The psychiatrist Leonardo Me policych: “We live in the era of mass narcissism. The “loves yourself” mantra has become a tyrannical imperative, which often means “fake to feel good, even if you are in pieces” “

Today that everything is known, that each area is investigated, which is constantly sought for the rights and equality, which is all spoken of freedom and sexual emancipation, progress and well -being, How is it possible that you still suffer for love? One should have reached a level such of awareness and presence to oneself And to one’s dreams and needs, to no longer have to seek or pour our frustrations, our resentments, the blood of our inner wounds in the other.

This was the question, the question, which guided Dr. Leonardo Medolicchio – Psychoanalyst psychiatrist, director of two departments for the rehabilitation and treatment of eating disorders and obesity (re -reacing adults and auxology) of the Italian Auxological Institute and Scientific Supervisor of the TV Docuserie Hunger for love, broadcast on Rai 3 -, in the writing of his latest book Love is a symptom – the paradoxes of love and sex in a changing worldpublished by Solferino and now in bookstores.

The answer? «Simple, but disturbing: Love is a mechanism that does not protect us from pain, but that questions us; It is precisely a symptom, Something that signals us with the presence of a malaise or an inner foreign body to heal, but it is not the remedy; In short, It is not a romantic panacea for our life», Says Mendolicchio.

A point of view that reverses the thought so far in use in modern society and that dismantles the cliché of the love that saves: By calling into question the psychoanalysis, Mendolicchio investigates love through new categories, crumbling stereotypes, like the idea that the other completes us and that the condition necessary to truly give ourselves both to love themselves before. “Provocative? Perhaps – adds Mendolicchio – it is certain that Love is a mystery, forces to go further and at the same time to look inside with patience and curiosity, Take note of your irrational side – at tending almost to the sacred -, coming to terms with contradictions, vulnerability, ghosts. Love inhabits the shadow areasrequires to handle the symbol and the myth rather than the measurement, approaching what is the most important lesson: How to recover the dimension of mystery in love, that these days of is a little lost ».

Here then the opportunity is gluttonous to deal with another point of view, one of the most thorny, but also juicy topics of the last period: that of narcissism. While everyone talks about it Always and only to the malein his book, Me policy dedicates an entire chapter to female narcissism. “I recognize that it is a topic that is often avoided because it is considered taboo or very slippery ground,” he comments. «In the current culture of mass, narcissism rhymes with male. Actually, let’s clarify it immediately, Narcissism has gender declinations that imply both the female and the male».

Let’s start from the beginning, to clear the field of any doubt: what exactly is narcissism? Why is there so much confusion today on the topic?
«Narcissism, in its essence, is not bad. It is the necessary experience of the subject who, looking at the mirror – real or symbolic – builds one’s identity. Freud called him “Primary narcissism”: It is that moment when we learn to get to know each other because we were looked at, desired, appointed. The problem arises when this love for oneself remains blocked in a rigid, self -referential form, and cannot translate into one bond with the other. Today’s confusion arises from the fact that Contemporary culture eroticized the image, but has lost the relationship. Thus narcissism becomes a caricature: the cult of the self, of the performing and invulnerable ego, without empathy or pietas, closer to a survival strategy than to a real self -affirmation “.

Are you telling us that in each of us is there a tip of narcissism? When can a person be called narcissistic in a clinical sense?
«Yes, and it’s good. A certain degree of narcissism is necessary to survive, to protect yourself, to build an identity. The problem arises when the subject can no longer get out of his mirror. When the need to be confirmed crushes all forms of otherness. In a clinical sense, we are talking about narcissistic disorder When the subject is a prisoner of his character, and relationships become only self -extensions. The threshold is suffering: When narcissism no longer protects, but isolates or attacks, then it is a symptom ».

