If Narcissus Did Teletherapy
On the video call and seeing too much of ourselves
I would like to say that during the only confrontation in my twenty-five year relationship with Caitlyn, my first-ever friend from preschool, I was entirely and completely present—but that wouldn’t be entirely and completely honest. We lived hundreds of miles apart and FaceTime was the closest we could get to actual face time, which meant that while her face filled up most of my laptop screen, my own expression blinked and twitched back at me, confined to a neat rectangle at the edge of my attention. As I described the growing distance between us, I checked the camera view of myself to make sure I looked both concerned and insistent. As I asked her whether something was wrong, I glanced toward my face for a stray angry eyebrow or lingering frown. Or that one wandering chunk of hair that always fell over my left eye. As I called out the ways she hadn’t seemed like herself recently, I tried to smooth any accusation out of my expression—no squinting, pursing, or furrowing. And I couldn’t help it. I smoothed that piece of hair behind my ear, too.
While I’ve been called a narcissist (and worse) on the internet, it wasn’t until I noticed my attention darting to the pixelated livestream of my face that I wondered if it might be true. I cared about Caitlyn, and this conversation, much more than I thought I cared about my hair or the way my mouth curved when I remembered another point I wanted to make. Every time I felt the heavy flit of my eyeball up and to the right, I flinched a little, embarrassed. Either my focus had been irreparably broken by screens and the internet, or I was really that obsessed with myself. Narcissistic.
Recall the Greek tragedy: Narcissus, a young man so beautiful that everyone he met fell in love with him, kneels to drink from a pool of water and falls in love with the man he sees within. Distraught that they cannot be together, he wastes away and becomes a daffodil on the bed of the pond.
Don’t be so obsessed with yourself, the story warns, but human nature and biology tell a different story. We are drawn to ourselves, even when we don’t mean to be. At a noisy cocktail party, you can attune your focus to the conversation you’re in and relegate everything else to literal background noise. But if someone drops your name in another conversation, your attention swivels toward them, like a glass shattered at a frequency only you can hear. Since the 1950s, this phenomenon has been replicated so many times in scientific literature that it has its own name: the cocktail party effect.
In a sea of dazzling, infinite stimuli to pay attention to, your head whips toward the most dazzling of all: the sound of your own name. Seeing your own face sets off a wave of dopamine that seeing other faces doesn't. We remember new information better when we can relate it to us, and we can’t stop staring at ourselves on video calls.
Maybe my FaceTime gazing wasn’t a sign of narcissism, but a normal biological and social reflex—even a philosophical one. Prioritizing information about ourselves is the alarm that the lion is running toward us just as much as it’s the basis for our sense of self. We need to pay attention to ourselves to stay out of danger, cooperate with others, and reinforce our identities. It isn’t just my inner Narcissus who is pulled to the self-facing camera; we’re all wired to turn toward ourselves. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”
McLuhan published those words in 1964, long before the lure of the self-facing camera. But before we spent days on Zoom, we took selfies and filmed vlogs. Before that we put ourselves in daguerreotypes and painted self-portraits. And for thousands and thousands of years, we have sought out the glimmer of reflective surfaces; of mirrors.
It’s just that we’ve never had this much access to watching the “self-in-action” until the explosion of video calling that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenon that won’t be going away as the adoption of remote work remains pervasive. Because the shift to online workplaces has been so rapid and extreme, most research on the effects of seeing yourself on camera investigates the self-view in a work context. Seeing yourself during video meetings leads to far more fatigue and worse cognitive ability than when you can’t see your face. It makes you think the people you’re talking to like you less than they do. It makes you more critical of your performance, your appearance, and your convictions.
You leave the call feeling unsatisfied. Why weren’t you as productive as you planned? Why don’t the solutions you came up with seem as effective as you’d hoped? Why do you just feel worse?
In 2021, writer Meghan O’Gieblyn described this disconnect in WIRED. “It wasn’t until a year ago that we were constantly, relentlessly, obliged to watch ourselves in real time as we interacted with others, to see our looks of dismay, our empathetic nods, our impassioned gestures, all of which appeared so different from how we’d imagined them, if we imagined them at all.” Now, we’re entering the fifth year of this relentless “all day mirror,” and it isn’t just reflecting back our awkward virtual baby showers and nauseating repetitions of can everyone see my screen?
