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      It’s a powerful portrait, and illustrates the point that narcissism goes far beyond strutting like a peacock. Narcissistic people have a sense of self-importance that depends on the admiration of others – and often ends up damaging others because of the narcissist’s inability to understand how they feel. Their innate uncertainty about their own worth gives rise to them concocting a self-protective, but often totally spurious, aura of grandiosity. It may not always be as extreme as in Mandy’s description, but it is common.

      This more worrying definition is very closely linked to the popular idea of narcissists as self-obsessed clothes horses. Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new and multifaceted understanding of the word is emerging, combining elements of previous interpretations down the decades. As the centuries have passed, new levels of meaning have stuck like barnacles to what originated as Greek myth. And as the idea of narcissism has gained increasing complexity, it also describes something very fundamental about human nature and the relationships we have with each other and our world. It is a concept that allows us to identify and characterise some of the defining aspects of personality.

      WHAT ANCIENT MYTH TELLS US ABOUT NARCISSISM

      You can’t talk about narcissism without telling the story of Narcissus, the beautiful son of a minor Greek god. The story is found (appropriately enough for a concept that has undergone regular transformation over the decades) in a collection of stories called Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. It’s the story of a boy who can’t stop staring at his reflection in a pond, while the woman who loves him pines away, ignored.

      That in itself tells us a lot about the modern meaning of narcissism. It’s not just about vanity, but about the terrible human consequences for yourself and those around you if you are so transfixed by yourself that you are unable to understand the feelings of others, or engage with them.

      The details of the story give rise to other fundamental notions of narcissism. It’s about glamour, isolation and terrible unspoken suffering. Self-absorption is at the very root of its tragedy.

      Narcissus, the 16-year-old son of the river god Cephissus, is so beautiful that all the nymphs in the woods where he hunts fall in love with him. But he rejects them all. One of the nymphs, Echo, becomes so distraught over his indifference that she withdraws to a lonely spot and, as she fades away in her grief, she prays that one day Narcissus might feel for himself what it is like to love and not have that love returned.

      The avenging goddess Nemesis hears Echo’s words, and grants her wishes.

      Soon after, while Narcissus is out hunting, he comes to a clear fountain that he has never seen before, and bends down to drink. In the water, he sees his own reflection – and thinking that the image belongs to some beautiful spirit living in the pool, he gazes at the face adoringly. He doesn’t know it, but he has fallen in love with his own reflection.

      When he tries to kiss the spirit, it disappears in the ripples. It vanishes when he tries to hold it, thrusting his hands into the water. But, almost instantly, it returns as the water smoothes, renewing his fascination and tantalising him once again.

      Narcissus cannot tear himself away from the water, or stop looking into it, and he is so infatuated that he loses all thought of food or drink. But the more he longs, the more he cries. And as his tears fall in the water, they send the beautiful face away again, making him even more inconsolable. As the poet Ted Hughes wrote, in his translation of Ovid: ‘He was himself/ The torturer who now began his torture.’⁴

      Like Echo, Narcissus loses his vigour and beauty. He pines away and dies. But when the mourning nymphs come to collect his body to put it on the funeral pyre, they cannot find it. In its place, at the spot where he died, there is only a beautiful white flower.

      WHAT PSYCHOANALYSTS TELL US ABOUT NARCISSISM

      The first person to take the myth of Narcissus and give it a specific significance in describing human nature was the British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis in 1898. He used it to describe a form of pathological self-absorption. But it was the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who in the early twentieth century tied the idea of Narcissus more specifically to human psychological traits, and presented the first coherent theory of narcissism in human beings.

      Freud said that narcissism was a natural part of the human makeup, but also a characteristic that if taken to extremes can prevent us from having meaningful relationships. In 1914, Freud distinguished between primary narcissism and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism, he said, is the love of self in our infancy which precedes our ability to love others. It is a natural and essential stage of the child’s development, when a child asserts a sense of identity – learning how to love themselves before they can love anyone else.⁵ This idea of the formation of the ‘self’ in childhood has been built on by many of Freud’s followers in psychoanalysis. The French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan, for example, put a new twist on primary narcissism by developing a theory of the ‘mirror phase’, where babies develop a sense of self and others only once they have recognised their own reflection in a mirror.

      Secondary narcissism is something very different – a form of self-love that people can develop in adulthood when they should be well beyond primary narcissism and should have learned to find external objects for their love. Secondary narcissism is a form of regression back to childish self-absorption, as a result of having tried to reach out to objects of desire, but failing to gain their love or attention. It is, in effect, a means of protecting yourself against further rejection.

      These ideas are still relevant to modern and emerging ideas of narcissism. When we talk about narcissists today, we are referring to secondary narcissists – people who are stuck in, or reverting to, childish self-centredness. Freud’s work demonstrates that ‘narcissist’ isn’t just an abusive term – it’s something inherent in all of us, and something that we are all liable to fall back on as a result of emotional trauma.

      Freud’s definitions are important because they set the groundwork for our

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