Echo and Narcissus
Echo and Narcissus:
Echolocating the Spectator
in the Age of Audience Research
By
Polona Petek
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research, by Polona Petek
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Polona Petek
Publication of this work was assisted by a publication grant from the University of Melbourne.
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-544-4, ISBN (13): 9781847185440
Greek mythology articulates our shared cultural narratives. Yet, given their
rich ambiguity and openness to re-interpretation, they are always capable
of being read otherwise.
—Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (1989)
echolocation: [f. ECHO n. 1 + LOCATION n. 7.]
The location of objects by means of the echo reflected from them by a
sound-signal, as of ultrasonic sounds emitted by bats or by man-made
devices. Hence echolocate v., echolocating vbl. n. and ppl. a.
—Oxford English Dictionary
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Part I: What should not have remained secret and hidden but has
slipped out of sight: The Myth of Echo and Narcissus in
Psychoanalysis
Chapter One................................................................................................. 7
Uncanny Encounters: Freud and Narcissus
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 18
Misogynistic Metamorphoses: Lacan, Narcissus and Oedipus
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 27
Abject Resurrection: Kristeva and Narcissus
Part II: The Strange Case of Echo and Narcissus in Film Scholarship
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 41
Mirrors, Shadows and Doppelgängers: Narcissus’s Cinematic
Metamorphoses
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 53
That Obscure Object of Desire: Narcissus and Screen
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 66
What Lies Beneath: Narcissus’s Screen
viii
Table of Contents
Part III: Out of Sight: Deconstruction and the Myth of Echo and
Narcissus
Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 78
The Mirage of Echo
Chapter Eight............................................................................................. 87
Narcissus’s Punishment—Echo’s Revenge?
Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 97
Echo’s Reward
Part IV: Flirting with Echo
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 125
Echo and Screen
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 137
Mise-en-abîme, or A Case of Mistaken Identity
Chapter Twelve........................................................................................ 152
No Longer Secret and Hidden…: Echo’s Postmodern Screen in Flirt
(In)conclusion.......................................................................................... 176
Bibliography............................................................................................ 177
Filmography ............................................................................................ 199
Notes........................................................................................................ 202
Index........................................................................................................ 231
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Cover image
M. C. Escher, Bond of Union (1956). Lithograph. © 2008 The M.C.
Escher Company, Holland. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com.
Figure 1...................................................................................................... 40
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus (1597–99). Oil on canvas,
110 x 92 cm, Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica, Rome. © Archivio
Fotografico, Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Artistico ed
Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma.
Figure 2.................................................................................................... 137
Quentin Metsys, The Moneylender and His Wife (1514). Oil on panel, 68 x
61 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Photo RMN – Gérard Blot.
Figure 3.................................................................................................... 166
Geno Lechner and Dwight Ewell in Flirt (Hartley, 1996, USA/Germany/
Japan). © Photo: Christa Köfer. Used with permission.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to a number of people whose intellectual, emotional and
otherwise support has helped make Echo and Narcissus possible. My
deepest gratitude is due to Barbara Creed, whose always enthusiastic
comments were an inexhaustible source of inspiration during my research,
and Meredith Martin, the most generous friend, who is “always on the
same page” and whose wit and razor-sharp mind I value most highly. I
warmly thank Hamid Naficy for an impromptu yet profoundly
encouraging discussion about Echo in Oxford a couple of years ago. I give
my heartfelt thanks to Ramaswami Harindranath, Jeanette Hoorn, Marija
Končina, Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, Marina Tavčar Krajnc and
Ksenija Vidmar Horvat, whose keen interest has provided plenty of
intellectual sustenance on both sides of the world. Thankyou also goes to
Hal Hartley and Jack Patrick from Possible Films; Margareth Verbakel
from the M.C. Escher Company; Raphaëlle Cartier and Florence Hemici
from the Photo Agency of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux; Isabelle
Deborne from Musée du Louvre; Angelo Sinibaldi and Maria Castellino
from Archivio Fotografico, Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio
Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma;
and Vlatka Kolic, Carol Koulikourdi and Amanda Millar from Cambridge
Scholars Publishing. I am indebted to all my friends for sharing my
obsession with cinema, for numerous thought-provoking questions and for
enduring my Echo-induced distraction and awaiting patiently the
completion of the manuscript. Above all, I shall always be grateful to my
family: to my sister for always being there for me despite geographical
distance; to my mother for introducing me very early on to the
mesmerising world of Greek mythology and for her warm understanding
and interest in my often obsessive academic pursuits; and to my father for
his selfless and most loving support in every possible sense of this word.
INTRODUCTION
The myth of Echo and Narcissus has continually lent itself to reinterpretation, fascinating artists and scholars alike with its protean ability
to traverse disparate socio-historical paradigms and always find a way to
echo the deepest anxieties and taboos as well as desires of the current
épistémè. The fact that in the past five years English readers should be
offered not one but two entirely new translations of Metamorphoses (Ovid
2003, 2004) confirms that the power of the ancient tale is anything but
waning.
This being the case, a sustained discussion of the significance of the
myth of Echo and Narcissus—in our culture in general and in cinema in
particular—is sorely lacking. Thus far, critical attention to the tale has
been anything but balanced. Narcissus has always occupied centre-stage,
be it as the doomed hero of the doppelgänger narratives or an object of
painterly fascination, as the enchanted spectator of classical Hollywood
cinema or as a personification of a universal human condition. The end of
the second millennium saw the publication of a handful of feminist studies
that attempt to turn the tables in favour of Echo. Segal’s readings of
French literature and Lawrence’s analysis of Hollywood cinema have
certainly brought Ovid’s nymph to light. Yet, their interventions fit quite
neatly into the canon of scholarly work on Ovid and the dominant cultural
interpretation of Echo. Namely, Echo’s fate in theory, art and culture in
general has been a déjà vu of sorts. As I will demonstrate, Echo is anything
but speechless, powerless or insignificant; yet, her role, if acknowledged at
all, has been persistently interpreted precisely as such. Echo has become,
rather than remained, the ignored, disenfranchised, “unthought” other
(Segal 1989, 170).