Here, what symptoms does narcissism have? What are the segnal behaviors that indicate to be in front of a narcissistic person?
“Pathological narcissism occurs with the constant need for confirmation, the inability to tolerate criticism, the hyper-control of the image and a certain emotional coldness associated with a radical lack of empathy. But above all, one difficulty in recognizing the other as a subject, how to be desiring. The narcissist seduces, fascinates, manipulates, but It does not really enter into a relationship. Look for mirrors, not faces. He wants to be loved, but he can’t love. Or rather, he only loves to stay in the center ».

We arrive at the crucial knot: why is narcissism in most cases associated with the male figure?
«The cultural paranoia that crosses our time, and which rightly brought to light the structural damage of the patriarchal society, however, has also produced some symbolic misunderstandings. One of all: linear identification between male and narcissism. As if the being man today coincided with the contempt of the other, with the inability to love, with the cold cult of himself.
Actually, Narcissism is not a gender prerogative, but a psychic structurea subjective response to how our identity can be built. That the narcissist has more often a male face depends on the fact that the patriarchal imagination has educated generations of men to be dominant, impenetrable, winning. The male narcissist embodies this social mandate: he is the man who never asks, who always knows, that he does not fail. But this is not “being a man”. Rather, it is the attempt not to fall. And those who do not agree to fall, cannot even meet the other. Male narcissism is often the mask of its fragility ».

Therefore, narcissism can also be female. What are its archetypes?
«Yes, narcissism can certainly have a female face, but presents itself with different traits, more subtle and deeply rooted in the emotional and symbolic history of women. If the male one is often a narcissism of the affirmation, the female one is structured on guilt. The sense of guilt, in fact, is the great device with which female subjectivity has been governed for centuries: feeling in default, responsible for everything, guilty of not being enough. But The psychic counterpart of guilt is paradoxical: “It all depends on me”, “I am the cause of the pain of others”. This is the narcissistic nucleus, invisible but powerful. As well the archetype of the salvific mother, omnipresent, that it cancels and is pleased with one’s sacrifice, as the myth of Medea explains that I speak in the book. This too is narcissism, disguised as love. Female narcissism often moves on the register of “giving too much” so as not to risk being abandoned. But, as always, it is not a question of gender, but of how desire has been welcomed or denied in everyone’s history ».

The narcissist, a man or woman who is, what needs do you try to make up for, hungry for the others or by avenged on them?
“The narcissist is, paradoxically, a hungry of love. But of a love that cannot ask. It is as if, in its past, love had been conditioned: “You are lovable only if you are perfect, only if you don’t weigh”. So today the narcissist punishes the other for his unresolved hunger. Sbama, because he was hungry. Humilia, because he feels humiliated in his vulnerability. In conclusion, He doesn’t want to take revenge: he wants to be seen. But you can’t say it».

Provocative question: isn’t it that narcissism is a consequence of the “love yourself” brought to the extreme? What does it really mean “loving yourself”?
“Yes, we live in the era of mass narcissism. The “loves yourself” mantra has become a tyrannical imperative, which often means “fake to feel good, even if you are in pieces”. But love for himself, the authentic one, is not an exercise in self -satisfaction. It is the ability to look in the face of your lack, to accept that you are not everything, not to be perfect. True love is not taught, it is transmitted: through the link, the care, the word that welcomed us. If no one has loved us starting from our truth, from our nature, how could we learn to love? “

How do you “treat” narcissism? Or rather, how to make us fully and really, without expanding in market individualisms?
“Narcissism is not “cured” as a cold is treated. Cross. We need a space in which the subject can meet his emptiness without being destroyed. Where can you finally say: “I need”. And there, in that crack of the ego, something new is born. As psychoanalysis teaches us, it does not heal from yourself, but accompanies us towards a path of evolution: towards a more sincere encounter with one’s own fragility, towards a love that is not possession, but presence. Realizing today perhaps means decentifying itself from the imposed ideal – success, perfection, performance – and accepting to be simply alive. Not complete, but desiring ».