The Hollow Men

Echo and Narcissus by J.W. Waterhouse, 1903

The Hollow Men

by T.S. Eliot

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

~T.S. Eliot~

"The key to understanding the narcissism myth is not that he fell in love with himself, but that he failed to recognize himself in his own reflection. In other words, true narcissists are not self-aware.

"A real narcissist is dissociated from his or her true self; he feels haunted by chronic feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and self-loathing and seeks to replace that disconnection with a sense of worth and importance fueled by others.

"Narcissism is also marked by a profound lack of empathy, a fundamental inability to understand and connect with the feelings of others. Taken together, these are the traits psychologists measure in diagnosing what's known as narcissistic personality disorder (NPD)." ~excerpted from The Mirror Effect by Drs. Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young.

Resources

Drew Pinsky and S. Mark Young, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America, page 88. 2009