My central aim in this book—which unfolds in dialogue with the
discourses of psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies,
deconstruction and postmodernism, especially those that are particularly
germane to film scholarship—is twofold. Most importantly, I claim
recognition for Echo; however, I also reconsider Narcissus and call for his
recuperation. I revisit the Ovidian tale and argue that the myth,
traditionally used in psychoanalysis to explain the imaginary formation of
the ego, in fact stages the entire trajectory of human psychosexual
development. My reappraisal offers a more adequate account of the
2
Introduction
construction of subjectivity in postmodernity. I demonstrate that Ovid’s
story stages a diachronic link between its two protagonists, a passage from
Narcissus to Echo, as a process of socialisation. Moreover, this process is
not a one-way rite of passage but rather a nexus, which produces an
infinite state of oscillation endemic to the decentred postmodern subject.
Chapters One to Six are dedicated almost entirely to Narcissus,
mapping his fascinating encounter with psychoanalysis, feminism and
cinema. Chapters Seven to Twelve, in turn, deploy the strategies and
insights of deconstruction, queer theory, postmodernism and postcolonial
studies to revisit these debates and find Echo. It may seem strange to begin
with Narcissus, who has always been the privileged protagonist of the
readings and appropriations of Ovid’s tale. However, the decision to do so
is strategic, and it is intimately related to my central argument. Ever since
Freud, Narcissus has figured as a key constituent of the psychoanalytic
model of the human subject and, by extension, as the paradigmatic
cinematic spectator. Throughout the twentieth century, these theorisations
have remained immensely influential and become ever more complex and
compelling. However, dissenting voices have also been steadily emerging,
contesting the two paradigms and gradually debunking them as anything
but neutral, universally applicable or, most importantly, historically aware.
The structure of Echo and Narcissus mimics the course of these shifts.
Parts I and II attempt to convey the irresistible allure and complexity of
Narcissus, which have yielded intricate and groundbreaking theoretical
paradigms. Yet, these paradigms, not unlike the mythical Narcissus, are
also rather self-absorbed, totalising, more or less ahistorical and reductive.
This became clear when feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies,
postmodernism and, above all, deconstruction provided the tools for their
re-evaluation and proper contextualisation. These critical discourses stage
their intervention in an Echo-like fashion, through a retroactive assertion
of difference and deferral. Hence, I bring them into play in the later
chapters of Echo and Narcissus.
This powerful intervention—which I interpret as specific to Echo and
typical of, although not exclusive to, postmodernity—reveals the historical
specificity of the Freudian-Lacanian employment of Narcissus. No longer
sustainable as a universal model of the subject/spectator, the
psychoanalytic Narcissus, or more precisely, Narcissus-cum-Oedipus, can
now be properly appraised as an ontological and epistemological paradigm
of the phallomorphic subject/spectator of modernity. Echo, in turn, offers a
tool for re-examining and critiquing conceptual blindspots and
metaphysical biases of modernity. Even more, the nymph, flickering in the
play of differences and deferrals, becomes a potent model of the
Echo and Narcissus
3
postmodern subject/spectator—the subject without a stable prediscursive
identity, who actively assumes different symbolic positions at different
times. Echo, or more accurately, Narcissus-cum-Echo, disproves the
utterly negative exegeses of postmodernity, such as Jameson’s and
Baudrillard’s “obituaries” to the subject and their disbelief in the
possibility of personal identity and political agency.
Narcissus-cum-Echo poses a challenge to the attempts to install too
rigid a cleavage between modernity and postmodernity. As Narcissus’s
postmodern symbolic incarnation, Echo emulates as well as parodies “the
modernist searching for integration and wholeness of personality”
(Hutcheon 1989, 109). To illustrate the contiguity of postmodernity with
modernity, I draw on, and expand upon, the notion of the uncanny. The
uncanny has been regularly associated with the tropes mobilised in
representations and conceptualisations of the subject/spectator in both
epistemological paradigms—namely, with the doppelgänger of modernity
and mise-en-abîme of postmodernity. In addition to shedding light on the
affinities and the differences between modernity and postmodernity, the
uncanny proves invaluable also in that it reveals the key role of cinema in
both paradigms.
The question of how representative of the postmodern condition is
cinema, when compared to other contemporary media, is of little concern
to me. Rather, what motivates Echo and Narcissus is the desire to show
that the medium need not be seen as confined to the experience of
modernity. I argue that cinema should be seen as a discourse of
postmodernity because it makes space for Narcissus-cum-Echo. I
demonstrate that cinema is a postmodern phenomenon not only because of
its newly enhanced power to obscure the difference between simulation
and reality but rather because of its much older and much more radical
potential to reveal that our perception of reality and ourselves is always
mediated, constructed and culturally contingent—the potential with a
strong fascination for Narcissus-cum-Echo.
Echo and Narcissus does not attempt to identify a radically new or
postmodern mode of filmviewing. Rather, it offers a radically different
conceptualisation of spectatorship. The book is thus a critical response to
the recent shift of focus in the studies of cinema. While the seventies and
the eighties were marked by increasingly complex theorisations of
spectatorship, the last two decades have witnessed a turn towards
ethnographic research into film reception. Yet, this long overdue turn
towards the empirical viewer has not produced a genuinely broader scope
of analysis. It has rather, all too hastily, consigned the spectator, the
textually constructed viewing position, to oblivion, thanks to the concept’s
4
Introduction
perceived hegemonic and totalising premise. Echo and Narcissus
intervenes into this state of affairs by arguing for a productive nexus
between theorisations of spectatorship and the currently more fashionable
audience research. I show that an informed mapping of contemporary (and
past) filmviewing practices still requires a spectatorial model, which can,
and should, be complemented with empirical audience research. My
critical recuperation of the Ovidian myth affords such a model. It
“echolocates” a spectator with discursive access to all types of cinema,
yet, flexible enough to accommodate a range of viewers’ responses and
their cultural diversity.
