Go to any of the most
beautiful places in the world,
and you'll see people
taking pictures...
of themselves.
We think of this as a new thing.
Selfie only made it into the
Oxford English Dictionary in 2013,
when it quickly became
word of the year.
But selfies are about
as old as photography.
The first was taken in 1839 by an
American named Robert Cornelius.
So why have we used photography,
this miraculous invention,
to take pictures of
something we can see
in our bathroom mirror every morning?
Something odd is clearly going on.
And who better to explain human
oddities than Sigmund Freud?
Freud invented psychoanalysis
and popularised many ideas
like the ego, the unconscious,
and talking to a therapist.
One of those ideas is narcissism,
or excessive self-love.
In a Greek myth,
a young man called Narcissus
sees his reflection in a pool
and spends so long
staring at his own beauty
that he loses touch
with the rest of the world,
and eventually drowns trying to
embrace his own image in the water.
Freud thought that a bit of self-love
was a natural part of being human.
But Freud also thought that self-love
can turn into
a psychological disorder,
when someone loves himself
to the exclusion
of everyone and everything else.
And that's what we usually mean
by narcissism.
Psychologists have developed tests
for measuring personality traits
like narcissism.
Here are some results.
Narcissists do tend to be
more active on social media.
And posting selfies is strongly
related to narcissism -
but only if you're a man.
Women tend to be
less narcissistic than men,
even though women
post more selfies.
Perhaps more worryingly,
narcissism is rising.
The psychologist Jean Twenge
has shown that,
over the past few decades,
it's risen at roughly the same rate
as obesity.
Freud derived most of his insights
from everyday life observations,
so he would have been
very interested in all this data.
He would have concluded that
narcissism is only part
of what's going on in
the rise of selfie culture.
Some people are posting selfies
not because they're in love
with themselves,
but because they want other people
to be in love with them.
Freud would have seen that need for
approval as neurotic or hysterical.
Freud began his career
in the late 1800s,
a much more sexually repressed time.
Men and women were kept
strictly separated.
And they were taught to be ashamed
of feeling... sexy.
Many of Freud's female patients
in Viennese high society
suffered from
'hysterical paralysis' -
an inability to walk
that had no physical cause.
Freud believed that these women were,
without knowing it,
stopping themselves from walking
because they wanted attention.
So, if we need attention so badly
that we'll paralyse ourselves for it,
why not post a few selfies?
Isn't that better?
Well, Freud would find something
unhealthy about selfies -
not just because of what they say
about the people taking them,
but also because of what they do
to the people seeing them.
Selfies show people's best moments,
carefully curated
and heavily stage-managed.
So we're increasingly
surrounded by images
of other people's apparently
perfect lives and bodies.
Recent studies show that
this makes us feel more envy,
inadequacy, isolation and insecurity.
Making us, in Freud's terms,
more neurotic.
Freud said...
So next time you reach
for the camera,
remember Narcissus
and focus on your friends instead.
You may not get as many likes,
but you'll get a thumbs up
from Freud.
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