“Void” in reflection

Fragments from the forthcoming book “Fragile People: A Secret Door to the World of Narcissists”

We all want to be loved,
And if not, they admire us,
And if not, to be horrified,
And if not, they hate and despise us.
We seek to arouse feelings
In our neighbor’s soul, no matter what.
The soul trembles in the face of emptiness
And seeks contact at all costs.

Hjalmar Zoderberg, Swedish poet

In a normal situation, the mother responds to the child with her gaze and her body. In her eyes we begin to exist for ourselves as “oh, you are my good” and “you are my joy. We appropriate ourselves, reflecting ourselves in the mirror of the mother’s psyche. And then our infant self begins to be filled with narcissistic investment: response, emotional presence, reflection. The mother serves as the very mirror that has been lost to Narcissus. Through the reflection in the psyche of mother, father, and other significant people, our self-esteem, sense of self, and self-value are formed. This is the natural and only path for the psyche, the mirror stage, without which Narcissus remained, having lost for himself the possibility of becoming anything at all. This is the drama of the Narcissus — the hole in the reflection, which he tries to fill, but fundamentally does not have such an opportunity. You can sit and look at your reflection indefinitely and even have a beloved nymph, Echo, who will repeat many, many times how beautiful he is. There’s no way that can fill the piggy bank of the “good enough” inner image of a narcissist…

Once upon a time there lived a Little Daffodil.

And as a child she was very pretty.

But her mother was afraid for her daughter’s future and criticized her all the time to prevent it. She always criticized her grandmother for her big nose and grandfather for her fat legs.

That’s how Narcissus grew up: she shied away from compliments and attention, being a beautiful young woman. She did not like to look in mirrors or take pictures.

Until, imperceptibly, one day she grew old. One evening, Narcissus took out her photographs of herself as a young woman. And she wept bitterly.

He would be doomed to keep coming to any source where there was any hope of seeing himself. But it will be treated rather peculiarly. To denigrate and disbelieve, to attack and destroy, to run away or to be near completely indifferently, without any hope of contact. Narcissistic defenses hide all the pain of the narcissist. He himself is largely invisible to his mother and desperately needs to be reflected in her. At the same time, in his boldest fantasies, he does not admit that he needs that reflection, depending on another. So he sits alone on the shore, trying to see something in the empty surface of the lake…