Echo and Narcissus revisits existing debates conflict and attempts to
cast new light upon them. And what could possibly be a better way to do
so than by adopting Echo’s tactics of repeating with a difference? In its
typically postmodern guise, the strategy—as the titles of my chapters
suggest—is perhaps best summarised as a fascination and play with
quotation, an unencumbered and replenishing foray into a territory of
perceived exhaustion. The aim of Echo and Narcissus is to initiate such a
foray into the territory of cinema and its affinity with the ancient story of
Narcissus and Echo.
PART I
WHAT SHOULD NOT HAVE REMAINED SECRET
AND HIDDEN BUT HAS SLIPPED OUT OF SIGHT:
THE MYTH OF ECHO AND NARCISSUS
IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
The literary version of the myth of Echo and Narcissus has reached our
times predominantly through Ovid’s version,1 recorded in his
Metamorphoses, which he wrote in the first decade of the common era.
However, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that
psychoanalysis brought the story into focus as an ontological and
epistemological paradigm.2 In Part I, I examine the employment of the
myth in the work of three key exponents of psychoanalysis—Freud, Lacan
and Kristeva—who use the myth to conceptualise the human acquisition of
a sense of self, and firmly tie this process to gender and sexuality.
Narcissus was the son of the nymph Liriope. She gave birth to him
after being ravished by the river god Cephisus. When Liriope asked
Tiresias whether the boy would live to a ripe old age, the blind seer
enigmatically replied: “If he ne’er know himself.” (Ovid 1977a, 149) By
the time Narcissus reached the age of sixteen, he had been adored by men
and women alike, but the beautiful youth never returned their love. One
day, as he was wandering through the woods, Echo saw him and fell in
love. Yet, she could not declare her love, for Echo was the once talkative
nymph who had been punished for deluding Juno (the Roman equivalent
of the Greek Hera) with cunning stories while the goddess’s husband Jove
(also referred to as Jupiter, the counterpart of the Greek Zeus) stalked
other nymphs. When Juno realised the ruse, she cursed Echo: “That tongue
of thine, by which I have been tricked, shall have its power curtailed and
enjoy the briefest use of speech.” (Ibid., 151) Henceforth, Echo was forced
to repeat the words of others. Following Narcissus, lost in the woods, she
waited for him to speak first. When this finally happened, the nymph
joyfully echoed Narcissus’s call, “Here let us meet” (ibid.), and came forth
with her arms spread wide open, ready to embrace the beautiful youth. But
Narcissus spurned her. To his cruel refusal, “Hands off! embrace me not.
6
Part I: What should not have remained secret and hidden
but has slipped out of sight
May I die before I give you power o’er me!”, Echo could only respond
with her sad confession, “I give you power o’er me” (ibid., 151–2).
Heartbroken and humiliated, Echo pined away until her body melted into
thin air, her bones were turned to stone and only her voice remained.
Narcissus continued living for himself, snubbing ever more admirers,
until one of them prayed to Nemesis to punish the unreceptive young man.
The goddess heard their plea. Again in the woods, Narcissus happened
upon a pool. While drinking, he caught sight of his reflection in the silvery
water and instantly fell in love. The beautiful figure returned his smiles
and mimicked his inviting gestures, yet, shied away every time Narcissus,
reaching out to embrace him, stirred the smooth surface of the pond.
Perplexed but enchanted, Narcissus spoke to the trees, seeking an answer
why his love would not be returned. At last, the truth dawned upon him.
The captivating apparition not only mirrored his gestures, yet, eluded his
touch; it also moved its lips when Narcissus spoke to it, but no words
would ever reach his ears. Thus Narcissus recognised his lover was
nothing but his own reflection. Yet, his love did not fade away; it grew
even stronger. Narcissus lamented over his impossible lover and longed
for death to end his misery, while the spurned nymph watched and echoed
his weeping. At last, wasted with grief, Narcissus closed his eyes in
deathly sleep and his body vanished. Only a yellow flower awaited the
naiads and the dryads, who came to mourn their doomed brother, and Echo
joined their cries of sorrow.
CHAPTER ONE
UNCANNY ENCOUNTERS:
FREUD AND NARCISSUS
Narcissus first appears in the psychoanalytic discourse in 1898, when
Ellis (1928) invokes the myth to describe a “Narcissus-like” psychological
attitude. A year later, Näcke coins the word Narcismus as a designation of
a type of perversion (Freud SE XIV:73n). It is Freud, however, who fully
elaborates the reference to the mythical youth in love with his reflection.
His ideas concerning narcissism first emerge in “Three essays on the
theory of sexuality” (SE VII:123–245), then assume an increasingly
important role in “Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood” (SE
XI:59–138) and Totem and taboo (SE XIII:1–162), to be developed into a
full-length study in the 1914 essay “On narcissism” (SE XIV:67–102).
In this essay, Freud incorporates and complicates Ellis’s and Näcke’s
understandings of narcissism by interpreting it as a three-fold
phenomenon. He agrees with his colleagues that narcissism can occur as a
fully developed perversion or an attitude manifest in a broad range of other
phenomena and disorders (such as megalomania, illness, hypochondria,
sleep and homosexuality). However, he also argues that narcissism, first
and foremost, designates a stage in the “regular” course of human
psychosexual development. Freud dubs this stage primary narcissism and
describes it as a necessary intermediary stage between auto-eroticism and
object-love, that is, a stage linking the initial amorphous and the
eventually fully structured states of the human psyche. Narcissus’s love for
his mirror image thus comes to represent the moment in the infant’s life in
which “something [is] added to auto-eroticism—a new psychical action”
(ibid., 77). This “action”—the attachment of libido to the child’s mirror
image—makes possible the acquisition of the first sense of self. The
child’s amorous encounter with her/his reflection facilitates the formation
of a “unity”, the ego, and it provides libido with its first love-object.
