What is a Narcissist - Monday Morning Memo

What is a Narcissist?

The ancient Greeks tell of a nymph named Echo who fell in love with the handsome Narcissus.

Narcissus cruelly rejected Echo, who, heartbroken, wasted away until only her voice remained.

The goddess Nemesis witnessed this act of cruelty and decided to punish Narcissus. She led him to a quiet pool of water. As he bent to drink, he saw his own reflection, fell in love with his face, and was trapped there forever, spellbound.

“Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.”
– W. H. Auden
(1907 – 1973)

And now you know where we get the words narcissist, nemesis, and echo.
– Indy Beagle

“Rugged individualism is the essence of America.

It is also the reason that we, as a people, are isolated and lonely.

Our focus on personal, individual success is the reason we are disconnected from one another.

Terrence Real put it this way, ‘Individualism is not a natural fact; it has a history. In American Colonial days, society was communalism on a small scale. It was about farms and small towns and small villages. When you lived face to face with your neighbor, it was a palpable reality that the good of all was the good for each of us.’

‘Civic virtue was the force that went beyond individual gratification. It was part of being a civilized person that you had a sense of civic virtue. With the Industrial Revolution, and the myth of the self-made man, all of that went by the wayside and it was each man for himself.'”

- Roy H. Williams