When someone's love and admiration for himself is very evident, it is said that he is a narcissist, a word that comes from a Greek myth, that of the young and beautiful Narcissus , who so adored his own person that he spent hours and hours contemplating enraptured its reflection in the water.
The best known version of his story is the one written by Ovid in The Metamorphosis in 43 BC According to this Roman author, the river-god Cephysus raped the naiad Liriope and later tried to compensate her by making a son of extraordinary beauty born from this union. would be called Narcissus.
This man, who would arouse the passions of men and women all his life, was nevertheless incapable of love because he was only in love with himself. Desperate not to be able to touch his own image reflected in the water, one day he leaned so close to her that he drowned trying to hug himself.
The use of his name to define the personality of those who revere their own person was the idea of Sigmund Freud, who introduced it in 1914 in an essay entitled Introduction to Narcissism.
