这是一个有病的时代，别再拿自恋说事了好吧。自恋也有好的一面。
Mar 22nd 2014 | From the print edition
Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love. By Simon Blackburn. Princeton University Press; 209 pages; $24.95 and £16.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
《镜子，镜子：自爱的运用与滥用》 作者：西蒙·布莱克本 普林斯顿大学出版社 209页 售价：$24.95，£16.95
The Americanization of Narcissism. By Elizabeth Lunbeck. Harvard University Press; 367 pages; $35 and £25.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
《美国化的自恋》 作者：伊丽莎白·伦贝克 哈佛大学出版社 367页 售价：$35，£25.95
1 WAS Narcissus a narcissist? Arguably not. Consider the difference between the famously beautiful boy, who spurned the advances of others, and another unfortunate character from Ovid's “Metamorphoses”. Actaeon, a keen hunter, instantly realised that he had been turned into a stag when he saw his head and antlers “mirrored in a stream”. Yet when Narcissus fell in love with a reflection, a few lines later in Ovid's poem, he did not recognise himself. Indeed, he recoiled in horror as soon as it dawned on him that it was his own face that he had been admiring in a pool. Narcissus was, one might say, enraptured not by a “selfie”, but by what he took to be a non-selfie. The poor boy, notorious for alleged self-absorption, may have been unfairly judged for the past 2,000 years—though he was certainly guilty of pride.
那耳喀索斯是自恋者吗？按理说，应该不是。考虑一下这个拒绝了他人求爱的著名美男子同奥维德《变形记》中的另一位不幸人物——热心的猎人阿克泰翁之间的区别。当阿克泰翁看到“映在溪流中”的头和犄角时，立即就意识到自己已经被变成了一只牡鹿；当那耳喀索斯爱上自己在水中的倒影时，他根本就没有认出那个倒影实际上就是他自己。事实上，当他突然意识到被自己所崇拜的水中的那张脸就是自己的脸时，他惊恐地蜷缩了起来。你或许会说，让那耳喀索斯着迷的不是一张“自拍照”，而是一张他自以为不是“自拍照”的照片。这个可怜的小伙子就是因为这种所谓的顾影自怜而在过去的2000多年间臭名远扬。虽说他确实过于自傲，但怎么说都是不公平的。
2 In 2013 Oxford Dictionaries anointed “selfie” its word of the year, to mark the exploding popularity of this novel term for a self-portrait, usually one taken by a smartphone and posted on a social network. As the blurbs for two new books note, the rise of this form of self-promotion has been widely taken as evidence of a boom in self-regard or selfishness. If there is such a boom, it is presumably a repeat outbreak of the epidemic of narcissism diagnosed by critics in the 1970s—“the Me-Decade”, as Tom Wolfe, an American journalist, dubbed it.
作为自画像的创新形式，“自拍照”是指通常用智能手机拍摄并被上传到社交网站的照片。《牛津字典》在2013年把它选为年度单词就是为了以此来记录它的爆炸式流行。但是，正如两本新书所指出的那样，这类宣扬自我的形式自其出现以来，就一直被很多人当成是自以为是或者自私自利行为的急剧增加的一种证据。如果确实存在着这种膨胀，那么它也是曾在上世纪70年代——也就是被美国记者Tom Wolfe称之为“我-十年”出现过并被批评家诊断为自恋流行病的再一次爆发。
3 In “The Americanization of Narcissism”, Elizabeth Lunbeck, a historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, explains how narcissism came to be “the pundits' favourite diagnosis”. By 1979, when an influential historian, Christopher Lasch, published “The Culture of Narcissism”, many American intellectuals spoke the language of psychoanalysis as if it were their mother tongue. There was a receptive audience for the Freudian idea that repressed self-hatred could lead to self-absorption, grandiosity and shallowness in individuals, and for the notion that this personality disorder could somehow be reflected in the spirit of a wealthy, coddled and self-indulgent age.
田纳西州纳什维尔范德比尔特大学的历史学家伊丽莎白·伦贝克在《美国化的自恋》一书中，对“自恋是如何成为‘深受专家青睐的诊断’”这个问题给出了自己的解释。到1979年时，随着富有影响力的历史学家Christopher Lasch的《自恋文化》一书的出版，许多美国知识分子都把精神分析语言当成是母语来使用；而且那时的听众也是善于接受新思想的。所以，当弗洛伊德学派提出“被压抑的自贬心理可能会导致自闭、浮夸和浅薄”时，当他们认为“人格的失常可能会通过炫富、溺爱和自我放纵等时代风尚反映出来”时，这些观点都被接受了。
4 For Sigmund Freud, there was a good sort of narcissism, at least in early life, and a bad sort. Narcissistic drives—urges aimed at nurturing the self—were a component of healthy development. But they could go awry, resulting in excessive self-love of various sorts, and you were supposed to grow out of them. Sometimes the Freudian picture got rather convoluted. Male homosexuals, Freud suggested in 1910, looked for partners modelled on themselves, because an exaggerated erotic attachment to their mothers made them want to love others in the same way that their mothers had loved them.