The first crucial outcome of Freud’s reconsideration of narcissism is
thus its incorporation into the “regular”—that is, non-pathological—
trajectory of human psychic development. And second, since he thereby
8
Chapter One
establishes that sexual energy instigates and fuels the conscious core of the
human sense of self (the ego), Freud institutes sexuality as central to
human subjectivity. These observations lead to a major reformulation in
Freud’s work. Whereas earlier he understood the human psychic apparatus
as comprised of the unconscious, preconscious and conscious systems (SE
V:509–622), the discovery of primary narcissism now paves the way for
the formulation of the so-called second topography—the id, the ego and
the super-ego (SE XIX:1–66; SE XXIII:139–208). The new topography
does not replace the former; rather, it complicates it. Consciousness is now
reduced to the nucleus of the ego, which, in turn, is much less autonomous
and extends beyond the domain of the preconscious–conscious system. In
other words, while Freud still sees the ego as the chief mediator between
the individual and her/his “physical reality”, he no longer considers this
agency to be entirely conscious. He understands the ego’s major role to be
defensive mechanisms, motivated by perception of unpleasurable
phenomena (such as anxiety) and largely unconscious. Freud’s earlier
notion of the unconscious already presented a challenge to the
Enlightenment subject, based on “a conception of the human person as a
fully centred, unified individual, endowed with the capacities of reason,
consciousness and action” (Hill 1998, 97). However, it is the later
understanding of the narcissistic formation of the ego that brings out the
radical nature of Freud’s work. In the early formulation, the unconscious
could still be misunderstood as an “additional” sphere of one’s existence,1
the sphere that the rational and fully present Cartesian subject (now
reinterpreted as the conscious component of the ego) is unable to control.
With Freud’s second topography, however, the unconscious forces
“invade” and destabilise the ego itself.
This finding ensues as a corollary to Freud’s argument that the very
foundation of the ego, primary narcissism, must undergo repression. The
ground-breaking insight of this contention notwithstanding, this is also the
point where one of the major problems of Freud’s theory of narcissism
becomes apparent. Freud initially identifies several rather different factors
that bring about repression. First he establishes that “what makes it
necessary at all for our mental life to pass beyond the limits of narcissism
and to attach the libido to objects” is the “damming-up” of libido in the
ego, which creates unpleasurable tension and seeks release (SE XIV:85).
Then he maintains that narcissism must be repressed because it “come[s]
into conflict with the subject’s cultural and ethical ideas”, passed on to the
child through the parents, their substitutes and, later on, society at large
(ibid., 93). However, rather inexplicably, Freud ultimately decides that the
main agent of repression “can be singled out in the shape of the ‘castration
Uncanny Encounters
9
complex’ (in boys, anxiety about the penis—in girls, envy for the penis)”
(ibid., 92). What comes to light here are thus not only the centrality of
sexuality and the identification of the unconscious forces at the core of the
human sense of self. Freud also posits sexual difference—defined
anatomically, in binary terms, and postulated as the crux of the castration
complex—as the decisive factor in human socialisation, and he valorises
male anatomy as the norm according to which the castration complex is
experienced.
Critique of this formulation of the castration complex appeared almost
immediately. In The trauma of birth (1952), Rank challenges Freud’s
account of the castration complex. Rank argues that humans experience
the separation from the mother’s body at birth as the original trauma,
which becomes the model for all subsequent anxieties, including the
anxiety caused by perception of sexual difference. For Rank, “the fear of
castration merely translates the fear of birth” (Wright 1992, 43). In a
similar attempt, Stärcke (1921) points to breast-feeding and weaning as a
possible blueprint for later experiences of castration. In addition to these
critiques, the problematic nature of Freud’s interpretation of the castration
complex is quite obvious within his own framework.
As a result of repression of primary narcissism, the initial libidinal
cathexis (the investment in one’s own ego during primary narcissism) is
split into love for external objects and love for a newly formed internal
“ideal”, which functions as a “substitute for the lost narcissism” (SE
XIV:94). Narcissus’s love is thus internalised and the beloved image is
solidified in a socially sanctioned ego ideal, to which the ego henceforth
aspires to conform. If repression of primary narcissism is successful,
Narcissus experiences metamorphosis. Unlike Ovid’s single yellow
blossom that replaces the youth, Freud’s Narcissus is displaced by the
interplay of the ego, the ego ideal and the super-ego, a triangular
constellation that traverses all three systems of the first topography.2 The
child, no longer the innocently enamoured Narcissus, enters the next stage
of development, the Oedipus complex, whose resolution determines one’s
choice of love-objects.
In Freud’s explication of the earliest stages in human life, the castration
complex thus ends primary narcissism and facilitates the child’s entry into
the Oedipus complex. Yet, Freud argues that this sequence of events
typifies the development of the female subject (SE XIX:241–60), whereas
in males the castration complex, if successfully resolved, ought to bring
about the dissolution of the Oedipus complex (SE XIX:173–82). Freud’s
account of the “regular” course of pre-oedipal development thus conflicts
with his positioning of the castration complex at the end of the oedipal
10
Chapter One
stage as experienced by the male child. During this stage, the little boy
should accomplish the transition from the love for his mother to the love
for another woman (that is, from one love-object to another), which is
brought about by the threat of castration represented by the father. Freud,
however, does not explain how the infant’s object-love could have
developed in the first place if the little boy had not already experienced
castration anxiety. But, as Creed has demonstrated in her formulation of
the concept of the monstrous-feminine, the boy in fact is already aware of
castration. Creed brings to light Freud’s own “repressed phantasy” (1993,
3), namely, the image of the powerful pre-oedipal mother, who represents
the threat of castration even before the boy has experienced any such
anxiety in relation to the father.3
As far as the female child is concerned, Freud’s position is equally
confusing. In girls, who “realise” that they have already been castrated,
primary narcissism intensifies in order to “keep away from their ego
anything that would diminish it” (SE XIV:89). Women are thus essentially
indifferent, not capable of loving but only of being loved.4 Yet, according
to Freud, they are envious of the male’s penis—a problem which is finally
resolved when women give birth to a child, in which “a part of their own
body confronts them like an extraneous object, to which, starting from
their narcissism, they can then give complete object-love” (ibid., 89–90).