Video calling is also the way more than 50% of mental health appointments are conducted. It’s how many of my friends have had to fire employees, and been fired themselves. It’s how, thanks to a combination of geographic dispersion and the pulse of urgency, I’ve learned of my best friends’ engagements, my brother expecting a baby, and my uncle’s cancer recurrence.
I don’t know that any of the alternatives—phone calls, texts, emails, or waiting for an in-person chance to talk—supersede the expediency and sense of closeness that video call enables. But I also don’t want to enter a difficult conversation with my oldest friend or process the painful end of a relationship with my therapist through a medium that makes me more self-aware and self-critical; more anxious and distressed. We already trudge through a negativity bias that tilts our attention, decision-making, and memory toward the bad. But when we watch ourselves, we even misjudge our own neutral expressions as sad, or angry, or afraid.
In these moments of deeply human, vulnerable interaction, I don’t want to be “able to monitor [myself] continuously and, consequently, control the impression [I] make on others.” Because if the option is there, I know I will try to control how wide my eyes go or how big my smile gets. While I should be focusing on important, sometimes life-changing information, some part of me will be seized by the moving mirror image of myself. It’s inevitable. The siren call of ourselves is “unintentional, unconscious, and uncontrolled.”
It was unintentional that, when I answered a FaceTime call from my mother in March of 2018, I happened to be standing in front of a mirror. As she told me my father had taken his life, I unconsciously flicked my attention from the phone to the mirror to find my same blank, unfamiliar face staring back at me in both. I started rapidly nodding, then I fell to the floor, then a sound I’d never heard before that moment ripped from my chest. All of it uncontrolled.
I had felt revolted at seeing so much of myself—in the phone camera, in the mirror. I was wearing a striped pastel shirt and denim cut-offs, and I remember thinking I should have worn something different to find out Dad is dead, already swimming outside of time. I had the impossible sensation, watching myself flip from shock to devastation and wishing I hadn’t witnessed either, that I’d been practicing for this moment, as if it had happened over and over sometime before. It hadn’t, of course. But the double mirror taunted me with whether I was doing grief right. Did it take me too long to cry? Why had I nodded over and over? How did my face appear the same, when everything in my world had changed?
In that moment, the self-facing camera and the mirror were an audience to my shock. And that is really what we’re trying to do by watching ourselves: we practice for the audience of self in order to be prepared for the audience of others. Getting a glimpse of how the world perceives us helps us adapt. In 1902, long before video calling, sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the term the looking-glass self, the idea that our sense of self is determined by how we think others perceive us. When we look in the mirror or at the Zoom screen, we get to see what others see. We are practicing for their reactions, and our own. It’s no wonder we can’t look away—there is nothing more relevant to our sense of self and safety than the knowledge that who we are is continuous, but who we can get along with is flexible.
But I worry that the conflation of it all—the frequency of video calls, the lure of our faces, the intensity of situations where we can now see our own reactions in real time—has crossed from adaptive awareness into self-surveillance. That when we see ourselves so often and so raw, we practice something else: policing our emotions and tempering our reactions even before they are fully born. We analyze, moment to moment, trying to make our reactions perfect.
It seems obvious enough that turning off self-view would stop Narcissus from wasting away at the pond, but that isn’t an option on FaceTime, and it isn’t the norm on platforms like Zoom and Teams. Even if it was, we want to see ourselves, regardless of whether it’s good for us. We get the dopamine hit, and we keep staring into the water.
But the way we talk about the myth is wrong. It’s not that Narcissus is obsessed with himself. It’s that he doesn’t recognize himself, and falls in love with his reflection as if it is someone else. The word narcissus means numb, like narcotic, like narcolepsy. Like what happens to the wondrous spectrum of sensation when we see too much of ourselves, numbed by a feedback loop of expression and control.
“It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves,” McLuhan presciently wrote sixty years ago. We make the choice for convenience and efficiency until it is no longer a choice, but a dependency. But what would it be like to—once in a while—wait to share the good news along with a hug, or not have the hard conversation until we can squeeze hands? What if we let an emotion unspool into all its delicious threads? To linger?
In all the ways our relationship with technology places us in constant tension between the automatic and the autonomous, seeing ourselves on video call is not the most consequential. But as it becomes a standard mechanism by which we maintain our relationships, how will it continue to influence our perceptions and awareness? Hurried thoughts and flatter feelings are the natural result of these numbed extensions of ourselves. But if we can break the feedback loop and let sensation in, what kind of agency over ourselves would we get back?