In a karst (limestone) topography, streams can disappear and reappear as they flow into sinkholes at higher elevations, travel through caverns, and re-emerge at lower elevations. Variously called sinking streams, lost streams, influent streams, or lost rivers, they have been associated with myths and legends. When they re-emerge, they are effluent streams.
Of all the myths and stories surrounding disappearing streams, none might be more famous than the one associated with the river that runs through an artificial “cavern” in Athens, where a highway overpasses the Kephisos River longitudinally. Strabo, the ancient geographer, describes the same river as having a natural, disappearing section.
The river god Kephisos (Cephisus), according to myth, ravished, in Ovid’s words, “the wave-blue water nymph Liriope” who gave birth to “a fine infant boy, from birth adorable, and named…Narcissus.” That we have a personality disorder that derives from union of a lost river and a water nymph might be fitting.
According to psychologist Craig Malkin of the Harvard Medical School and author of rethinking Narcissism, the disorder manifests itself in many subtypes. Some are grandiose, altruistic martyrs, “self-sacrificing to the point where you can’t stand to be in the room with them.”* But just as we can have a single name for a river that runs on the surface, disappears from view, and re-emerges onto a different landscape, so we can recognize a common flow through true narcissists: “Self-enhancement.” What they think, do, and say sets them “apart from others, and this feeling of distinction soothes them, because they’re otherwise struggling with an unstable sense of self.”**
Unstable, just like a river. And, according to Seth Rosenthal of Yale, “They have this constant need to have their greatness verified by the world around them. When reality catches up with them, they may react by becoming depressed.”*** Depressed, as in a sinking stream.
Maybe some narcissism runs through all of us, but there’s little danger as long as the stream of our lives isn’t disrupted by that consistent desire for self-enhancement. Actually, most of us probably have more in common with the landscape than with the flow. But landscapes can be altered by streams, so there’s a threat to any stability by flows that appear and reappear and that erode the surface.
Just taking an occasional Selfie doesn’t make you a narcissist, and just thinking that you have worth doesn’t qualify you as a narcissist. In fact, maybe a little narcissism—not the pathological kind—might be helpful at times: Auditioning for a part in a play, applying for a job, presenting new research results at a conference, or pushing that first novel to an agent at a book fair. Maybe, just maybe, there are times when everyone should disguise low esteem with some degree of bravado and hubris.
We live a delicate balance between landscape and stream, between the ostensibly permanent and the definitely temporary. Because we don’t have much permanence ourselves, it’s easy to be caught up in a flow that disappears from view. That disappearance is our ultimate fate is unavoidable in the karst topography of our finite lives. There are sinkholes and caverns aplenty.
Staying on the surface requires some, however slight, narcissism.
*Webber, Rebecca. Meet the Real Narcissists (They’re Not What You Think). Psychology Today, Septemver 5, 2016, reviewed on December 15, 2017, Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201609/meet-the-real-narcissists-theyre-not-what-you-think
**Ibid.
***Ibid.
Of all the myths and stories surrounding disappearing streams, none might be more famous than the one associated with the river that runs through an artificial “cavern” in Athens, where a highway overpasses the Kephisos River longitudinally. Strabo, the ancient geographer, describes the same river as having a natural, disappearing section.
The river god Kephisos (Cephisus), according to myth, ravished, in Ovid’s words, “the wave-blue water nymph Liriope” who gave birth to “a fine infant boy, from birth adorable, and named…Narcissus.” That we have a personality disorder that derives from union of a lost river and a water nymph might be fitting.
According to psychologist Craig Malkin of the Harvard Medical School and author of rethinking Narcissism, the disorder manifests itself in many subtypes. Some are grandiose, altruistic martyrs, “self-sacrificing to the point where you can’t stand to be in the room with them.”* But just as we can have a single name for a river that runs on the surface, disappears from view, and re-emerges onto a different landscape, so we can recognize a common flow through true narcissists: “Self-enhancement.” What they think, do, and say sets them “apart from others, and this feeling of distinction soothes them, because they’re otherwise struggling with an unstable sense of self.”**
Unstable, just like a river. And, according to Seth Rosenthal of Yale, “They have this constant need to have their greatness verified by the world around them. When reality catches up with them, they may react by becoming depressed.”*** Depressed, as in a sinking stream.
Maybe some narcissism runs through all of us, but there’s little danger as long as the stream of our lives isn’t disrupted by that consistent desire for self-enhancement. Actually, most of us probably have more in common with the landscape than with the flow. But landscapes can be altered by streams, so there’s a threat to any stability by flows that appear and reappear and that erode the surface.
Just taking an occasional Selfie doesn’t make you a narcissist, and just thinking that you have worth doesn’t qualify you as a narcissist. In fact, maybe a little narcissism—not the pathological kind—might be helpful at times: Auditioning for a part in a play, applying for a job, presenting new research results at a conference, or pushing that first novel to an agent at a book fair. Maybe, just maybe, there are times when everyone should disguise low esteem with some degree of bravado and hubris.
We live a delicate balance between landscape and stream, between the ostensibly permanent and the definitely temporary. Because we don’t have much permanence ourselves, it’s easy to be caught up in a flow that disappears from view. That disappearance is our ultimate fate is unavoidable in the karst topography of our finite lives. There are sinkholes and caverns aplenty.
Staying on the surface requires some, however slight, narcissism.
*Webber, Rebecca. Meet the Real Narcissists (They’re Not What You Think). Psychology Today, Septemver 5, 2016, reviewed on December 15, 2017, Online at https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201609/meet-the-real-narcissists-theyre-not-what-you-think
**Ibid.
***Ibid.
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