interactions that you will not see in any animal: a tense attention and a sentiment of question. This uncertainty fully persists even in adulthood. In each new encounter we wonder what exactly intonations, words, a look or a smile mean. Does the Other like me? Do I mean anything to them? Do they find me attractive? Human existence gravitates around these questions.
Due to the shifting nature of its linguistic system, the human child is in a pressing uncertainty as to how it can gain control over its caretaker. When the mother enthusiastically points to the reflection, this uncertainty suddenly disappears. There, before its eyes, sharply defined, it sees who it must be to secure its place in the mother paradise. Hence the enthusiastic aha experience and the triumphant delight.
Because of the recognition, the child has for the first time a visual overall picture of its body and can for the first time - literally - draw a line / border around its own body. In order to avoid the reappearance of the underlying insecurity, it must engage in an aggressive, rivalry battle with every other that the mother's (or later love object) attention is also focused on: only one person can be the mother's object.
To a certain extent this is necessary to build a stable ego structure, but with excessive narcissism the mental-visual boundary between self and the other becomes so thick and pronounced that the self, literally, becomes mentally locked up in the self-image and the original, symbiotic empathy in for the other and the surrounding world disappears almost completely.
The uncertainty that human language creates in our relationships explains our reaction and importance to our self/mirror image. Appearance and self image is used as a mean to secure oneself and an attempt to find symbiosis with the other but leads to isolation and destruction of the other. The more we identify with the mirror image, the more we must surpass, belittle and even destroy others. Empathy decreases and we lose humanity.
It is also a form of self-destruction. All energy that is in the human being is absorbed by the outer shell. In psychotherapy, people who are strongly committed to appearances often say that they feel "empty".
The second failed attempt to cure this insecurity is the over-controlling of the relationship with the other. We also find this attempt at the group level: when the group becomes anxious and insecure, it grasps more and more forcefully to a shared ideal and formulates an ever-growing set of rules that become increasingly inconsistent and absurd. And just as on an individual level, the group is inevitably heading for self-destruction. Narcissistic competition will certainly not bring a solution.
For the time being, we have to wait for a real solution that truly harmonize humans and their social relationships - and the relationship with Mother Nature. No one can give those solutions just like that, but they must undoubtedly be sought in the direction of cultivating the conversation, learning the art of good speech.
In the mean time we can remind ourselves that we are all human beings and sensitive for the illusion that our own reflection could lead us to paradise.
