Loving Yourself Before Loving Others, or Constantly Tearing Yourself Down: Narcissism

There is a formula that circulates everywhere in contemporary discourse. To love others, you must first love yourself. You find it in magazines, in self-help podcasts, on Instagram, in the mouths of life coaches, and even — and this is more troubling — in the mouths of therapists. It looks self-evident. It is presented as an established truth. And when one questions it, people become aggressive, because what is being touched is not merely an opinion: it is an entire edifice on which a part of their daily justifications has been rebuilt.

The world that produces this idea

To understand how we got here, we have to look at the world in which this formula thrives. The post-modern world is ultra-individualistic. It has sold its subjects the idea that technology allows each person to enjoy individually, infinitely: send messages at any hour, access any information at any moment, order anything, watch any content, talk to anyone. The contemporary subject is supposed to be an autonomous point of enjoyment, equipped to be sufficient unto themselves.

It is in this context that the idea took hold that one must love oneself. And it is in this same context that what is called "therapy" has been redefined, in much of the current offering, as the apprenticeship of this self-sufficiency. The promise becomes: therapy will help you do without others, become sufficient to yourself, become the auto-enjoying subject that the world demands you to be. No more need for the other's gaze. No more need for external validation. Learn to love yourself, and you will be saved.

What happens to Narcissus

We have to remember what happens to Narcissus in the myth. The young man, having rejected all who wished to love him, is punished by the gods. His punishment consists in falling in love with his own reflection in the water of a spring. He stays there, fascinated, unable to detach himself, unable to reach this object that seduces him and which is nothing but himself. And he dies of it.

This myth says something very precise. When the subject takes himself as object, when he folds his capacity to love onto his own image, he does not flourish. He consumes himself. Narcissism is not a path toward love. It is what closes that path. The myth knows this, has known it since antiquity, and says it without detour. It will have taken two millennia of forgotten wisdom for us to come to invert the story and present what kills Narcissus as the therapy of Narcissus.

"But narcissism is loving yourself too much"

At this stage, the objection always comes, and it is always the same. Yes, but narcissism isn't loving yourself normally, it's loving yourself too much. There would be a healthy self-love, measured, reasonable, and then, beyond a certain threshold, an excess that would tip into pathology.

This is a false answer, and one that reveals a very contemporary trait: the passion for quantitative pseudo-diagnoses. We see it everywhere. Hypersensitivity, for example, which would designate the fact of being sensitive "too much". As if others had normal feelings and oneself had feelings in excess. It is completely arbitrary — where does one place the threshold, and who decides? — and it is completely imaginary. It is also profoundly self-centered, because it presupposes that the subject measures himself against a norm of which he would be, conveniently, the singular deviation.

Narcissism is not a quantity but a structural position: the subject takes himself as object. It does not depend on intensity — it depends on the direction of investment.

The other face no one wants to see

Here is the point that we refuse most firmly to look at, even though it should be at the center of any serious discussion of narcissism: it is not necessary to take oneself as an object of love. It suffices to take oneself as object, period.

People who spend their time tearing themselves down, judging themselves, ruminating on their flaws, finding themselves insufficient, mediocre, unworthy — these people are deep in narcissism. All the way. They are entirely turned toward themselves. Their attention, their energy, their suffering, their psychic work — all converges on their own person. The object of their investment is themselves.

Whether this investment takes the form of love or of hatred changes strictly nothing of the structure. Hatred is the other face of the coin of love, not its absolute opposite. It is the same movement, in the same direction, with an inverted sign. To love one's reflection and to hate one's reflection — both are remaining in front of the reflection.

This has a considerable consequence, one that should make any serious practitioner pause: the "therapy" that would consist in teaching the depreciated subject to love himself at last, to compensate his self-hatred with an equivalent and opposite self-love, does not bring him out of narcissism. It worsens it. It piles an additional layer of self-investment on top. It adds narcissism on top of narcissism. What an idea.

Self-love is built on hatred of the Other

There is another aspect of narcissism that has to be named, because it is observed everywhere today on the collective scale: self-love is built on hatred of the Other.

Look at the movements that loudly claim to stand for inclusion. Examine what they actually include. You will find they only include what they already consider similar to themselves. They function on the model of the "big family", of the "you are like me", of the "we recognize each other in one another". That is to say, they abolish difference at the very moment they claim to celebrate it. Real otherness, the kind that disturbs, the kind that does not let itself be reduced to the same, is refused. We see it perfectly the moment a thought differs from the consensus: it is violently banished, in the name of justice, in the name of protection, in the name of respect. There is, in these movements, a correct way of thinking, and those who do not conform are expelled.

This mechanism is a remarkable clinical demonstration of what narcissism is at the scale of a group. The group constitutes itself as a great Ego, it loves itself in the similarity it identifies in each of its members, and it rejects everything that marks difference — that is, everything that marks otherness. The self-love of the group feeds on hatred of what is not it. And it is exactly the same structure as that of the individually narcissistic subject: investment folds onto what is identified as self, and everything that would resist this identification is fought.

