Narcissism
Etymology
An eponym from the Greek myth of Narcissus, a youth who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and wasted away beside it. Taken up by early psychologists such as Havelock Ellis and Paul Näcke, then by Freud, it became a clinical term for self-directed love.
noun · /NAR-sis-iz-um/
Excessive self-absorption, vanity, and need for admiration.
What it names
The personality organized around its own image — hungry for reflection, thin on empathy.
Example
His feed was a case study in narcissism: every crisis in the world somehow refracted back to his own feelings about it.
Related idea
Vanity is preoccupation with how one appears; narcissism is a deeper organization of the whole self around admiration, often masking a fragile sense of worth.