Myth Of Narcissus Research Articles

Estranged Kinship: Empathy and Animal Desire in Merleau-Ponty

Abstract Merleau-Ponty suggests in his Nature lectures that myth provides the best way into thinking the relation of strange kinship between humanity and animality. He goes on to refigure Husserl’s paradigm of the two hands touching to extend beyond merely human-to-human relations, invoking in the process the myth of Narcissus. By carefully examining Merleau-Ponty’s late refiguration of that paradigm, alongside the revised conception of narcissism that it helps him to develop, we find that while human-animal empathy is made possible by a ground of intercorporeal kinship, human-animal estrangement makes possible the emergence of an ethical relation to other animals, contingent upon the sublimation of animal desire. Holding human-animal kinship and estrangement in tension reveals a nascent ideal present implicitly in the early stages of childhood development: a vision of the possibility of interspecies harmony, rooted in the bodily reciprocity that drives the process of self-maturation.

The fate of the myth of Narcissus

The report attempts to psychoanalyze the Myth of Narcissus. Some contradictions of the modern concept of narcissism and how narcissism is presented from the point of view of the economy of mental processes are shown. The report correlates some of the theses of the myth with the narcissistic perso nality structure.

Line Rider and Ludomusical Excesses

This article rethinks music and video games in terms of experiences—what is termed ludomusical excesses—that do not fit squarely with the fundamental assumptions about music’s centrality in video games but overstep the limits of moderation as potentialities. This article uses Line Rider (2006)—a video game in which players draw lines to music of their choice—as a case study to explore how narratives, metaphors, and experiences of ludomusical excesses can animate music’s multifarious relations with video games. This article comprises three episodes of ludomusical excesses, which are respectively concerned with physical excess, discursive excess, and affective excess. The first episode sees excess as prosthetic extension in the game and conceptualizes numbness and irritation in the process of musical transcription in Line Rider. In so doing, it explores the overspilling forms of queer digital intimacy with one’s self during gameplay through the myth of Narcissus. The second episode examines the mutual reflection of landscape and mindscape in Chinese qin music that exceeds the digital rendering in the game. Playing with the metaphors of trap and prey, the episode underlines the oxymoronic play with the game’s representational flatness and its ludic conceit in disciplining musical surplus. The final episode considers affective excesses in a game designer’s passion for and wonderment in the game that result in a virtuosic display. Together, these episodes craft ludomusical realities of excesses that aim to invite alternative configurations of music’s relationship with video games.

Миф о Нарциссе во французской литературе раннего Ренессанса: фрагмент, аллегория, эмблема

This article examines the evolution of medieval interpretations of the myth of Narcissus (Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book III) in French literature of the first half of the 16th century. Jeanne Flore in the “Comptes amoureux” develops the courtesan interpretation of the myth, in which Narcissus, who rejects Cupid’s omnipotence, is combined with the figure of Belle dame sans mercy. In the tradition of moral and allegorical commentary, the young man in love with himself served as a symbol of hubris excessively immersed in worldly goods; in the mid-century, this tradition changed under the influence of humanism: with François Habert and Barthélémy Aneau the story of Narcissus illustrates the maxim “know thyself.” Reception of the Metamorphoses in the Middle Ages implied a fragmentation of the text of the poem: the courtly interpretation referred to its separate subjects, while the allegorical interpretation transformed it into a list of symbolic characters with a stable independent meaning and into a set of didactic maxims of a universal character. During the Renaissance, literati seek to restore the coherence of Ovid’s text. This tendency is embodied not only in new translations (by Clément Marot, F. Habert, B. Aneau) but also, paradoxically, within the genre of the emblem. The “Metamorphose d’Ovide figurée” inherits the medieval florilegiums and transforms the tradition of illuminated manuscripts: on the one hand, it replaces the text of the poem with a series of engravings, while, on the other, its emblems arrangement recreates the unity of the poem. Ovid’s emblematic treatment embodies Horace’s principle of ut pictura poesis.

