Desire

Currently enjoying a hypertext project by Christian Hubert:

narcissism and desire:

Narcissus expired through his delusory desire "because he could not lay hold of himself, and yet perceived himself as other. (Ovid) Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage follows both Ovid and Freud in stressing the basically narcissistic relation of the subject to his counterpart, the specular ego. In this way Lacan also sets up the erotic attraction or aggressive tension as a relation to a counterpart ("another who is me"), who can only exist because the ego is originally another. (See " Imaginary" in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis) The collapse into the self enacted by Narcissus is transformed for prototypically narcissistic female subjects into a fundamentally alienated relationship to her external image.