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In the earliest version of the myth of Narcissus, he died at the hands of a rejected suitor. In a more complex development of the myth, by Conon, Narcissus killed himself in repentance for having invited a rejected suitor to commit suicide. In Pausanias's more elaborate version, Narcissus gazes into the pool to find relief of his grief for his dead twin sister. Ovid says that Narcissus died of self-neglect while gazing at his own image. In these several myths, death resulted from his involvement with an image more and more like himself. 'It appears as though these versions progressively describe an increasing internalization and assimilation of an external object which passed the judgment of death on Narcissus because of his sexually exciting and yet frustrating and unsympathetically rejecting attitude. It is as though these versions describe an ego formation which was the product of the fusion of the images of a sexually excited object (father) and a sexually exciting and yet frustrating object (mother) who had a deadly hatred for the former (her ravisher husband).' Thus in Ovid's version Narcissus died when he became the subject and the object of his own love and the subject and the object of his own aggression. The narcissus plant has a poisonous bulb, it grows beside water, and it is beautiful; for these reasons it was connected with the myth. The evolution of the myth parallels an increasingly popular pattern of response in man: to internalize the aggression provoked by frustrating beauty. The therapeutic problem in the myth may be not only the excessive self-love but also 'the problem of dealing with the