Pentimento of Narcissus: Poem and Commentary

Psychotherapists and cultural pundits tell us today that contemporary society is fundamentally narcissistic. The therapeutic concept of Narcissism was propagated by Sigmund Freud in 1914, building on his immediate predecessors who had linked narcissistic personality traits with criminal homosexuality. In Freud's thinking, the story of Narcissus became the paradigm by which to distinguish infantile stirrings of libidinous energies set against the parental authority charged with instilling the social code in the child, and saddling "Its Majesty, the Baby" with a sense of guilt. Once the child learned to project its need for love on somebody beyond itself, the sense of guilt would abate in the mature adult. If, however, that maturation process for some reason was disturbed, the adult would suffer from pathological narcissism curable by therapy.

Freud's use of the Narcissus allegory as found in Ovid's Metamorphoses ignored two significant aspects of the ancient myth, first its linkage to the orbit of the goat-god, half nature and half man, and second that Narcissus' death from staring into the pool of his own self would produce the chaste flower of artistic creation. By contrast, C.G. Jung would argue that the myth of Narcissus in its fullest sense depicts the liminal experience of delving into the pre-conscious self, which is the perpetual and universal source of dreams, art, religion, and philosophy.

These meanings were adumbrated by the Symbolist artists and writers of second half of the nineteenth century, but were ignored in Freud's thinking. His analysis focused on the personal unconscious of the isolated individual. With the cultural shifts taking place in Western society since

the 1970s, the individual, stripped of permanent cultural models identified with parental authority, finds itself confronted with substitute imagoes proffered by commercial media. Instead of feeling "guilt" from an internal judgement vis-a-vis the parent, the modern child and adolescent feel "shame" from not measuring up to the cultural images imposed online.

The poem below sets out to restore the ancient context of the Narcissus myth, followed by commentaries drawn from the primary sources on which the Narcissus tradition is based, and on modern discussions of the figure as it appears in contemporary psychodynamic therapy and social theory.