As Kofman (1980) has argued, the notion of the narcissistic woman
experiencing penis-envy and the need to be loved is a rather absurd idea.
Why would a beautiful and perfectly self-sufficient figure be envious or in
need of anything? This has led Kofman to conclude that Freud’s essay “On
narcissism” undermines its own argument about pregnancy being “the fruit
of penis-envy” (ibid., 40). Rather, it inadvertently demonstrates that
“narcissism might well be the ground of object-love and therefore of all
desire” (ibid., 39). Kofman thus manages to secure narcissism as the
paradigm for human subjectivity as well as intersubjectivity, while
abandoning the Freudian idea of the castration complex—castration
anxiety in boys, penis-envy in girls—as regulating interpersonal relations.
The introduction of the castration complex thus presents a critical
moment in Freud’s theory of narcissism. Nevertheless, as Kofman’s
analysis confirms, Freud has offered a valuable reading of the myth, which
considerably recasts the significance of Narcissus. In contrast to Ellis’s
and Näcke’s reductive understandings of narcissism, Freud interprets the
phenomenon as constitutive of human subjectivity and indispensable to
socialisation. Prior to the narcissistic formation of the ego, the infant is not
aware of itself and is therefore unable to impose a structure on the world
and to locate itself in relation to this world and other beings and objects in
Uncanny Encounters
11
it—just like the mythical Narcissus, who loves no one until he meets his
mirror image. Freud’s reading has thus recuperated Narcissus, who is no
longer seen as an exceptional “pervert” but rather as the universal model
of the human individual.
This is a fascinating reading, not only because it posits narcissism as
absolutely indispensable to human subjectivity and socialisation, but also
because it interprets narcissism as a dynamic process and it detects in it a
“darker” force that lies at the core of the human self. The mythical
Narcissus is not a static character forever blissfully in love with himself.
The beautiful youth dies as soon as he “knows” himself and only a yellow
flower is found in place of his body. Ovid thus allows his protagonist to
abandon the world of mortals and puts an end to his suffering. In other
words, the Roman poet grants Narcissus’s wish:
Oh, that I might be parted from my own body! and, strange prayer for a
lover, I would that what I love were absent from me! […] Death is nothing
to me, for in death I shall leave my troubles; […] we two shall die together
in one breath. (1977a, 157)
The very last glimpse of Narcissus that Ovid affords his readers is
strangely ambiguous. In Miller’s translation, it reads: “Even when he had
been received into infernal abodes, [Narcissus] kept on gazing on his
image in the Stygian pool.” (Ibid., 159) In Ovid’s version, however, the
melancholic quality of the scene is significantly diminished. Narcissus’s
impossible lover does not resurface: “Tum quoque se, postquam est inferna
sede receptus, in Stygia spectabat aqua.” (Ibid., 158) Narcissus, at last at
peace (in both senses of the phrase), simply continues gazing in the waters
of the river of the Greek netherworld.
This detail has not escaped Freud’s attention. In his perceptive reading,
Narcissus’s death takes on an elaborate symbolic meaning. To become a
fully socialised subject—to survive socially, so to speak—the infant must
master its narcissism. The child must leave Narcissus behind; yet,
Narcissus cannot die, for Narcissus is the child. Freud’s Narcissus thus
metamorphoses much more literally than Ovid’s, who is replaced by his
flowery surrogate rather than transformed into it. Controlled but not
annihilated, Freud’s Narcissus more or less furtively survives in the trinity
of the ego, the ego ideal and the super-ego, forever waiting to resurface
openly to end the ego’s “suffering”, that is, to end the ego’s struggle to
conform to the ego ideal and meet the demands of the super-ego, which
“constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal” (SE
XIV:95).
12
Chapter One
What is alluded to here is Freud’s earliest intimation of the death drive.
Freud fully articulates the concept in Beyond the pleasure principle (SE
XVIII:1–64). However, in a rudimentary form, the idea already appears in
his essay on narcissism. As Lasch puts it,
primary narcissism conforms quite closely to Freud’s description of the death
instinct as a longing for the complete cessation of tension […]. Narcissism in
this sense is the longing to be free from longing. (1979, 240–1)
Freud thus exhausts the entire trajectory of the mythical Narcissus—from
his initial indifference (auto-eroticism) through his infatuation (the
formation of the ego through primary narcissism) to his longing for death
(the emergence of the death drive)—to bring to light not only the existence
of the unconscious facets of human subjectivity and its fundamentally
narcissistic structure but also its essentially self-destructive nature. As
Royle argues, Freud shows that “death is not simply the termination of life
[…] but life’s driving force, its animating, dynamic principle” (2003, 85).5
Freud’s commentators often refer to the death drive as one of the most
controversial concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis.6 What makes it
controversial is the argument that the death drive refers to the basic desire
for the ultimate elimination of tension, which renders the death drive
something “more than any particular type of instinct—it is rather that
factor which determines the actual principle of all instinct” (Laplanche and
Pontalis 1973, 102). The death drive is the mechanism of both life and
death instincts, which is why Freud claims that even “the pleasure
principle seems actually to serve the death instincts” (SE XVIII:63).
Freud’s short but extremely dense essay on narcissism and,
consequently, the Ovidian myth occupy a pivotal point in the
psychoanalyst’s work. The ideas emerging in this essay have shaped
significantly Freud’s later work as well as the work of his successors.
Before exploring their elaboration in Lacan’s and Kristeva’s theories,
however, I want to draw attention to another of Freud’s texts that can be
read as a reference to Narcissus. His 1919 essay “The uncanny” (SE
XVII:217–56) is of particular interest to film scholarship, for it was in this
context that cinema was related to the myth for the first time.
