Beyond Narcissism

Abstract

ABSTRACTSince Freud’s essay on Narcissism, our reading of the Narcissus myth has been instrumental to identifying a specific type of personality disorder that has been increasingly seen as characteristic of modern and postmodern Western societies. But what if this reading of the ancient myth was, in itself, a narcissistic misreading? In this article, the author addresses one of her primary research interests: how a comparative reading of medieval hermeneutics of the human experience and of Jung’s depth psychology may offer us a deeper understanding of the workings of archetypal imagination. This article explores the ways in which premodern visionaries, poets, and artists from different cultural traditions consciously engaged with the images staring at them from the depths of the unconscious in an approach that resonates with Jung’s own. Those images of the depths, it turns out, deeply engage the masculine conscious side of the psyche in the retrieval of its feminine, life-restoring counterpart.