Narcissism: What is it really?
“In the psychoanalytic tradition, one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support. Instead of self-assuredness, then, narcissists tend more toward a fragile self that needs propping up by external reassurances.”
To sum up what this quote is saying, narcissistic people are necessarily people who are in “love” with themselves, but fragile people who are constantly seeking attention and external support from the people are things around them. This is a whole new way of thinking about it, since I myself have never thought that this could be the case. This kind of reminds me of the joke where a guy/girl posts a picture online and comments “OMG… I’m hideous” or something similar and other people reply “No you’re not… your perfect”. Although these are two different things it kind ties in together. Narcissistic people constantly tell themselves that they are perfect because they may have low esteem and believe that by telling themselves otherwise will help them become more confident in themselves. However, sometimes this is not enough. These people may need other external factors that can support them.
“The narcissist is devoid of empathy and incapable of intimacy with others as well as with himself. To him, lying is a second nature. A False Self takes over. The narcissist begins to believe his own lies. He makes himself to be what he wants to be and not what he really is.”
This quote basically states that narcissists constantly lie to themselves in order to “support” himself. This constant lying to himself is causes the person to basically believe in his own lies and makes himself to be the person he wants to be rather than the person he really is. This will carry on to lying to other people as well and not just himself.
These two quotes tie in together because int he first quote, Katie Davis states how narcissistic people aren’t people who love themselves, but rather people who are so fragile that they need constant support and reassurance to make them, I guess, feel better. The author of the second quote states how this constant reassurance can cause the person to lie to themselves and make them seem like a person they actually aren’t and cause them to lie to others as well. Social media supports this because people can make instagrams or facebook profiles and since they have total control of what they share, they can make themselves seem like a whole different person than they are.
