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In book three of his Metamorphoses, the poet Ovid recounts the unhappy tale of Narcissus, the youth who is sought by many for his exceptional beauty.2 Unmoved, even scornful of the amorous attentions of his admirers, Narcissus finally discovers an object worthy of his devotion when he gazes at his own reflection for the first time in an undisturbed pool of water. His tragic fate, the inability to love anyone but himself, has often inspired artists, poets, and musicians through the centuries, but it was not until 1914 that Sigmund Freud recognized Narcisus as not only an intriguing mythological character, but as a universal peronslity type, an observable character as common to the Vienna of his own time as it presumably was to the Rome of Ovid's.3 In the same year the century's first great war befan, a war that would become the standard for modern warfare, Narcissus became the patron of the clinical condition that bears his name, a disorder that many would later consider a distinguishing pathology of the modern personality.4 The connection between the publication of Freud's idea, however, and the outbreak of hostilities is by no means coincidental.5
Despite various revisions to Freud's original model, most of the observable symptoms of the narcissistic personality syndrome have remained constant; at the same time they also remain remarkably faithful to the details of Ovid's poetic account.' It is significant that his poem appears in the early years of a political order that recalls the despotic regimes of the twentieth century. Regardless of the age, the nature of tyrannies, whether of the first or the twentieth century, is such that it necessarily establishes a political milieu in which the narcissist can assume a respected public role, enforce public policy, and receive reinforcement for the very traits Freud and his disciples would consider symptoms of pathology.' In Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, or Neronian Rome, narcissism escapes detection because it is an essential component of a political order that requires an allegiance as identical as an image in an undistorted mirror.' Never does the personal become so political as in the affairs of everyday life under tyrannies and their uniformity of thought.' In reality and in myth, the narcissist requires not only a mirror, but an...