Under the mirror of the sleeping water: Poussin'sNarcissus

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.

Resurrecting Oedipus: Poussin’s Birth of Bacchus.

“…Secretly, she observes him, and "burns with passion for his nakedness" (IV.478). Consistent with this writer's interpretation that it is mother's worshipful, mirroring gaze that draws Narcissus to reflecting waters (Tutter 2014b), her "eyes light up as though he were the sun and they were mirrors filled with his reflection" (IV.479 -480, emphasis added). 8 The admiring, desirous mother and the split-off and repudiated Echo are (re)condensed in the personage of Salmacis, whose advances Hermaphrodites rejects the way Narcissus did Echo's.…”

“…Rather, Ovid places the story of Narcissus where the story of Oedipus is normally told in the traditional sequence of the Theban myths, and eliminates the story of Oedipus altogether. This fact, well known to philologists and literary scholars (e.g., Loewenstein, 1984), is nevertheless absent from prior art-historical considerations of Birth of Bacchus (Tutter 2014b)-and, as far as I can tell, from the Anglophone psychoanalytic literature on Narcissus, whose myth Ovid largely narrativized. Charged with not "knowing" himself (and perhaps his textual genesis), the dyadic myth of Narcissus in the Metamorphoses thus functions as a regressive textual screen for the missing myth of Oedipus-that other myth in which preeminent motifs of sight and knowledge share a lethal link.…”

The Erotics of Knowing: A Neglected Contribution to Analytic Erotism

“…But it is also possible that it points to a more general preoedipal retreat from the oedipal. This defense is as old as myth: Ovid enacts a textual-indeed, a literal-version of preoedipal regression in his replacement of the story of Oedipus with that of Narcissus in his poeticized narration of the Theban cycle of myths in Books III and IV of the Metamorphoses, excising the entire House of Laius from Thebes as neatly as erotism was excised from "analytic love" (Tutter 2014(Tutter , 2016. Indeed, the relocation of analytic erotism from the hot province of the erotic transference to the ostensibly benign maternal transference can be analogized to the redemption of mankind from original sin via the Virgin birth of the Christ child.…”

“…As much as we desire knowledge, our apparent need to break connections subverts our attempts to acquire it, which Bion (1959) demonstrates so well in his seminal essay "Attacks on Linking." The fragmentation of scholarship into encapsulated, isolated disciplines enacts this on a collective level (Tutter 2016), resulting in what José Ortega y Gasset (1930) calls "the barbarism of specialization" (p. 94). No doubt this intellectual siloing has facilitated our field's lack of engagement with the erotics of knowing.…”

Book Review: Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House

“…It should be noted that Tutter has written elsewhere, extensively and psychoanalytically, about the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (see, e.g., Tutter 2014). It is a striking fact, clearly significant and meticulously discussed here, that the sole work of art in Johnson’s Glass House is, and has been from its inception, a painting by Poussin, modestly displayed, uncertainly attributed, and rather carelessly protected.…”