IJSP Number 6, 2024

90 “Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability, and adequacy, of being useful and necessary in the world. But thwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness, and of helplessness. These feelings in turn give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic trends. An appreciation of the necessity of basic self-confidence and an understanding of how helpless people are without it can be easily gained from a study of severe traumatic neurosis.” [9] The constant search and neediness for attention, affection, love, understanding, and validation, or respect is, in fact, very energy consuming. Unfortunately for the individual involved in such a process, propelled by one’s own childhood idiosyncrasies and the constant effort to overcome them, one will not easily find a solution for the hidden roots of self-importance. Instead, the inevitable and permanent insistence of the individual – who has no alternative from the monopoly of one’s own self-importance –, the importance given to the self (at least to the one presented in the show-window of the world), will inevitably increase the inescapable self-importance. It is a self-increasing process, a never-ending story that gets bigger and fatter by eating itself up, in fact a true ouroboros – the old snake or dragon of the alchemists eating its own tail, in a perfect vicious circle. As such, we are talking of a closed system, at least from a psychological point of view, one that is self-feeding on itself but also on its constant fear of being discovered. Because, what lies in the shadow of the self-importance is a very weak self-esteem. From a socio-psychological perspective, one has to be connected in order to feed on the attention, validation, or whatever one can grab by exhibiting oneself to the public. As such, we have a permanent tension between the ‘exhibiting tendency’, namely the histrionic one, and the all-pervasive fear of being exposed as a fake. To be in the public eye – and to acquire more and more self-importance – on the one hand, and to fear the public eye because it could see through the falseness of the mask one is wearing all the time, on the other hand, – that is the big dilemma of the falseness self-importance carries on. A mask that, we should mention it, does not seat very well on a human face – even more so when such a face is just one in a million or billion others. And, above all, even the masks resemble one another, as we are in a society where uniformization is the norm. As an example, we may think of the universalization of tattoos: once uncommon and making individuals exceptional, nowadays, when everyone wants to be an individualistic exception, pretty much everyone (who still wants to be exceptional) has at least one tattoo if not a whole series on the body.