Who Am I Really? – Illusions and Splits in the Mirror

This research paper examines the ‘As-If’ personality, characterized by mimicry, emotional distance, and disconnection from one’s true self, within the context of today’s social media culture. Drawing upon psychoanalytic insights, it explores the impact of living a superficial existence, marked by illusions and isolation. Through the lens of the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus, it reveals the yearning for authentic connection and love beneath these personas. The study highlights the potential for healing and self-discovery in Jungian analytical psychology, emphasizing the journey to self-realization and authenticity.

THE (QUEER) AESTHETICS OF JEAN PAUL'S SIEBENKÄS

ABSTRACTThis article proposes that the eighteenth‐century novel Siebenkäs contains the formulation of an aesthetic theory that embraces same‐sex desire. The novel's author, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, still relatively unknown among literary scholars today, uses the myth of Narcissus as an aesthetic blueprint for the novel. In doing so, he appears to comply with the aesthetic conventions espoused by his German Romantic peers, many of whom considered self‐contemplation to be a prerequisite for gaining access to the Absolute, a term that designates an unconditioned totality that was dear to authors, artists and philosophers at the time. However, the article suggests that Jean Paul's true purpose is to employ the myth to subversive ends. In particular, the author builds upon the myth's homoerotic underpinnings – largely (but not entirely) forgotten in the eighteenth century – to articulate a theory of aesthetics that no longer seeks to efface homosexual desire. The aesthetic worldview that emerges from this process is one that foregrounds imitation as a fundamental building‐block of queer aesthetics and that, in contraposition to some of the dominant aesthetic thinking of the age, advocates the legitimacy of an aesthetics that celebrates desire rather than suppressing it.

Double Index. The Self-Shadow in American Photography of the Second Half of the 20th Century

The article focuses on the notion of the image of self-shadow in American photography in the second half of the twentieth century, understood as a shadow silhouette of the creator captured in a photograph. The two main problems that concern the author’s research are the lack of current, theoretical study on the problem of shadow in the history of photography from the perspective of art history (V. Stoichita, R. Casati, P. Cavanagh, H. Kanaan) and the lack of the definition of the phenomenon of self-shadow and its possible types in self-portraiture. The author’s proposition of a definition of self-shadow is based on selected photographs by four artists whose works touch upon the problem of shadow in the context of relations between the “self” and the “other” (Lee Friedlander), race and subjective invisibility (Shawn W. Walker), mask and the other-self (Andy Warhol), and the intimate recording of identity (Nan Goldin). In her analyses, the author discusses the problem of the hybrid ontology of the shadow, which is both visible and visual. In this understanding, the shadow not only refers to a physical body, present “here and now” but more importantly evokes a sense of presence, even when the artist’s body is absent in the picture. The double index refers to the image leaving its mark both in reality and on light-sensitive paper. The rudimentary, vitalistic relation linking the human body with its shadow is only a starting point for analyses of the complexity of its status and symbolism. The concepts framing Andy Warhol’s Polaroid are twinning, the mask, and the Jungian theory of the shadow archetype. To discuss the self-portrait of Shawn W. Walker, the author applies the literary-philosophical concept of invisibility based on writings from Black existentialists (W.E.B. Du Bois, F. Fanon, R. Ellison). The analyses of Lee Friedlander’s photograph have been based on the psychological distinction between the figures of the “self” and the “other”. The closing concepts that frame Nan Goldin’s self-portrait are the haptic thinking subject (M. Smolińska) and the notion of a diary. The critical apparatus of the study is supplemented by contemporary analyses of the myth of Narcissus, the mythical origins of the self-portrait, and the notion of the index (after R. Krauss, M. Michałowska, M.A. Doane).

Performing the virtual double

In what follows the idea of the online double is historically contextualised and analysed. Beginningwith the contemporary idea of the ‘selfie’ as online self-induced double, I proceed to discuss theDoppelgänger’s (double) mythical and literary roots, in order to expand the discussion of the selfieto include the online double. Two instances of the online double are unpacked, namely the doubleas shadow and the double as a stand-in or alter-ego, which correspond significantly with MarshallMcLuhan’s analysis of the Narcissus myth and technological use. McLuhan reveals the doublednature of our technological engagement that leads to either self-amputation or self-amplification.In my analysis, the double as shadow is correlated with self-amputation and the double as alteregowith self-amplification. It is argued that the double as shadow is evoked online through themining of data regarding the self that is captured consciously and unconsciously to create whatis known as the Data Doppelgänger. The figure of the Doppelgänger is further vividly conjuredthrough virtual stand-ins or alter-egos that act on behalf of the self to create a tele-presencethrough examples such as Project Lifelike and rep.licants.org.

