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And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
While the characters in Moby-Dick see a reflection of themselves in the white whale, literary critics often find the image of Narcissus himself in the texts they study. Thus Kochhar-Lindgren, after analyzing the concept of narcissism in Freud and Lacan, sees “the dark side of the face of Narcissus” (p. 71) in Virginia Woolf's (1931) novel The Waves. The first step toward using the literary text as a reflecting mirror seems innocuous enough. In the first chapter of Narcissus Transformed, “Narcissism in Contemporary Discourse,” Kochhar-Lindgren calls upon philosophers from Descartes through Kant and Nietzsche in search of an adequate way in which to look at the relationship between narcissism and writing. An ambitious project, so perhaps we should not be too hard on him for coming up with nothing more than a kind of empty subjectivity:
Metaphysics becomes the description of the appearance of appearance, a phenomenology of the phenomenal. Writing only swirls the water of Narcissus's pool; the self becomes…a reflecting reflection. (p. 16)
The writing here seems to be affected by what we might call “The Mirage of Narcissus,” which is the title of the third chapter of the book in which Kochhar-Lindgren discusses “Jacques Lacan and the Poetics of the Psyche.” This chapter follows one entitled “The Scar of Narcissus” that discusses Freud's concept of narcissism. We should note the assumption of hierarchy here; Freud happened to create psychoanalysis and did not do too bad a job of it for a pioneer; luckily for us, he was followed by Lacan to point out the