The controversial canvas, Nicolas Poussin's Birth of Bacchus, is fundamentally reconstrued as representing not only Ovid's serial narration of the myths of Bacchus and of Narcissus and Echo in The Metamorphoses, but also the history of this text. In particular, Poussin alludes to the intertextual relationship between Ovid's Narcissus and Sophocles’ Oedipus. Poussin's interpretation of classical myth points to a more complex interrelationship between dyadic and triadic dynamics in development. An interdisciplinary approach to the aesthetic interpretation of myth underscores the reciprocal value of the arts to psychoanalytic theory.