Narcissism as a global barrier to education for sustainable development

Narcissism, extreme self-interest, refers to a set of personality characteristics including arrogance, self-centeredness, need for admiration, sense of entitlement, grandiosity, lack of empathy, and interpersonal exploitation, which can range from normal to a diagnosable mental disorder, narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissism, deriving from the Greek myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water which led to his demise, is part of our human nature and is associated with aggressive behaviour, conflict and war, counterproductive work behaviour, “bad” leadership, and weaker environmental ethics. Evidence suggests that individual and collective narcissism is increasing worldwide. Correspondingly, individualism is increasing while collectivism is declining. Furthermore, leadership attracts narcissists with its allure of power and prestige, who then affect their organisations’ performance, and those higher in narcissism tend to attain higher leadership levels. These trends are increasingly problematic as our world shifts toward greater interdependence. Add the challenges of narcissism with its corresponding threats to sustainable institutions to the challenges of sustainable development, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987: 43), and this identifies an overlooked barrier to education for sustainable development. We developed a testable model to address this barrier. Since the determining factors for institutional sustainability are generated largely by activities of specific teams, departments, and task forces, our framework stresses interactions at the group level in education systems. This model presents seven sets of impacts of a narcissistic leader’s actions upon the outcomes for her or his group, generates fourteen propositions, and outlines research strategies.

성경과 나르시스 신화의 조화

This article presents the harmony of the Bible and Greek Mythology in Tirso de Molina’s play, La venganza de Tamar. Through the confluence of the historical events of Amnon and Tamar in the Old Testament and the Myth of Narcissus in Greek Mythology, Tirso creates La venganza de Tamar, a ‘psychological’ play, which was rare in the Golden-Age plays. This study proves that Tirso instills a narcissistic personality and psychology into the biblical characters, allowing readers or spectators to empathize with the character’s actions, allowing them to go down into the depths of historical events rather than staying on the superficial surface. Together, Tirso cites excessive pursuit of desire as the cause of the Davidic dynasty’s crisis and conveys this message to Spanish society at the time in an aesthetic way.

Joan Jonas’s Ecological Portraits

Across various projects in the 1960s and ’70s, Joan Jonas created forms of self-portraiture enmeshed within environments. Engaging a range of media including mirrors, water, and video, Jonas repeatedly emphasized her body’s interrelation with surrounding natural and media ecologies. The resultant ecological portraits offer a model of being that encourages audiences to acknowledge their own embodiment in encounters with nature, whether experienced directly or through mediation. This article excavates this intermedia practice and explores the forms of ecocritical thought her performances and records might produce. Working in an era of expanding media experiments across performance, sculpture, and video, Jonas’s multimedia projects collaborate with the surrounding environment to explore the emergent openness of art in the 1970s. This article takes Jonas’s Disturbances (1974) as its starting point, arguing that Jonas featured the reflective and refractive properties of water to meditate upon the ecological resonances of the myth of Narcissus, the distorting optics of video, and the mediation of nature broadly. Similarly, in recent projection-based projects, Jonas has continued her exploration of the body’s relationship to both nature and media by incorporating her body into projected nature videos. In keeping with her stated unwillingness to “penetrate space,” ecological portraits across Jonas’s career reveal her multidirectional entanglements with spaces near and far, from waves in a pool to global oceanic crises.

Is there a recipe for getting rid of narcissism?

The book examines the problem of narcissism. The old myth of Narcissus is reinterpreted in a completely new discourse — political narcissism.

Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation

Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation

Reversed Myth and Negative Symbols of Narcissus in Mother-Son Relationship in Hayashi Fumiko’s Narcissus

The famous myth of Narcissus is about a mythical handsome young man who indifferently rejects the love of the nymph Echo leading to Echo’s broken heart and untimely death and his being cursed to excessively adore his own handsome reflection on the pond till his death. The short story entitled Narcissus written by Hayashi Fumiko is intriguing because its title calls to mind the famous myth of Narcissus. However, this short story portrays the myth of Narcissus from a unique perspective. Thus, the aims of this paper are to analyse the reversed myth and negative symbols of Narcissus as reflected in the mother-son relationship in the short story. To support the analysis various psychological understandings of the myth of Narcissus are used as well as various understandings of the symbols of the flowers called Narcissus. The methods of research used are a comprehensive combination of textual-contextual methods as well as library research and qualitative research. The textual method focuses on the intrinsic aspects relevant to the focus of analysis, such as character, conflict, and setting, while the contextual method borrows the psychological concepts of the term Narcissus and the symbolic meaning of the flowers named Narcissus. The result shows that the mother-son relationship clearly portrays the reversed myth in the matter of the gender roles, the type of relationship, and the ending of the relationship. Another result shows that all the symbols related to the flowers of Narcissus turn into negative meanings in the sort of story entitled Narcissus by Hayashi Fumiko. In short, the short story writer turns upside down both the myth and the symbols resulting in an engaging story full of hidden meanings to be interpreted

From the Imaginary to Theory of the Gaze in Lacan.

To understand Lacan’s thinking process on vision, the entirety of his teaching must be taken into consideration. Until the 60s, the visual field is the imaginary, the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenal giving to the experience of a subject. This register is the opposite of the field of the word with the L schema and, subsequently, as subordinated to the symbolic system according to the model of the optical schema of the inverted flower vase of Bouasse. It is only with the 1964 seminar that Lacan makes a daring turnaround through which the visual becomes a sign of the emergence of a real that is irreducible to both reality and the mediation of the subject of knowledge. The split that separates reality and the real is reproduced in Lacan within the visual field, which is, on the one hand, the cardinal principle of the consistency of the experience of reality (as imaginary), and on the other, it is an element of irreducibility to reality (as object gaze). This produces a cascade of consequences: first of all, the modification of the presentation of the mirror stage. Unlike the voice, which through prosody, tone, and volume, finds some strips with which anchor itself imaginatively to reality, the gaze, invisible and elusive, escapes the imaginary grasp. Captured in myths, it reveals its power and ability to annihilate—as in the myth of Medusa’s gaze—or to make people fall in love but only with a narcissistic love that leads inexorably to death as in the myth of Narcissus. The gaze is elusive because the subject is dependent on it in the field of desire. Like the voice, it is about the desire on which the subject is supported; it is one of the objects on which the phantom depends. In our opinion, thanks to this characteristic, the gaze object can make remote psychoanalytic treatment possible through easily accessible videoconferencing tools and, at the same time, create new conditions within it that should be carefully evaluated to understand its implications in the session itself.

Metamorfoses – Um projeto de videoarte e fotografia.

Metamorphoses is a project whose objective is to induce introspective thinking about the search for perfection through the image. It refers to the existence of metamorphic gaze when the reflection of the self reproduces itself in the mirror: there remains the manifest contemplation of the individual as a reflected element and simultaneously a second surreptitious image created by the projection of the self. It is evidenced the artistic interpretation of the relationship of the subject with his reflection conditioned by social and cultural experience.Many artists use their own bodies to convey a message through image manipulation, and this is the focus of the Metamorphoses project. Therefore, this paper intends to present the results of an artistic project that establishes a symbiotic connection between photography and video art to show a self-representation which was distorted by the mirror in order to question the ideas of identity and perfection. The conception of metaphors is emphasized by the manipulation of sound and image and the constant presence of the mirror in photographic and video art creation wants to highlight the narcissus myth as a symbolic representation of the culture of the selfies.Thus, the article wants to divulge the experience of a scientific and artistic project that manipulates photography and video to communicate distorted transformations which an altered look may originate and that resulted in an art exhibition that reflects the structure of contemporary society in which the appearance and construction of Ideal images seem to be the foundation of the postmodern.