Considering the fact that Freud developed and practised
psychoanalysis primarily as a therapeutic method, it is hardly surprising
that he was not interested exclusively in the “regular” course of human
psychosexual development; in fact, he was particularly fascinated with
instances of its failure and deviations. “The uncanny” offers the most
elaborate discussion of such a failure in repression of primary narcissism,
Uncanny Encounters
13
while it also provides further evidence of the problems stemming from
Freud’s theory of narcissism.
Freud’s objective in “The uncanny” is to uncover the origin of a
particular type of frightening phenomena, especially as they are
manifested in the realm of aesthetics. These occurrences are described as
uncanny (unheimlich), for they arouse the feeling of horror and
strangeness in relation to what should be innocuous and familiar. Freud
(ibid., 219) mentions “a fertile but not exhaustive paper” by Jentsch (1906)
as the only earlier attempt to elucidate the uncanny. Thus setting himself
up as a pioneer charting a rather unfamiliar territory, Freud first consults
several dictionaries to establish that “heimlich [homely] is a word the
meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally
coincides with its opposite, unheimlich [unhomely, uncanny]” (SE
XVII:226). This ambivalence at the core of the term is perfectly captured
in Schelling’s gloss quoted by Freud: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for
everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come
to light”. (Ibid., 224) The uncanny, in short, is the frightening recurrence
of something repressed. Freud then introduces the distinction between two
classes of the uncanny: one in which what returns are repressed infantile
complexes, and the other in which surmounted or discarded primitive
beliefs are confirmed once again. Ultimately, Freud asserts that “animism,
magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death,
involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all
the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny”
(ibid., 243). He lists several manifestations of the uncanny—involuntary
and unintended repetition; recurrence of events, objects, people or
situations; premonitions; certain superstitions; dead bodies; the fantasy of
being buried alive; bodily dismemberment; and the blurring of the
distinction between fantasy and reality—and finally singles out the double
or the doppelgänger as the uncanny phenomenon par excellence.
Before presenting his own analysis of the double in Hoffmann’s short
story “The Sandman” (1967), Freud acknowledges Rank’s study of the
double (1914), published five years before Freud’s essay on the uncanny
and drawing extensively on Freud’s theory of narcissism. It is in Rank’s
essay that the first link between cinema and Narcissus is forged. Although
he feels compelled to apologise for using such a “lowbrow” example,
Rank refers to the German Expressionist film The Student of Prague (Rye
and Wegener, 1913) at the very beginning of his essay. In the rest of the
study, Rank limits his discussion to literature;7 however, the prominent
placement of the cinematic reference not only draws attention to one of the
14
Chapter One
earliest examples of the double in cinema but possibly also suggests a
unique cinematic predisposition for representations of this phenomenon.
What is of interest in the present context is Freud’s isolation of the
double as the paradigmatic instance of the uncanny, particularly because
his opinion about just what exactly returns in this “uncanny harbinger of
death” (SE XVII:235) is hardly consistent. At one point, Freud establishes
an immediate link between the double, primary narcissism and castration
anxiety:
The “double” was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego
[…]. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its
counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing
castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. […] Such
ideas […] have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the
primary narcissism. (Ibid.)
Conversely, the reappearance of the double (after primary narcissism
should have been repressed) is described as an uncanny experience. In
other words, the return of Narcissus’s unattainable lover, no longer
indifferent but openly threatening, is hereby firmly tied to the failure of
repression of infantile complexes (more specifically, the castration
complex) and, without further elaboration, declared paradigmatic. But then
Freud, paradoxically, goes on to argue that the uncanniness of “meeting
one’s own image unbidden and unexpected” belongs to the group of
surmounted or discarded primitive beliefs (ibid., 248n).
Considering the problems with Freud’s equation of repression of
primary narcissism with the resolution of the phallocentrically defined
castration complex (that is, the boy’s anxiety about and the girl’s envy of
the penis), the inconsistency outlined here is hardly surprising. It is,
however, rather amusing that Freud refuses to classify the double as the
return of repressed narcissism when he relates the phenomenon to a
personal experience, namely, that of mistaking his own reflection in the
mirror for a fellow passenger on the train (ibid.). The unsustained, and
unsustainable, imposition of male anatomy as the norm in “On narcissism”
thus resurfaces in “The uncanny” and disrupts Freud’s argument
concerning the double.
This is particularly evident in Freud’s selective reading of “The
Sandman”. Hoffmann’s story is an intricately structured text about a young
man, Nathanael, whose life is a string of uncanny events leading to his
tragic end. The first part of the story is told through letters (the first and
the last written by Nathanael and the second by his fiancée Clara), through
which the reader learns about Nathanael’s mysterious childhood trauma. In
Uncanny Encounters
15
the first letter—written to Clara’s brother Lothair, however, in a telling slip
of the pen, sent to Clara herself—Nathanael describes how, as a child, he
hated and feared the nights when a sinister old man, German lawyer called
Coppelius, visited Nathanael’s father and all the children were
immediately sent to bed. To silence their grumbling, their mother and their
nanny used to call upon a figure from a ghastly children’s story, the
Sandman, who throws sand in children’s eyes, pulls them out and feeds
them to his brood. In Nathanael’s vivid imagination, Coppelius and the
Sandman soon became one and the same person, and the death of
Nathanael’s father during one of the lawyer’s visits only intensified this
delusion. Several years later, Nathanael, now a student, happens upon a
Piedmontese weatherglass peddler, Giuseppe Coppola. Nathanael is
convinced that the Sandman has taken on yet another identity, that the
tradesman is not the lawyer’s namesake or doppelgänger but rather the
lawyer himself, and the student is determined to avenge his father’s death.