"I love animals more than humans"

We find this same logic in a more socially valued form among those who declare "I love animals more than humans." Clinically, it almost always reveals a wound that has not been worked through. The subject has been hurt by humans and, instead of putting this wound to work, invests animals as a supposedly safer object. But the paradox betrays the operation: these subjects humanize animals entirely, attributing to them intentions, values, and unconditional love. What is loved is not the animal in its radical otherness — it is an idealized human figure stripped of unpredictability. A mirror that does not resist. This is exactly the narcissistic movement: the operation fails to reach the otherness of the animal at the very moment it claims to celebrate it.

Don't confuse the gaze of the other with narcissism

We must now lift a massive and very contemporary confusion. Many people, when narcissism is mentioned, immediately think of social media. That's it, modern narcissism — selfies, exhibition, the need to show oneself. This is an error, and one that prevents understanding what the narcissistic position actually is.

To show oneself to another is not narcissism. It is even the opposite. To show oneself presupposes an addressee, a gaze, someone to whom one is showing. There is a link to the other, however clumsy, however unhappy, however pathological in other respects. The truly narcissistic subject would have no need to post his photos. He would keep them for himself. He would look at them alone, in the absolute privacy of his own fascination, like Narcissus before the spring. But he posts them. There is therefore an other in his psychic economy. There is an Other whose gaze counts.

This point is important because it goes against popular opinion and allows us to understand narcissism more precisely. What characterizes the narcissistic position is not exhibition. It is the absence — or the attempt at absence — of the Other in psychic life. Of course, there is always, in any subject, an attempt to do without the other, because psychic life is made of movements and no one is ever entirely in a pure position. But it is precisely this attempt, and not public exhibition, that signs narcissism.

The moralism of good and bad

Why does this misreading pass so well? Because it fits into a moralism that has enormous appeal. People love to judge in terms of good and not good. Self-deprecation is bad — therefore self-love is good. Self-hatred is bad — therefore self-love must be the remedy. It is binary, it is reassuring, it is false.

A serious therapy does not judge in these terms. It does not tell the patient what is good and what is bad. It does not hand out gold stars for positive thoughts and bad marks for negative ones. It welcomes what the patient brings. It questions the presuppositions on which he operates. It unsettles fantasies — exactly what we are doing in this article. And what counts is not the morality of what the patient thinks or feels. It is the ethics of his act: does he act in accordance with his desire, or does he turn away from it?

This distinction between morality and ethics is central, and it is precisely the one that contemporary practices erase. When we tell the patient "you have to learn to love yourself", we are prescribing him a morality. We are giving him a normative goal. We are telling him what he ought to feel, instead of helping him hear what he actually feels and toward what it carries him.

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The death drive, and the direction of the cure

What is the actual clinical movement of narcissism? Whatever its form — exalted self-love or corrosive self-hatred — the narcissistic subject folds his investment in the world back onto himself. Instead of investing the other, work, creation, encounter, the loved object, he invests his own ego. He withdraws from the circuit of binding.

This is what psychoanalysis names the death drive — not a morbid will to die, but this movement of unbinding, this folding back, this involution. The life drive moves toward the other, binds, invests, builds relations. The death drive undoes, folds in, brings back to the self.

Therapy, if it is serious, is on the side of binding. It aims at relaunching the movement toward the other, toward the world, toward what in the subject seeks to deploy itself outside of him. It is not on the side of "learning to look at one's own navel". It is not on the side of "learning to psychically masturbate because one is supposed to know how to love oneself". It is on the side of what comes out.

The contemporary anti-therapy

This is where the current situation becomes worrying. We live in a world where what takes precedence is the patient's discourse. The client is always right. The subject knows what is good for him. His speech must be respected, never contradicted, never decentered.

The result, in much of today's therapeutic offering, is that practitioners replace their own discourse with that of the patient. They no longer hold a position. They validate, they accompany, they affirm. If the patient says "I need to learn to love myself", they answer "yes, let's work on self-love". If the patient says "I need to be sufficient unto myself", they answer "let's build your autonomy". The therapist becomes a polished mirror that returns to the patient an improved version of what he is already saying.

This is no longer therapy. It is anti-therapy. It is precisely the apparatus that condemns Narcissus to remain before his reflection — except that here the reflection is held, polished, enlarged, framed, by a paid professional.

To love oneself is not the precondition for loving the other. To depreciate oneself is not the opposite of loving oneself; it is its hidden face, and the same prison. And therapy, the real one, does not consist in choosing between the two. It consists in leaving the room.

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References

• /Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV. Hogarth Press.
• /Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE XVIII.
• /Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE XVIII.
• /Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. SE XXI.
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• /Lacan, J. (1959–1960). The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Dennis Porter, W. W. Norton.
• /Lacan, J. (1969–1970). The Seminar, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Russell Grigg, W. W. Norton.
• /Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book III, "Narcissus and Echo".
• /Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton.
• /Melman, C. (2002). L'homme sans gravité : jouir à tout prix. Denoël.
• /Dufour, D.-R. (2003). L'art de réduire les têtes : sur la nouvelle servitude de l'homme libéré à l'ère du capitalisme total. Denoël.