The Metamorphosis of Self(ie)-portrait: between the sublime and the banal

The analogy between the myth of Narcissus, referred to as the intrinsic symbol of painting by Leon Battista Alberti; the typological value of self-portrait as an ontological and statutory reference; its value while metamorphosis of reality; and the self-representative phenomenon that Selfie translates – all this has to be established and requires due consideration. When dwelling on the contemporary Selfie we need to consider also the salvific dimension of this kind of self-representation mechanisms that have always been there. The value of image while selfawareness mechanism compels us to question the fi eld of action where it is far more active – on social media.
 Its immanence is a true narcissistic affliction. The intrinsic and immediate value of image thus overlaps sign and word. The mechanisms of self-contemplation thus produced translate into a clear ontological impoverishment of reality. The Selfie does not prevent the subject’s Kafkian metamorphosis, but renders reality vulgar, making it acceptable through both similarity and integration. Self-portrait and Selfi e are thus the ancestral mechanisms of self-preservation. Its origin derives from narcissistic mechanisms that require a continuous desire to stand out socially. However, while the pictorial self-portrait translates into epistemic valuation of its author, Selfie delights in the vulgarization of the repetitive and banal gesture.

BEYOND NARCISSISM: THE MULTI‐LAYERED NARCISSUS REFERENCE IN HERMANN HESSE'S NARZISS UND GOLDMUND*

AbstractFreud's theory of narcissism, developed in the 1910s and 1920s, can be seen as a radical break with the Narcissus tradition in that the myth of Narcissus is turned into a theory about man's psychosexual constitution. This prompts the question of whether, or to what extent, Freud's theory influenced subsequent literary treatments of the theme. This article examines in particular the Narcissus reference in Hermann Hesse's novel Narziß und Goldmund (1930). Hesse had an intimate, but not uncritical, relationship with psychoanalysis, and his novel provides an interesting illustration of how the Narcissus reference was used in the direct aftermath of Freud's conceptualisation. In this article, I argue that while the narrative frame of the Narcissus myth is broken up in the novel, it remains poetically productive. Narcissism is incorporated into the intertextual nexus, but without replacing Narcissus. Three distinct layers of the Narcissus reference are identified in the novel, an Ovidian, a Freudian, and a neo‐Platonic, which interrelate in ways that prompt reflection on the relation between individuality and intersubjectivity, and between life and art.

The ‘Narcissus Effect’: Top-down alpha-beta band modulation of face-related brain areas during self-face processing

Self-related information, such as one’s own face, is prioritized by our cognitive system. Whilst recent theoretical developments suggest that this is achieved by an interplay between bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms, their underlying neural dynamics are still poorly understood. Furthermore, it is still matter of discussion as to whether these attentional mechanisms are truly self-specific or instead driven by face familiarity. To address these questions, we used EEG to record the brain activity of twenty-five healthy participants whilst identifying their own face, a friend’s face and a stranger’s face. Time-frequency analysis revealed a greater sustained power decrease in the alpha and beta frequency bands for the self-face, which emerged at late latencies and was maintained even when the face was no longer present. Critically, source analysis showed that this activity was generated in key brain regions for self-face recognition, such as the fusiform gyrus. As in the Myth of Narcissus, our results indicate that one’s own face might have the potential to hijack attention. We suggest that this effect is specific to the self and driven by a top-down attentional control mechanism, which might facilitate further processing of personally relevant events.

Literatura e imaginário educacional em Ofélia, a ovelha, de Marina Colasanti

Esse artigo analisa o conto de fadas Ofélia, a ovelha, de Marina Colasanti, buscando identificar seus significados a partir da relação entre imaginário e educação. Os contos de fadas possuem papel proeminente nesse contexto, visto que apresentam riqueza simbólico-arquetípica e metafórica para o contexto do imaginário educacional por projetar imagens necessárias à Bildung humana. Introduzidas desde cedo na vida das crianças, as manifestações artístico-literárias (contos de fadas, fábulas, histórias em quadrinhos, poemas, desenhos animados, contos diversos, entre outros) fornecem pistas para a compreensão da psique coletiva. Por meio de um estudo fundamentado na filosofia do imaginário educacional, na psicologia analítica e na leitura mitológica do conto colasantiano, desvenda-se a presença latente do mito de Narciso. Esse mito serve de imagem para uma educação da sensibilidade durante o período de construção da personalidade. À luz da autoimagem, as crianças podem ser estimuladas a desenvolver a imaginação sobre o autoconhecimento e a autoestima, condições essenciais para as interações sociais e afetivas autônomas.