Writings on Narcissism, Part 8

Rastinews — The Commodification of Emotion and Identity

Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in her study Das gekaufte Herz (The Purchased Heart, 2006) that flight attendants are trained not only technically but emotionally. Smiling, appearing warm, showing interest — in short, making passengers feel good — is part of the job. Here, kindness and courtesy become a product. Emotions stop being inner experience; they become something sellable, teachable, manageable.

Diether Duhm, a figure from the intellectual line of Germany's 1968 movement, pushes this further in Fear in Capitalism (2009). In capitalist society, it is not only emotions that become purchasable — many human qualities do too. This is decisive for narcissism. A person no longer has to develop the traits they lack; they can acquire them by proxy instead.

A sports car gives its owner a strong, dynamic identity. A perfume that promises to make its wearer "attractive" manufactures a sense of desirability. A stylish lifestyle stands in for success and self-worth. These objects are not merely consumed; they are used to manufacture identity. The self is no longer built from within, but assembled from parts bought from without. This is where narcissistic "polish" takes over. The deficiency is not removed — it is buffed to a shine. Instead of transforming the inner void, the person tries to cover it with signs that make it invisible. But the polish does not last, because no purchased trait ever truly answers to the depths of the self. Each new acquisition brings only brief satisfaction, and then the void reasserts itself. In the end, modern individuals consume not only objects, but their own selves.

Falling in Love with One's Own Creation: The Modern Subject's Fantasy of Making

We sometimes read in the news: a director married his young actress. A professor fell in love with his student. In other words, a person falling in love with someone they themselves shaped and guided. Sometimes the pattern turns up in more extreme form still: a painter's favorite painting, a director's favorite film, a poet's favorite poem. As one song puts it: 'You made me, the beauty in me...'

The myth of Pygmalion is one of the strongest accounts of a person falling in love with what he himself has made. Disillusioned by real women, Pygmalion does not give up on desire — he carries it into the realm of creation instead. He carves a statue of a woman. The statue is not the work of nature or of the gods, but of his own hand. Its perfection is not given; it is produced. And in the end, Pygmalion falls in love with his own work. Here the link between creation and control becomes plain. To create is not merely to make — it is to hold complete mastery over what is made. Pygmalion's statue is not an autonomous being; it is his desire given form. What he loves, then, is not really another, but a world he himself has built and governs. In place of a real woman he cannot control, he turns to an object he can. Creation thus becomes one of the purest forms of narcissistic investment: the subject creates his own ideal and falls in love with it. To create, here, is also to control. What is loved is not the other, but the ideal the subject has built and rules over.

This myth has become a metaphor for the relationship the modern subject has with his own body and existence. Today a person is no longer simply a being who lives out a body given to them; through cosmetic procedures, hormonal regulation and biotechnology, they can transform and reshape their own body. The subject thus stops being merely a product of nature and becomes, in part, a product of his own intervention. The modern subject increasingly becomes his own Pygmalion: he produces his own image, then identifies with it. What is loved is no longer simply the given self, but the created self. The subject is at once sculptor and statue — creator and created.

This shift also changes the structure of relationships with others. The other is always unpredictable, independent, resistant. The image the subject creates, by contrast, is under control. It does not leave, does not object, does not refuse. So the direction of love changes: from the other toward the self — not the natural self, but the created one. A person no longer loves only another, but also the self he has made. For the first time, the one who loves and the one who is loved converge in the same being.

This fantasy of creation appears most intensely in the field of reproduction. A child has never been merely a biological event; it represents the subject's own continuity. Reproduction has therefore always carried a narcissistic meaning. But with modern reproductive technologies, the structure of creation has changed at the root. A child is now the product not only of two bodies meeting, but of technical intervention. Reproduction stops being an event that simply happens and becomes a process that is planned and organized. Creation shifts from the domain of nature to the domain of technique.

This shift transforms the subject's relationship with his own existence. Before nature, the subject is limited; technique offers the possibility of intervention. The modern subject thus experiences himself not merely as part of life, but as its regulator. This experience activates the most primitive layers of the narcissistic structure and grants the subject a sense of omnipotence: the illusion of having control over life. But this omnipotence is fragile. Technical intervention does not always succeed. In failure, the subject confronts not only the limits of nature, but his own narcissistic fragility.

