What would Freud make of our obsession with selfies?

Go to any of the most beautiful places in the world, and you'll see people taking pictures... of themselves. We think of this as a new thing. Selfie only made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, when it quickly became word of the year. But selfies are about as old as photography. The first was taken in 1839 by an American named Robert Cornelius. So why have we used photography, this miraculous invention, to take pictures of something we can see in our bathroom mirror every morning? Something odd is clearly going on. And who better to explain human oddities than Sigmund Freud?
去世界上任何一个最美丽的地方，你都会看到人们在拍……自己。我们认为这是一个新事物。2013年，Selfie（自拍）才被收入《牛津英语词典》，并迅速成为年度热词。但自拍和摄影一样古老。第一张自拍照片是1839年由美国人罗伯特·科尼利厄斯拍的。那么，为什么我们要用摄影这个神奇的发明，来拍摄我们每天早上在浴室镜子里看到的东西呢?
奇怪的事情显然正在发生。还有谁比西格蒙德·弗洛伊德更能解释人类的奇怪呢？

Freud invented psychoanalysis and popularised many ideas like the ego, the unconscious, and talking to a therapist. One of those ideas is narcissism, or excessive self-love. In a Greek myth, a young man called Narcissus sees his reflection in a pool and spends so long staring at his own beauty that he loses touch with the rest of the world, and eventually drowns trying to embrace his own image in the water.
弗洛伊德发明了精神分析学，并普及了许多观念，如自我、潜意识和与谈话疗法。其中一个概念就是自恋，或者说过度的自爱。在一个希腊神话中，一个叫纳西索斯的年轻人在水池中看到了自己的倒影，他长时间凝视着自己的美貌，以至于与世界失去了联系，最终为了拥抱自己在水中的映像而溺水身亡。

Freud thought that a bit of self-love was a natural part of being human. But Freud also thought that self-love can turn into a psychological disorder, when someone loves himself to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. And that's what we usually mean by narcissism. Psychologists have developed tests for measuring personality traits like narcissism. Here are some results. Narcissists do tend to be more active on social media. And posting selfies is strongly related to narcissism - but only if you're a man. Women tend to be less narcissistic than men, even though women post more selfies.
弗洛伊德认为有点自爱是人类天性的一部分。但是弗洛伊德也认为自爱可以变成一种心理障碍，当一个人爱自己的时候，他会把所有人和所有事情都排除在外。这就是我们通常所说的自恋。心理学家已经开发出测试自恋等人格特征的测试。这里有一些结果。自恋者在社交媒体上的确更加活跃。发布自拍与自恋有很大关系——但只有在你是男性的情况下。女性往往不比男性自恋，尽管女性发布的自拍照更多。

Perhaps more worryingly, narcissism is rising. The psychologist Jean Twenge has shown that, over the past few decades, it's risen at roughly the same rate as obesity. Freud derived most of his insights from everyday life observations, so he would have been very interested in all this data. He would have concluded that narcissism is only part of what's going on in the rise of selfie culture. Some people are posting selfies not because they're in love with themselves, but because they want other people to be in love with them.
也许更令人担忧的是，自恋情结正在上升。心理学家让·特文格的研究表明，在过去几十年里，自恋的上升速度与肥胖的上升速度大致相同。弗洛伊德的大部分见解来自于对日常生活的观察，因此他会对所有这些数据非常感兴趣。他会得出这样的结论：自恋只是自拍文化兴起的一部分原因。有些人发布自拍照并不是因为他们爱上了自己，而是因为他们希望其他人爱上他们。

Freud would have seen that need for approval as neurotic or hysterical. Freud began his career in the late 1800s, a much more sexually repressed time. Men and women were kept strictly separated. And they were taught to be ashamed of feeling... sexy. Many of Freud's female patients in Viennese high society suffered from 'hysterical paralysis' - an inability to walk that had no physical cause. Freud believed that these women were, without knowing it, stopping themselves from walking because they wanted attention.
弗洛伊德会认为这种对认可的需求是神经质的或歇斯底里的。弗洛伊德的职业生涯开始于19世纪晚期，那是一个犹为性压抑的时代。男人和女人被严格分开。他们被教导要为性感的感觉感到羞耻。弗洛伊德的许多女性患者在维也纳上流社会遭受“癔症性瘫痪”——无法行走，但没有身体原因。弗洛伊德认为，这些女人在不自觉的情况下，阻止自己走路，是因为她们想引起别人的注意。

So, if we need attention so badly that we'll paralyse ourselves for it, why not post a few selfies? Isn't that better? Well, Freud would find something unhealthy about selfies - not just because of what they say about the people taking them, but also because of what they do to the people seeing them. Selfies show people's best moments, carefully curated and heavily stage-managed. So we're increasingly surrounded by images of other people's apparently perfect lives and bodies.
所以，如果我们迫切需要关注，以至于我们会为此麻痹自己，为什么不发几张自拍照呢？这样不是更好吗？弗洛伊德会发现自拍有一些不健康的地方——不仅是因为自拍者的表现，还因为自拍对看到自拍的人造成的影响。自拍展示了人们最美好的时刻，经过精心策划和刻意安排。因此，我们越来越多地被他人表面上完美的生活和身体的图像所包围。

Recent studies show that this makes us feel more envy, inadequacy, isolation and insecurity. Making us, in Freud's terms, more neurotic. Freud said, "the aim of psychoanalysis is to replace neurotic with ordinary human unhappiness." So next time you reach for the camera, remember Narcissus and focus on your friends instead. You may not get as many likes, but you'll get a thumbs up from Freud.
最近的研究表明，这让我们感到更多的嫉妒、信心不足、孤立和不安全感。用弗洛伊德的话说，让我们变得更加神经质。弗洛伊德说：“精神分析的目的是用普通人的不快乐取代神经质。所以下次你拿起相机的时候，记住纳西索斯，把注意力放在你的朋友身上。你可能不会得到那么多的赞，但你会得到弗洛伊德竖起的大拇指。


★原视频及更多英语听力见公众号【琐简英语】，回复“1”，可进入【打卡交流群】