This paper analyses the evolution of Western perceptions of the Arab Spring through the prism of self/other identities and psychoanalysis. Reconstructing the process of perception, the argument suggests that the West engages in a self-pleasing phantasy of first recognising itself in protesters, and then, when faced with irreconcilable difference, developing a no less narcissistic suspicion. The argument is situated in the broader dynamics of self-definition against the unknown, and the illusions and traumas of a meaningful discovery of the other.