Reconciliation with nature is a puzzling concept in the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. It is difficult to grasp in a comprehensible manner, yet it can hardly be dismissed as an afterthought of these authors, as so much of their work seems to lead back to it. To transform the concept of reconciliation with nature into ecology and environmental consciousness hardly seems consonant with their intent. Yet, Jiirgen Habermas seems quite correct that in some respects the concept is irrational, indeed eschatological in its implications. I employ the category of narcissism, popularized recently by the work of Christopher Lasch, in order to reinterpret the concept of reconciliation with nature. My thesis is that the quest for reconciliation with nature in the work of the first generation of critical theorists is a quest for narcissistic feelings of lost omnipotence and wholeness. However, let there be no misunderstanding on this point. If the theory of narcissism developed by Bela Grunberger, Janine ChasseguetSmirgel, and Lou Andreas-Salome is correct, any comprehensive social theory must be concerned with this quest. It is not a criticism, only a compliment, to state that Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse are seeking paradise lost. The issue is only whether reconciliation with nature as they understand it is a fruitful direction in which to proceed. I argue that in some respects it is not, and that the theory of narcissism suggests how the concept of reconciliation might be reinterpreted in a more mundane albeit still thoroughly utopian fashion, without losing its critical power. It is curious that Horkheimer and Adorno, who otherwise drew so freely and brilliantly upon psychoanalysis, did not draw upon psychoanalysis to illuminate the quest for reconciliation with nature. Part of the reason they did not is surely that the intensive psychoanalytic study of the first two years of life the years from which the quest for reconciliation springs was only undertaken by Freud's followers, especially Melanie Klein, of whose work they show no awareness (Klein's first major work, A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States, was published in 1935). To be sure, Adorno clearly grasps the way in which the end of the individual (i.e., the