The main quality of the great myths is their eternal relevance, supported by the symbolic power with which they dialogue with us from the bottom of time as if they were in front of us, here and now. As a priceless heritage, it is simultaneously unknown to many – which prevents them from fully fulfilling their mission: questioning us, making us think, but also crying and laughing, thus transforming us and our perspective of the world and life. I felt like recounting one of them.
After the birth of Narcissus, the result of a violation of the nymph Lyriope by the god Cephisus, the parents decided to consult the oracle, to know her destiny.
The prophecy dictated that he would live long as long as he didn't know himself. At sixteen, Narcissus' unparalleled beauty aroused the passion of all who approached him, but he rejected them coldly and haughtily, indifferent to the devastating effect it had.
Until, one day, he sent a sword to one of his most tenacious suitors, Aminias, who, broken, killed himself in the doorway of Narcissus' house, not without first clamoring for revenge with the gods.
Artemis, the goddess of the moon, heard it, condemning the beautiful Narcissus to finally fall in love without being able to consummate this irresistible desire.
Shortly thereafter, exhausted from walking and hunting in the woods, Narcissus approached a silvery water lake never before frequented by shepherds and their flocks, wild animals or birds.
As he leaned over to quench his thirst, the young man saw his reflection for the first time – and fell madly in love. Unable to consummate the irrepressible desire that possessed him, Narcissus was wasting away in contemplation of his beloved, until he died. On the shores of this lake, the flower bearing his name was born.
This story, which I recreated from various Greco-Latin versions of the myth (omitting intermediate sequences, such as the encounter between the protagonist and the nymph Eco), is very old, poignant, something enigmatic and semantically so strong that it gave rise to many beautiful ones. poems and paintings (I strongly recommend Caravaggio's) and many hundreds of pages of specialized bibliography, in various areas of knowledge, on its multiple possibilities of meaning. From it arises, for example, the Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a pathological version of the most common «narcissism».
A few years ago, I read with pleasure the delicious How to Become a Mentally Ill (Dom Quixote Publications, 2006), by the Portuguese psychiatrist JL Pio Abreu.
In this work, aimed at lay people, Pio Abreu presents the properties of the many psychic illnesses that human beings can suffer from, in a succession of synthetic and very clear «technical files», arranged in sets.
In the end, he asks us: did we feel, throughout the reading, that we were also suffering from all or many of those illnesses? If so, we are healthy, he concludes, because the psyche integrates them all in reasonable relative balance. The pathology, therefore, will result from the fact that one of them (or, in more serious cases, more than one) takes on such gigantic proportions that it unbalances the machinery.
This final note by the author, in which his writing reaches the heights of critical, fine and intelligent humor that permeates the entire work, is very useful to look at the issue of mental health, but also to look at our fragile and imperfect humanity and we realize that life is made up of this difficult search for the best possible balance between trends that struggle daily within us, each wanting to win the best. The trick seems to be to keep a close watch on this war and, if possible, not let any of them take over, cherishing them all equally.
Let's go back to the myth of Narcissus. Like all myths, it confronts us with excess as an element that causes individual and cosmic imbalance. And it is good that this is so, because it is only in excess that the profound things to which those call us are made visible. Diving in them is a learning experience with impunity, as it is a deferred experience, not causing the dents caused by immediate life. The excesses, in the myth in question, are of different order and origin.
They start with the parents (in some versions, only the mother), when they feel the need to anticipate knowledge about the fate of their newborn child; they pass through suitors of both sexes who, from their earliest childhood, could not resist their physical beauty; by Aminias, who killed himself at the door of Narcissus' house with the sword (a symbol with clear outlines) that he sent him; by the lake, immaculately virgin waiting for the protagonist; to finally rise to their peak in the wasting death of Narcissus, forever caught up in his obsession with himself.
If we look at the story from Narcissus' side, he was a victim of context, as everything and everyone taught him just to look exclusively at himself. In this short story, he never comes across someone who simply says: "Narcissus, have you ever noticed the beauty of that eagle that flies majestically over us?" Or: "See, Narcissus, how that person who looks so ugly is only ugly until we hear him speak and see him not acting."
Narcissus' pride appears to us, then, less as an innate characteristic of his and more as a trait of a personality helped to build by all those around him. It's no coincidence that the character's name (Narkissos, in Greek) is formed from the Greek word nárke, which means “torpor”, and is at the etymological origin of the word “narcotic”.
From this perspective, Narcissus' outcome became predictable, gradually designed over a too short life, guided by the confirmation that only that reflection in the clear waters of the lake would deserve all his energy and attention, because before he had deserved the energy and attention from others.
Because we do best what they teach us meaningfully, when the opportunity arose, Narcissus diligently applied the teachings that the behaviors of others induced in him. What Narcissus was finally able to see in the still (yes, still) waters of the lake was, only, what he had only glimpsed before in the extreme dedication of others to himself.
That is why there are traditions (and people) who regard praise as always pernicious or unproductive, as they consider it difficult to achieve healthy growth in depth. In fact, knowing how to fit a compliment requires a mastery that few achieve, because at the end of a compliment awaits the narcissistic part that lives in us - and taming it is a colossal task that no human being should have to endure, let alone in childhood and youth.
Author António Branco is a professor and was rector of the University of Algarve
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