Where does the word “narcissism” come from?

A prophecy that sounded like nonsense

The story is in Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Narcissus is the son of the river god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope. While he is still a baby, his mother asks the blind seer Tiresias whether the boy will reach old age. The answer seems empty: “If he but fail to recognize himself, a long life he may have, beneath the sun.” By sixteen Narcissus is so beautiful that young men and women alike want him, and his pride, Ovid says, turns every one of them away.

Echo, who can only answer

One of them is Echo, a mountain nymph who has lost the power to speak first. She used to keep Hera talking while the nymphs Zeus was chasing slipped away, and the goddess, Juno in Ovid’s Latin, sentenced her to repeat only the last words she hears: “Your tongue, so freely wagged at my expense, shall be of little use.”

So when Narcissus, separated from his friends in the woods, shouts “Who is here?”, all she can say is “Here!” He calls “Come here!” and she calls it back. When she runs out to hold him, he pulls away. Echo hides in caves and wastes until only her voice is left in the hills, and her bones, Ovid says, turn to stone. Like the reeds that gave away Midas’s secret, she can only give back what she hears. Her name is simply the Greek word for a sound that comes back.

The face in the pool

One of the lovers he scorned prays that Narcissus too may love and never win, and Nemesis grants it. Tired from hunting, he bends over an untouched spring to drink and falls in love with the face he sees. Did he know it was his own? Not at first. Ovid is precise: “He knows not what he there beholds.” He tries to kiss the face and hold it, and it breaks into ripples.

Knowing makes it worse. “’Tis I in thee,” he says at last, and then the line that sums him up: “abundance makes me poor.” He cannot leave the water. He melts away like wax near a flame, Echo returns his last “Farewell!”, and where his body lay the nymphs find only a flower, “the white around the gold.” Even among the dead, Ovid adds, Narcissus keeps gazing at himself in the river Styx.

From myth to medicine

The word itself came from doctors, not from Ovid. In 1898 the English physician Havelock Ellis compared a self-absorbed kind of love to Narcissus. A year later the German psychiatrist Paul Näcke turned the comparison into a term, Narcismus. In 1914 Sigmund Freud published “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” which made the idea central to psychoanalysis and treated some self-love as a normal stage of growing up, not only an illness. Since 1980 the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual has listed narcissistic personality disorder.

Everyday speech uses narcissist far more loosely, for anyone vain or self-absorbed. Ovid’s boy fits only half of that. He is proud and cold to others, but he never boasts, and at the pool he is not admiring himself knowingly. He is fooled first, then trapped.

The flower, for its part, is older than his story in Greek poetry. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Earth grows a narcissus as a lure for Persephone, and Pliny the Elder thought the plant’s name came from narkē, numbness, the root of “narcotic.”