The second part of the story is a first-person narrative whose narrator
remains more or less unknown, describing himself only as Lothair’s and
Nathanael’s friend. He unravels the rest of Nathanael’s story. A short
holiday at home nearly ends in a disaster. Clara barely manages to prevent
Nathanael and Lothair’s duel, prompted by Nathanael’s insult; the student
has called his strong-minded and independent fiancée a “lifeless
automaton”. Upon returning to his studies in the city, Nathanael meets
Olimpia, the daughter of Professor Spalanzani, and falls in love, despite a
friend’s warning that the girl seems too perfect to be true. Nathanael’s
courting ends catastrophically when he realises that Olimpia—and not
Clara, as he has so recklessly, and ominously, remarked—is indeed an
automaton, Spalanzani and Coppola’s most outstanding achievement.
Furious, Nathanael attacks Spalanzani, then falls ill and is finally taken to
a madhouse. When he regains consciousness and sanity, or so it seems, he
is back in his hometown and Clara stands by his side. They rekindle their
relationship and everything seems to be going well until they climb the
tower of the town hall. There, Nathanael once again uses the binoculars
that Coppola has sold him and through which he first saw Olimpia; only
this time, he sees Clara and suddenly goes mad again, trying to hurl Clara
over the railing. Lothair manages to save his sister, but Nathanael, seeing
Coppelius amongst the crowd down below, leaps to his death.
Freud’s interpretation of Hoffmann’s text focuses on a single example
of uncanniness, the one manifested in (Nathanael’s anxious perception of)
the doubling of the Sandman, the lawyer Coppelius and the peddler
Coppola, coupled with the equally malevolent consequences of the
student’s encounter with Professor Spalanzani, and closely related to the
16
Chapter One
fear of losing one’s eyes. Freud declares “The Sandman” a paradigmatic
text and restates the argument that the uncanny ensues from the failure of
repression of castration anxiety. He does not explore what might be the
significance of the rather obvious doubling of the story’s female
characters, Clara and Olimpia, and he pays little attention to the
uncanniness produced by the automaton, who blurs the line between the
animate and the inanimate.
The underlying phallocentrism of Freud’s discussion of the double and
the uncanny has not gone unnoticed. Cixous argues that Freud displaces
the more fundamental uncanniness of the automaton onto the uncanniness
of Sandman/Coppola/Coppelius/Spalanzani as the castrating father figure.
Rather than elucidating the innermost uncanniness of the double as the
harbinger of death and a reminder of human mortality, Freud in fact
represses it. His relegation of Olimpia to a footnote (SE XVII:232n) is no
less than “a typographical metaphor of repression” (Cixous 1976, 537).
Freud has thus repressed the premonition of death embodied in the
automaton, but the uncanny apparition continues to haunt him. Unwilling
to see in the figure of Olimpia the uncanniness of woman—the
uncanniness of female genitals as the “entrance to the former home” for all
humans (Todd 1986, 524)—he can only see her as man’s “mutilated
double”, confirming the “reality” of castration for the male subject (ibid.,
527). Freud’s interpretation of Hoffmann’s story thus unconsciously
reveals that woman’s penis-envy is not a “fact” but rather his own
projection, that is, a phallocentric fantasy originating in the male fear of
castration.8
Indeed, something is “not quite right” in Freud’s essay (ibid., 519). His
insistence on the phallocentrically defined castration complex has
prevented him from acknowledging the more fundamental meaning of
uncanniness as “a rehearsal of an encounter with death” (Jackson 1981,
68). What Freud represses in his discussion of the uncanny is his own
earlier intimation of the death drive. As Royle contends, the death drive
may well be the most uncanny instance of uncanniness; “the death drive
comes to figure uncanniness better than anything that is actually discussed
in Freud’s essay”; yet, this “most uncanny example of uncanniness is
eerily not in ‘The Uncanny’” (2003, 88). In a similar vein, Apter (1982)
suggests that the source of the uncanny cannot be said to lie in the
“discovery” of sexual difference. What renders the double uncanny is its
profoundly ambiguous incarnation of desire and fear, love and hate, life
and death, as they confront human beings regardless of their sex or gender.
The readings of Freud’s text on the uncanny have provided evidence
that there are indeed inconsistencies and contradictions in Freud’s
Uncanny Encounters
17
argument. However, it was not their intention to dismiss his theory
altogether. Freud has rightly established that the uncanny signifies the
failure of repression, which has enabled Todd (1986) to perform a
symptomatic reading of his essay and argue that the text provides an
example, rather than an analysis, of patriarchal oppression of women.
Jackson (1981) is even more favourable to Freud. She maintains that his
discussion helps shed light on the socially transgressive potential of the
uncanny. Freud may not have been willing to see the uncanny as
frightening as well as alluring; however, his pioneering work on the topic
has opened up a space for subsequent reconsiderations of the uncanny as a
transgressive and pleasurable materialisation of Narcissus’s refusal of the
phallocentric symbolic order. Freud may have seen the double as an
embodiment of a taboo love liaison necessitating Narcissus’s social
“death”; yet, by offering such a resolute interpretation of this uncanny
figure, the psychoanalyst has also provoked analyses that show that the
uncanny “functions to subvert and undermine cultural stability” by
permitting articulation of cultural taboos and giving expression to
“fantasies of violating these taboos” (ibid., 69–70).9
CHAPTER TWO
MISOGYNISTIC METAMORPHOSES:
LACAN, NARCISSUS AND OEDIPUS
Freud’s theories have found their chief supporter in Lacan, who takes
up Freud’s ideas and, rather than disputing the arguments as such, shifts
their foundation from anatomy to discourse. He re-formulates Freud’s
theory of human psychosexual development, which, for Freud, is
dependent upon the anatomical distinction between the sexes. In contrast,
Lacan argues that the human subject is indeed essentially a sexual, or
rather, a sexed subject, for it is constructed as such in discourse rather than
determined by anatomy. Lacan believes that he has thus divorced the
binary definition of sexual difference (phallic/castrated) from anatomy and
instead defined it as discursively fabricated. In principle, Lacan fully
espouses Freud’s account of Narcissus as the model of the human subject;
however, he complicates and radicalises the idea. Not only does he make
clear the intimate relationship between the subject and narcissism; he also
shows that they are inextricably linked with the uncanny, the double and
the death drive. Moreover, Lacan’s account clarifies the value of Narcissus
not only as an ontological paradigm but also as an epistemological one.
