A Commentary on the Series

The Editor has kindly given me the opportunity to review the series of papers on Narcissism written from various points of view. I hope to encourage others to read them again and to evaluate their different ways of stating the theoretical and clinical issues with which ‘narcissism’ confronts us. Since narcissistic processes are reflexive, we are at once involved in considering how we conceptualise the human person, how we describe the whole system of his/her internal relations (of self as object to self as subject), and what we assume when we try to describe what happens as exernal relations affect the internal system.

As I reread them, the different papers have called to mind various patients, my own and others', and the problems which they have posed in treatment and in description and discussion of the problems. It is also useful to be able to refer to a good literary case, one available to all, and for this purpose none better, as Rushi Ledermann reminds us, than Ovid's version of the myth of Narcissus, which dwells on the external and the internal relations of the youth. Rather than the Loeb bilingual edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Ledermann suggests in her bibliography, I recommend more accessible versions. Mary Innes's prose translation has been current in Penguin for over 30 years, and last year The World's Classics issued a delightful translation in verse by A. D. Melville . For those who do read Latin the story is told in lines 339-510 of Book III. The Metamorphoses deserves to be a bedside book for ever psychotherapist. Arthur Golding's version, which came out when Shakespeare was a small child, stocked his mind with its stories and its very language.

In her otherwise fine paper Ledermann retalls Ovid's version in three sentences, all (I fear) inaccurate. It was Narcissus's mother to whom a long life for her infant son was foretold, ‘if he didn't come to know himself’ (not ‘if he didn't look at his own features’, which spoils the force of Ovid's nex