Perhaps the patients Freud called narcissists were people so lacking in empathy and capacity for love, so fraudulent and immature, that today they would be diagnosed with NPD. But one wonders whether any women and too-feminine men might have resisted making the mistakes transference demands—falling in love with the analyst, projecting their father-attachments onto him—for some other reason. From the perspective of Freud’s emerging “science,” if they didn’t need therapy, their self-sufficiency must be a case of arrested development; if their sexuality was not visible as healthy from the perspective of the analyst’s theories, they were immature. It’s not something Freud considers, the possibility that such resistance might actually have been exactly what it looks like: an aversion to the analytic situation, with its imbalance of power, its detached and disinterested analyst, its required performances of colossal mistakes, its falseness and its theatrical repetition of the past, and that such resistance might make some sense, in a room where the patient’s sexuality or gender is treated as something to overcome.

On the question of prevalence, this first DSM entry was cagey: “This disorder appears to be more common recently than in the past, but this may be due only to more professional interest in it.” But behind that neat list of narcissistic traits, within psychology’s ever-expanding and dividing fields and schools, the debates continued: How much self-regard is normal, and how much unhealthy or even evil? When someone is acting like a six-year-old, should you empathize with their view of reality or try to correct it? If someone doesn’t want to talk to you or fall in love with you, when is that because he is fundamentally an asshole? If someone turns suddenly away from treatment, or from a relationship, does that mean she is incapable of love? Are there really people who have no empathy? Can you help someone learn to love? And is this thing called narcissism something some people are, or something they do? These are questions you can ask forever, not only if you are a psychologist, but if you find yourself loving someone who turns away.

It is something you’ll come to months or years later, if at all: the possibility that the way he was with you was real, and that it was love; that the way he was with the other woman, real or imagined, was real, was love, as well. You might understand this in the middle of the next time you fall in love with someone else, and find yourself, still, in love with him. You’ve just spread your love out in time, and he has spread it out in space.

But that is exactly what you can’t get to, the perspective of time, when your gaze is frozen on the image of him turning away. You’re suffering from the same illusion as both Echo and Narcissus: only one person can be the center of another person’s world at any given time, and ideally, this would always be you. This is where all the narcissistic romance websites invite you to be: in the center of the world, stuck in time, assessing the moral status of others, until love is gone.

There’s a sentence of Alice Miller’s looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: “Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.” It’s the main thing I’ve learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time.

For years, whenever he turned away, I filled in the blanks with the script, but now he is here all the time, he won’t leave, and even so close by, his mind—the other’s mind—can turn strange and blank. You can fill in the blank with stories about coldness and stories of evil. You can try to chase it down, rope it, you can make war on it, but it will still be blank. You can rage against your dependency, the absolute need for the other that can never be satiated, but the other is, in their own way and not through their own fault, the very center of their universe, and there is a part of that centrality that will always be empty of you. You can study it and theorize it, but if the blank were not still bottomless, love would not ever go on long.

Maybe it’s not something to run from, but one of the best things, the way no matter how hard we try to study them, the selves of others escape capture. It is something to turn toward, the selfishness of others, a kind of gift: the thing that can empty the future of your fears from the past.

The selfishness of others is the feeling of your dependence revealed, as their gaze turns away. Your independence laid bare as myth. The feeling of being the animal you are, born of other animals, made of mirroring them.