Narcissism and Mirroring

On Seeing and Being Seen

When I was a teenager I spent a lot of my time looking at myself in the mirror. I still do look in the mirror fairly often, but not quite to the same obsessive degree: it was really something of a major pastime of mine.

I think I expected to be able to rearrange my features to see what I wanted through some sheer force of will. Sometimes I would come up with crazy schemes like tensing all of the muscles in my face over and over to “exercise them”, and be forced to go to school the next day with my face all puffy. Or I would, in a fit of rage, try to squeeze all of the blackheads out of my nose in one heroic action, and be left with a permanent horizontal scar that is still faintly visible.

I would sneak into my mom’s bathroom and apply her makeup, then painstakingly remove all traces of it in fear that someone might notice a fleck of powder foundation on my skin.

One day my dad saw me standing in the hallway looking in the mirror and said “Stop looking at yourself. You’re not that pretty, you narcissist.” So I left and went to my room in pursuit of my other hobby at the time, which was crying and screaming into my pillow while trying to make as little sound as possible.

Later when I was visiting home from college, one of my sister’s friends was staying with us and I saw that she was standing in that same hallway, looking into the same mirror.

“You’re a Narcissist”, I informed her.

“What’s that?”

“Oh… it’s like a greek god who looks at himself in a reflective pool and then like, falls in love with himself and then drowns… something like that.”

“Oh I see. Narcissist... that sounds pretty.” She twirled her hair in one finger slowly and turned to look into her own eyes. “I’m a... n a r c i s s i s t .”

“...”

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Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child was one of these books floating around on twitter in the immediate post-covid world, when everyone seemed to have healing trauma on the brain. I listened to an audiobook version of it wandering around Vancouver at night pushing a granny cart loaded with groceries. The short version is that it’s about how children learn to abandon their own feelings in order to keep their parents happy.

Recently I was at a friend’s house and their infant daughter slammed into the coffee table. She looked up at my face and saw that I was wincing, and then began to cry. She was looking at the reaction of the nearby adults to gauge how she should react, and saw a face that communicated “you must be in pain” and reacted accordingly.

She only cried for about 30 seconds until her mom soothed her, and then immediately went back to playing contentedly. This soothing¹ is what Miller would call Mirroring, and it contains a lot of information: I see that you banged the table but I don’t think it was that serious and the sensation will go away soon, I also see that you are sad and you know this because you can see that I care that you’re sad.

Mirroring is always a two way process of exchanging information, but a child needs the information way more than the adult does because they are still building models of everything. Miller contends that if the child fails to build accurate models of themselves from a lack of inputs, then they fail to exit that childlike state as adults. When they go on to become parents, they’re so concerned with understanding their own emotional reality that they fail to reflect the child’s emotional reality back to them, which deprives the child and perpetuates the cycle.

The child does learn very early how to understand and manage other people’s emotions, which is actually a good thing (that’s the “gift” part of the gifted child), but obviously not worth it if it’s at the expense of learning about themselves.

This framework extends to Miller’s take on the actual myth of Narcissus. He’s not just vain: he can't recognize his own reflection because nobody ever reflected him accurately in the first place, so he falls in love with the image of a beautiful stranger.

The Last Psychiatrist has a similar take:

How do you make a child know himself? You surround him with mirrors. “This is what everyone else sees when you do what you do. This is who everyone thinks you are.”

You cause him to be tested: this is the kind of person you are, you are good at this but not that. This other person is better than you at this, but not better than you at that. These are the limits by which you are defined. Narcissus was never allowed to meet real danger, glory, struggle, honor, success, failure; only artificial versions manipulated by his parents. He was never allowed to ask, “am I a coward? Am I a fool?” To ensure his boring longevity his parents wouldn’t have wanted a definite answer in either direction [²].

- The Last Psychiatrist, The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus

But where Miller’s version falls firmly into the storied psychiatric tradition of blaming all of your problems on your parents not loving you enough, TLP’s version claims that the real danger is in the things that the parent does out of love for the child: sanding off the sharp corners and never allowing them to get hurt. The point is that in either case they lack the information they need to build an accurate model of themselves, and the person they see in the mirror appears as a stranger.

Maybe my dad was not necessarily entirely wrong to call me out for being ridiculous, but it felt like an unjust misdiagnosis: he thought I was looking in the mirror out of admiration and vanity, but I was actually more motivated by hatred of the person I saw there.

On the other hand, maybe they are two sides of the same coin.

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Back when I was in clown school³, one of the exercises we did that had a strong lasting effect was called face off. You sit in front of another student and stare them in the eyes, and when you feel a moment of recognition or “we-ness” you point your finger.

It’s a pretty simple setup but it quickly devolves into bursts of uncontrollable laughter. If you allow yourself to be uninhibited with your emotions and listen to your body’s sensations, that can sometimes swing into sobbing. But it doesn’t necessarily always need to go big: if you’re feeling down they can see that you’re down, but being seen being down makes you see yourself from an outside perspective, and that might be funny. It’s actually quite surprising the depths to which you feel connected with a person over a five minute exercise: you come to feel fully understood without exchanging any words.

After you gain familiarity with these one on one face offs, the next step is to face off with an audience. You stand onstage in front of the entire class and try to do the same exercise, reflecting back the emotions of the audience as a collective. This is the essential currency of clowning as a pursuit: this cultivation of the feeling of we-ness and of “I know that you know that I know that you know that...” (my teacher claimed to have empirically determined that the maximum number of reflections is seven)

Clowning is quite wholesome and positive, but there are other related forms like Bouffon that deal in the profane and challenging the audience. Bouffons are like scary mean French clowns basically. But the whole point of the death and resurrection show remains the same: there is a healing power in seeing and being seen. Creating a mirror to show people themselves helps them grow. In some ways it’s what I hope to accomplish with all of my art and writing as well.

Near the very end of clown school, after months of rigorous self-study and receiving a mirroring megadose, I had the strange experience of looking into the mirror and suddenly gaining the ability to feel empathy for the man I saw there. I’m not going to say that I always love what I see, but one of the lasting effects of going through all of that is that often I see my reflection and smile.

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My sister’s friend was obviously very dumb. Claude is telling me that I’m being too mean here but I’m actually going to double down and say that this girl was probably one of the dumbest people I’ve ever met in my entire life. But, in the same way, she was actually quite wise. I had a terrible understanding of myself—reinforced by a fairly cruel and unhelpful frame from my father—that took me 186 hours of clowning instruction to overcome. When I tried to pass it along to her, she effortlessly deflected it like some sort of Daoist master. She never needed to learn how to love herself in the mirror because she simply never knew not to.

And she was right about one thing: narcissist does actually sound pretty.

1. My wincing also probably counts as mirroring, just much less skillful.

2. The parents were acting on a prophecy that said “He will have a long life, if he never knows himself.”

3. Yes we get it, you went to clown school, get over it that shit was 7 years ago it’s time to move on bro