Narcissism in Our Midst

This is a four-part series about narcissism in a variety of its permutations. It describes a problem, almost as ancient as Judaism, and still important today. Part One looks past the ancient myth to examine how healthy self-regard can develop.

Everybody thinks they know the story of Narcissus. The beautiful young man kneels at a natural pool, falls in love with his own reflection, and wastes away because he can’t tear himself from the water. The Roman poet Ovid relayed this Greek myth two thousand years ago, and we’ve been borrowing his name ever since for a certain kind of person.

But here’s what most people forget: Narcissus wasn’t alone at that pool.

He had an Echo; a nymph, cursed so she could no longer speak her own words. Rather, she could only repeat back the last words of whoever spoke.

Echo followed Narcissus, able to do little more than return his own voice to him. He was so absorbed in an image — that was not even real — that he never truly saw her. And so Echo faded, until all that remained of her was a sound; a voice calling back across empty valleys.

That’s the part of the myth we forget. Narcissism isn’t just a man at a pool. It’s a man at a pool, and a person beside him, reduced to an echo. The story isn’t really about a personality type. It’s about a relationship. The narcissist needs an Echo. And Echo, in a strange way, needs him back.

As a psychiatrist, I’ve spent forty years watching this play out, in marriages, in families, and in whole communities. Yes, there is such a thing as group and religious narcissism. In America, we see it in the radicalization of the left and the right — pick your poison.

However, the reason why I feel compelled to write this series is because I care deeply about Israel, and believe that we need to consider how this is also playing among our larger Jewish family.

To be clear, I’m not here to point fingers, and I’m not here to diagnose anyone. This is because the moment the “N” word gets fastened onto a specific person, it stops being an insight, and it turns into a weapon.

Instead, my role here is to help us identify certain behaviors – in others, and if we’re prepared to be honest, in ourselves too.

Here’s something that might surprise you.

A little narcissism is healthy.

There’s a place for some grandiosity and some entitlement. A child needs that kind of confidence just to walk out the door, and a people needs it to survive three thousand years of others trying to end them.

Wanting to matter, and wanting to leave a mark, is the fuel behind every good life anyone has lived.

Our own tradition understood this long before psychiatry gave it a name.

There’s a story in the Talmud about Shimon HaTzaddik, who distrusted Nazirites — those who took on extra vows of holiness. He suspected most of them wanted to feel more pious than the people around them. To feel special. He was probably right.

But once, a young shepherd came to him. Strikingly beautiful with long curls that he intended to cut off and offer to Heaven.

Shimon asked him why he’d give up such beauty. The young man’s answer: “I bent down to drink from a spring, and I saw my own reflection. My pride rose up to seize me. So I said to it, why are you proud, in a world that isn’t yours, over a body that will end as dust? And I vowed to give this beauty to Heaven instead.”

This is exactly the same image as the Greek myth with the captivating youth looking at himself in the water.

The difference is that this young shepherd doesn’t lose himself in the reflection. Instead, he turns it into a lesson about the person he wants to become. In response, Shimon kissed him on the head.

The very same self-regard, and the very same awareness of specialness which pulls one person down can elevate another.

When it comes to leaders, we often look for a particular type who is supremely confident and who seems to be blessed with clear certainty about the issues that worry us.

But why are we drawn to such people, and what makes them special in our eyes?

The answer is that underneath our hunger for clarity and certainty sits an uncomfortable truth — which is, just like Echo, we are attracted to this person and their ideas. We are moved by the certainty and their sense of power, reassuring us — and almost by proxy, providing some power to ourselves.

The problem is that when it goes dark, we also feel special in our contempt for the other side. And, with this contempt, there’s no empathy, and we all know how that plays out.

We can see this dynamic everywhere.

A world with exactly two answers to every question, where the other side isn’t merely wrong, but sometimes even less human. Whole movements, often with compelling, polarizing leaders, built on competitive victimhood, with each one racing to out — suffer the other to justify whatever comes next.

The problem with this approach is that it fosters a dangerous sense of moral immunity: the feeling that whatever you do, you’re covered.

The Torah saw this coming by frequently repeating the commandment not to oppress the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. It takes the very wound that could license cruelty, that we were victims, and then flips it into the opposite obligation. Because of what was done to you, you, of all people, must never turn another person into an object. The Torah seeks to immunize us against our own narcissism.

But we don’t always pay heed to this command.

Sit back for a moment and pay attention to how it plays out all around you. Whether the relationship dynamic is personal, political, religious or familial, there are always two answers to every question, us and them. No third option, no middle path. Yet beneath all that certainty is not true strength. Instead, it is a brittle self that is so defensive that it cannot survive being wrong. Disagreement doesn’t land as a difference of opinion; it lands as a threat.

We all know the everyday version: the know-it-all, the one who can never once say the words “I was wrong”. Now provide that person or group with a threat, and you will get a predictable response, an attack. It crushes whoever disagrees and never owns its part. Watch for that reflex. It is the tell.

So how we do identify and avoid toxic narcissism?

The prophet Micah answered this question twenty-seven centuries ago: “do justice, love mercy, walk humbly”. Justice, wrapped in mercy and humility. That’s our tradition’s immune system, still doing its job.

Read the news and count how many claim they’re so special either in greatness or as victims. Then watch how it leads, in a heartbeat, to special rules of nepotism or exploitation or anger or worse — which apply only to them.

Our tradition was built to stop this kind of thinking in its tracks. We are not to fall in love with our own reflection. Nor treat another as a mere echo, as a nothing.

Now that you better understand Ovid’s myth, there’s more to come. In the next piece in this series, we will look at how easy it is to feel special, and exploit without even thinking. And, how Torah, when applied with love, demands better of us.