Self-worship is a passing stage that, if lingered in, ossifies into self-destruction and emptiness.

Evidence

In the worship of self, the adolescent girl can muster the courage to face the disturbing future; but it is a stage she must go beyond quickly: if not, the future closes up. The woman in love who encloses her lover in the couple’s immanence dooms him to death with herself: the narcissist, alienating herself in her imaginary double, destroys herself. Her memories become fixed, her behavior stereotyped, she dwells on the same words, repeats gestures that have lost all meaning: this is what gives the impression of poverty found in “secret diaries” or “feminine autobiographies”; so occupied in flattering herself, the woman who does nothing becomes nothing and flatters a nothing. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1833

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows narcissism as an arrested developmental stage with a specific phenomenological signature: fixed memories, stereotyped behavior, meaningless repetition.
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing line condenses a whole theory — woman who does nothing becomes nothing and flatters a nothing — an aphoristic compression of immanence-into-narcissism that resonates far beyond the case at hand.
• XREF: connects to: Horkheimer saw the ego’s self-preservation drive as ultimately self-destructive. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 816