You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Stefano Mistura is a psychiatrist and for many years has worked in the public psychiatric service in Emilia. In this book he examines the myth of Narcissus from all angles, taking into account the work of poets, philosophers, ethnologists, psychoanalysts, theologians, mystics, novelists and painters. Mistura often seems to pay excessive attention to their work, and thus risks being distracted from the main drift of his argument. However, I wish to point out immediately that he seems to use such work fundamentally in order to stimulate his own reflections, rather than to define what contribution to the study of narcissism has been made by each discipline and author.
In other words, Mistura's approach is systematically devoted to myth and fable rather than to theoretical argumentation, and is prone to effecting “sudden reversals of logic” and to highlighting the “ambiguity and equivocality” of the human soul and condition. Thus, from the outset, Narcissus is seen also, if not primarily as the symbol of the “proud thirst for knowledge”, of inexhaustible curiosity and the “aspiration to totality” which rejects all limits.
The first limit the Author discusses is that of sex: men give thousands of signs of their desire to procreate and of the illusion that they do so, and Mistura takes these as a starting point for a discussion of the theme of bisexuality, which is expressed moreover by the fact that similar beings, such as twins, mirror each other: according to Pausania's interpretation of the myth, Narcissus' tears and death express his desperation at seeing nothing but his own image in the water instead of his beloved sister's. In our own time this interpretation has been reflected in Musil's The Man Without Qualities when Agathe and Ulrich recognise each other. Here incest expresses the illusion of reuniting in one the two parts, male and female (and, I would add, even more ambiguously, Pierre's passion for his step-sister thanks to her resemblance to her father in Melv