title: Under the mirror of the sleeping water: Poussin's Narcissus.
abstract: Examined in conjunction with a close reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Nicolas Poussin's four paintings on the preoccupying theme of Narcissus and Echo reflect a developing aesthetic interpretation of its textual source. Poussin's reflective vision supports a radical reappraisal of the enigmatic myth at the heart of psychoanalytic theory and practice, in which Narcissus is construed as a far more object-related figure that seeks the formative, affirmative mirroring of the other. This in turn encourages a more versatile conceptualization of narcissistic disturbance, in which an etiologically heterogenous constellation of issues stems from a variety of disturbances in the myriad dynamic and developmental aspects of mirroring and attunement: the narcissisms.
authors.affiliation: 300 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024, USA. atutter@mac.com.
authors.forename: Adele
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tutter
mesh_terms: D004954:Esthetics; D009229:Mythology; D009289:Narcissism; D010151:Paintings; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory
keywords: Echo; Herbert Rosenfeld; Narcissus; Nicholas Poussin; Ovid; Sigmund Freud; metamorphosis; mirroring; narcissism; the metamorphoses