Desire & the Myth of Narcissus
Loq. was a small-scale social media project based around users creating two-minute podcasts. I was a junior content creator and this podcast was created for a week themed around Narcissism.
At face value, the myth of Narcissus reads as a fable about the crueller outcomes of vanity.
You know it already: punished by the gods, Narcissus hypnotizes himself with his own reflection and weeps himself into a flower.
It seems to tell us that our own demise will stem from self-indulgence – which is a timely take, given mass-followings of vloggers and influencers in digital culture.
But the story of Narcissus is also one of the most sexually-charged myths in a Classical canon. Not just vanity, it explores the wider theme of desire.
Sigmund Freud interpreted the homoerotic subtext of the myth as a crucial and defining characteristic of male sexuality – in the Greek version, anyway, Narcissus rejects the external feminine, Echo, falling instead for his own divinely male reflection.
This is an important way to look at the myth when it comes to correcting historical LGBT erasure. It might also explain the statistical prevalence of male narcissists over female ones.
But in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, what Narcissus desired most wasn’t the physical object of himself – the reason he wept was because he lusted after his own intangible image.
In that vein, artists have taken major inspiration.
Dalí’s 1937 painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus explores the delirium replicated by false, unattainable imagery and the disgust that arises from self-desire.
The figures are designed to obscure themselves into incoherent shapes after prolonged viewing, just as the narcissistic ego can’t differentiate between what is ‘them’ and what is not.
In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes puts it squarely:
“It is my desire I desire; the loved being is no more than its tool.”
Narcissus didn’t need his earthly body – in metamorphosis he became what he wanted.
This is key when we examine the synonymous psychological condition. Narcissists are defined by wonting, often deprived of intimacy as a child - and they often use sex as a means of to fuel grandeurs of delusion about themselves.
But in a culture that is more image-centric than ever, the question for psychotherapists today is: should we sacrifice intangible ‘images’ to foster healthy relationships with sex, desire and ourselves?