However, his account of human psychic development, like Freud’s, is
ultimately unable to transcend its implication in phallocentrism.
The key text in which Lacan first elaborates these ideas and puts
forward his own reading of the ancient myth is “The mirror stage as
formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic
experience” (1977, 1–7). Although seemingly quite simple, the mirror
stage designates a rather intricate concept, and it becomes even more
complex in Lacan’s subsequent rearticulations in various contexts.
In this essay, in less than ten pages, Lacan lays out Freud’s entire
scheme of Narcissus’s coming into being and his amorous encounter.
Lacan’s initial concept of the mirror stage denotes the moment in
childhood, somewhere between the ages of six and eighteen months, when
the infant first notices its reflection in the mirror and joyfully assumes it as
its own image. In this process of identification with one’s specular image,
Misogynistic Metamorphoses
19
the ego is formed. Lacan thus argues that the ego is formed through
imaginary projection. The ego believes to be what is essentially merely its
counterpart, its external reflection; it projects itself onto this ideal ego. The
fact that Narcissus thus almost instantly reaches the closing scene of the
myth confirms that Lacan takes on board Freud’s argument about
narcissism as a crucial and necessary stage in human socialisation
(namely, the relinquishment of the self-absorbed auto-erotic stage).
However, Lacan also radically re-interprets the closing sequence of the
ancient tale by reversing the epistemological outcome of Tiresias’s
prophecy. Narcissus now gets to live to a ripe old age for he never really
gets to know himself; the ego is based on misrecognition
(méconnaissance), rather than recognition, at the heart of human selfknowledge. The ego brings about a fundamental “alienation” of the human
subject (1993, 149). It comes to figure as a symptom—indeed, “the human
symptom par excellence” (1987, 16)—for, in Lacan’s view, alienation is
inevitable if the ego and consequently the socialised human subject are to
be formed at all.1
The ego, however, only initiates this decentring of the subject that the
human individual has yet to become. Lacan elaborates his understanding
of the notion of the subject in his conceptualisation of the so-called orders
of human existence: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.2 This
tripartite system significantly complicates Lacan’s view of the mirror
stage. The latter can no longer be seen as a “historical”, one-off occurrence
that terminates at some point in early infancy; the mirror stage becomes a
permanent component of the human psychic apparatus, constituting the
Imaginary and manifesting itself in the dual relation between the ego and
the ideal ego (1993). The subject, on the other hand, only comes into being
with one’s entry into the Symbolic—Narcissus’s metamorphosis. The
passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, occurring between the ages
of three and five, is what the Oedipus complex stands for in Lacan’s
theory. In other words, even though his understanding of the Oedipus
complex is rather different from Freud’s, Lacan too believes that Narcissus
transforms into Oedipus and ultimately into the fully socialised human
subject. Moreover, when sexual difference is taken into account, both
psychoanalysts stumble at more or less the same point in what they see as
the regular course of psychic development.
Freud distinguishes between “positive” and “negative” forms of the
Oedipus complex (SE XIX:1–66). In its positive form, the concept
designates the child’s desire for the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry
with the parent of the same sex; in its negative form, the relations are
reversed. Although every child, according to Freud, experiences the
20
Chapter Two
“complete” Oedipus complex, which, in various degrees, consists of both
positive and negative forms, “it is only in the male child that we find the
fateful combination of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred of
the other as a rival” (SE XXI:229). For Freud, only the little boy’s
experience of the complex can lead to anxiety (caused by the threat of
castration that the father represents), which yields the dissolution of the
Oedipus complex (the boy’s transition from the desire for the mother to the
desire for another woman). Because of the value that Freud assigns to the
male sexual organ, there can be no such anxiety (only penis-envy) for the
girl, who is thus stuck, so to speak, in the Oedipus complex indefinitely.
Lacan rarely uses Freud’s expression the castration complex; he simply
refers to castration. Thus, he underscores his dismissal of Freud’s binary
conceptualisation of the castration complex as castration anxiety in males
and acceptance of castration and penis-envy in females. Lacan preserves
the argument that castration is indispensable to the resolution of the
Oedipus complex and the ensuing formation of the fully socialised subject.
However, he argues that castration—that is, its acceptance rather than
anxiety about it—befalls both sexes and that, in both cases, it brings about
the resolution of the Oedipus complex.
What enables Lacan’s reconsideration of the child’s trajectory through
the Oedipus complex is his elaboration of the notion of the phallus. Lacan
(2000) quite emphatically argues that the penis and the phallus are not to
be confused or even conflated.3 The penis denotes the male sexual organ
whereas the phallus is neither an object nor an organ; rather, it is a
function that regulates the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic
(that is, the Oedipus complex) and the relations within both registers. In
short, the phallus in Lacan’s theory designates the signifier of desire. In the
Imaginary, one assumes one’s counterpart as one’s own image; yet, the ego
that is thus formed perceives an imbalance in this relationship.4 In
comparison with the child’s relatively uncoordinated body, the image
looks surprisingly coherent. Hence, the ego looks for confirmation from
without; the infant looks for something or someone who will confirm that
the image is indeed the infant itself. The child finds this reassurance in the
(literal and metaphorical) returned gaze of the adult. This is the figure that
possesses the imaginary phallus, that is, the power to make the child feel
complete and do away with its lack. Lacan dubs this figure the imaginary
or phallic mother.5 The presence of this single, omnipotent adult of the
mirror stage, however, does not suffice for the child to enter the Symbolic,
which is the order of interpersonal relations, the realm of social exchange.
The transition can start taking place once the child has realised that the
mother is also lacking, that she too desires something (the phallus); this is