在弗洛伊德看来，自恋是有好坏之分的，起码青少年时期的自恋就应该属于好的自恋。驱使人们去自恋的原动力，即把培育自我当做目标的那种冲动，是健康发展的一个组成部分。但是，这些冲动可能偏离正轨，结果就会表现出各式各样的过度自恋，以至于不得的接受建议，逐渐改掉这些不良行为。弗洛伊德的解释有时会是相当晦涩难解的。他曾在1910年指出，男性同性恋者是以母亲为原型去寻找伴侣的。这是因为他们有一种被扭曲了的对于母亲的性依赖感，而这种依赖感常常会迫使他们希望用母亲爱他们的同样方式去爱别人。
5 As Ms Lunbeck notes, the good aspects of self-love were neglected by Freud and by his most influential followers, who started to see bad narcissism everywhere. In the 1930s some analysts tried to get a better press for a “healthy” adult narcissism which, they argued, underpinned a well-adjusted life. But their voices were drowned out by other analysts, and by the jeremiads of social critics who were eager to find a pseudo-scientific framework for their attacks on consumer culture.
正如伦贝克所指出的那样，自恋的好的一面已经被弗洛伊德本人，以及那些把自恋看得一无是处的他的追随者中最有影响力的人给忽视了。在上世纪30年代时，一些分析人士曾试图强化成年人“健康”自恋的报道，他们认为这是协调平衡生活的基础。但是，这些人的声音被另外一些分析师的声音和急于为他们攻击消费者文化的行为找到一个伪科学框架的社会批评家的哀叹声给淹没了。
6 In “Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love”, Simon Blackburn, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, and one of the best popularisers of his discipline, comes at narcissism from a different angle. He examines it through philosophical debate on ethics, integrity, hubris, self-respect and temptation, among other things, and through the lens of literature. He does not spend much time on the speculations of professional psychologists. But, like Ms Lunbeck, he too suggests that self-love is not always as bad as it has been painted. A sense of self is a precious thing, he argues, and he reminds us what a disaster it is to lose it—to dementia, for example. Although self-consciousness can be debilitatingly intense, as in adolescence, the lack of it has its perils too, not just for propriety but for morality.
在《镜子，镜子：自爱的运用和滥用》一书中，剑桥大学名誉哲学教授，同时也是他自己理论的最好普及者之一的西蒙·布莱克本从另一个角度对自恋做出了解释。他没有将太多的时间浪费在专业心理学家的推测上，而是通过对道德准则的哲学探讨，通过文学作品中对自以为是和诱惑等问题的描述，对自恋进行了研究。他也像伦贝克女士那样建议，自爱并不总是像人们所描绘的那样坏。他指出，有自我意识是弥足珍贵的，他还提醒我们如果失去了自我意识，比方说，变得麻木不仁，那才是真正的灾难。尽管自我意识可能会在青春期表现的有点偏牵强，但是，如果缺少了自我意识，就会造成外在行为和道德的双重风险。
7 Finding the right value to put on oneself is a balancing act, Mr Blackburn sagely observes, though there are no simple rules that can steer us between the Scylla of excessive self-love and the Charybdis of its opposite. The matter of “positioning oneself among others in the social world” is a complex one, so discovering the right mix of attitudes and feelings “may be like finding the centre of gravity of a cloud”.
布莱克本明确地指出，尽管没有简单的法则可以让我们在面对锡拉式的过度自爱与卡瑞布狄斯式的过度自卑之间掌找到平衡点。但是，找到正确的价值并将其赋予自身是一种需要进行综合考虑的行为，“确定自己在社会中的位置”是一件复杂的事情，因此找到态度和感觉的正确的结合点“可能会像找到云彩的重心一样”。
8 Sometimes, he writes, it is plain that the balance between self-interest and a proper concern for others has been seriously upset. For him, a clear example of this is “the ‘greed is good’ culture that spread across banks and boardrooms in the last thirty years”. Few will disagree when Mr Blackburn says there has been no recent shortage of financial egotism, though the inclusion of Rupert Murdoch in his gallery of financial villains suggests a certain nebulousness in his conception of it.
他在书中写道：有时，在自私自利与适当地关心别人之间找到平衡显然是一个非常恼人的问题。对他来说，这方面的明显例证就是“在过去的三十多年中，遍布银行和董事会会议室的‘贪婪是好东西’这种文化”。因此，当布莱克本指出，现在最不缺少的就是金融利己主义时，没有人会不同意他的观点。但是，当他把默多克也归入金融恶棍这类人时，这表明他对这个概念的理解还有点模糊。
9 In a tongue-in-cheek prefatory acknowledgment to L'Oréal, a cosmetics firm, Mr Blackburn reveals that his despair at the company's slogan “Because you're worth it” was an important stimulus to this book. It is presumably little comfort to him that the slogan has metamorphosed over the years from “Because I'm worth it” to “Because you're worth it” to “Because we're worth it”. The trouble with such a line, for Mr Blackburn, is that what it is really saying is that you're not in fact worth it unless you buy the products. This may be as questionable an interpretation as Freud's account of male homosexuality. Either way, perhaps it is time to stop invoking poor Narcissus in the diagnosis of so many major ills and minor annoyances.
在那篇以戏虐的口吻表达了对欧莱雅的感激之情的前言中，布莱克披露说，正是因为该公司“因为你值得拥有它”口号让他感到失望，他才最终下定决心写作此书。这些年来这个口号不断发生变化，从“因为我值得拥有”到“因为你值得拥有”再到“因为我们值得拥有”，一点也没有给他带来设想中的那种安慰感，反而让他觉得这个口号的真实含义存在着很大的问题：除非你购买了它的产品，不然的话你根本不会拥有它。布莱克本的这个观点同弗洛伊德有关男性同性恋的分析一样，都是值得怀疑的。不管怎样，在对众多的主要病症和次要小毛病的诊断中，该停止刺激自恋者的时候了
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