In this process, the meaning of the body also changes. The body is no longer simply something lived, but a system to be measured and managed. Hormone levels, biological reserves and technical measurements remove the body from the domain of subjective experience and turn it into an object of intervention. The subject begins to look at his own body not from within, but from without. And here the central paradox of modern narcissism emerges: the more the subject tries to control his own body, the more estranged from it he becomes.

The tragedy of modern narcissism, then, is not that the subject loves himself too much, but that he cannot feel himself from within. Technical intervention offers the subject the illusion of approaching the power of creation, but that power is never absolute. The subject can create, transform, intervene — but he cannot abolish his own finitude. Man is not God; the tragedy of the modern subject is not that he is God, but that he believes he could be.

For this reason, the healing of narcissism does not lie in the power to create, but begins at the point where the subject can rebuild his own inner continuity. True narcissistic wholeness arises not from technical intervention, but from the subject's capacity to sustain his own existence from within. For a human being, the deepest act of creation is not to produce something, but to carry one's own existence, with all its fragility, from the inside. And perhaps the most fundamental freedom is not fidelity to the image one has created, but fidelity to one's own inner being.

Narcissism and Time: The Fracture of Continuity

Narcissism is not only the subject's relationship with himself; it is also the foundation of his relationship with time. Narcissism is the capacity to experience oneself within a temporal continuity. A person is not only a being that exists in the present moment; he is also the carrier of his past and the anticipation of his future. The sense of self rests on feeling this continuity from within. Narcissistic wholeness, then, is not only bodily but temporal. A subject remains identical with himself only insofar as he can feel himself as a being that persists through time.

But narcissistic injury interrupts precisely this continuity. The experience of infertility is one of its most intense forms. Here it is not only the body that fractures, but time itself. The subject confronts the possibility that its own existence may not extend into the future. This is not merely a loss — it is an existential threat aimed at the subject's own continuity. A child is not simply another person; the child is the subject's temporal extension, its echo in the future. Infertility therefore shakes the subject's trust not only in its body but in its own temporal being. The body is no longer a guarantee of continuity. It ceases to be a vehicle carrying the subject into the future and becomes a reality that imposes its own limits. The subject is forced to confront its own finitude.

Modern medical intervention promises to repair this fracture. Reproductive technology offers a way past nature's limits. But this intervention can also weaken trust in the body's own sufficiency. Technical intervention implicitly suggests that the body is not enough on its own. The subject ceases to be a being that lives its body from within and becomes one that manages its body from without. The body is no longer the subject's home — it is an object to be administered. Here lies modern narcissism's central paradox: the more the subject tries to control its body, the more estranged it becomes from it.

This estrangement also affects the subject's relationship with its own voice. Voice is not merely a biological function — it is how the subject experiences its own existence from within. A person feels themselves to the extent that they hear their own voice. Voice is the internal echo of the subject's own being. But in modern culture, the subject increasingly begins to seek its voice outside itself. The gaze, reaction and approval of others come to replace the subject's own experience of its existence. The sense of self becomes dependent on external validation. To be visible is experienced as the condition of existing at all.

Yet visibility and existence are not the same thing. A subject may be visible in the gaze of others and still fail to feel its own existence from within. This is the central tragedy of modern narcissism: the split between visibility and existence. As the modern subject grows ever more visible, it feels its own existence less and less from within.

Narcissistic wholeness arises from the subject's relationship with its own inner continuity. That relationship requires the subject to accept its own limits. Modern culture, however, offers the subject an illusion of limitlessness. But this illusion does not eliminate narcissistic fragility — it produces a deeper collapse when limits are finally encountered. Healing from narcissism therefore begins at the point where the subject accepts its own finitude. This acceptance is not surrender — it is transformation. For within its own finitude, a person can rebuild its own continuity.

Freedom is not limitlessness. Freedom is the capacity of a finite being to sustain its own existence through time.