Continuing my posts on the Last Psychiatrist’s vacated (but hardly forgotten) blog. I dug up two essays from this run-down website that can be helpful to those, like me, who wish to heal from entry-level sociopathy. The first, titled “The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus”, reminded me of a Houllebecq-inspired Anna K-Hole tweet:
[…] “Chronic inability to love” is probably the best definition of narcissism I’ve come across. All the other stuff about “grandiosity” and “vanity” is cope.
Here’s a passage from the Psychiatrist’s essay:
What have you learned so far? Do you think you’ve understood?
You heard the story, you heard the words, but your mind unheard it and replaced it with something else. Even after I tell you this, you’ll have trouble remembering it.
You think Narcissus was so in love with himself that he couldn’t love anyone else. But that’s not what happened, the story clearly tells it in the reverse: he never loved anyone and then he fell in love with himself. Do you see? Because he never loved anyone, he fell in love with himself. That was Narcissus’s punishment.
You thought Narcissus rejected all those people because he was in love with himself, but he rejected them all before he loved himself. Loved himself? Do you think Narcissus rejected them because he thought he was better than them? Or better looking? How would he have known he was so beautiful? He didn’t even recognize his own reflection! He rejected all those people because they loved him.
Although the second essay, titled “Funeral”, mainly deals with grief, it too eventually circles back to the theme of narcissism, the problem of which seems to be the colligating fibre that braces much of the Psychiatrist’s work:
Why did any one of them think they had the power, the right, to interfere with another person’s mourning? This was between her and her father and God and no one else. Did no one notice that even the husband had given her space? Did they just think he was being a jerk? “I just wanted to comfort her.” No, you didn’t know what else to do, so you did that. “I didn’t want her to be alone.” That’s because you are a terrible person.
It turns out that the Last Psychiatrist has not one, but two books published (here and here) under what I assume to be yet another penname: Edward Teach, MD.