Banville’s Narcissists

Abstract

There is a common misapprehension of narcissism that interprets it as little more than psychologically entrenched vanity or self-love, as an acute form of smugness. It would be much closer to the truth, however, to describe it as an exhaustive anxiety, or cluster of anxieties, about the self. In most post-Freudian psychoanalytic writing about the condition, it is seen as a way of looking at the world and one’s place in it that is ultimately diminishing, even degrading. There is a sense in which narcissism, as an affliction, is a kind of psychic double bind, whereby the narcissist is wholly consumed with finding some fundamental truth about himself and yet prevented from ever reaching such knowledge by his or her own self-absorption. The thing sought and the overwhelming desire to find it become, that is to say, irreconcilable.