The Death of Narcissus, Morris Fraser, 1976

[Alyosha]

The Death of Narcissus
Morris Fraser
Seeker & Warburg, London, 1976

Morris Fraser makes a Freudian analysis of the orientation, using repeated symbolisms and imagery in the literature of topical writers: Carol (Alice books), Barrie (Peter Pan), James (The Turn of the Screw), Tournier (The Erl-King), Ried (The Garden God), McDonald (The Water-Babies), Farrar (Eric), Walpole (Jeremy), and so on.

In a single sentence, in the last chapter, Faser mentions waiting in a reception room and noticing a "West Indian" boy; so he does not violate his own methodology,

• "A creative artist is generally understood to be a man with an outstanding ability to perceive and to communicate. For this reason, if he happens to be a victim of any psychiatric illness or abnormality, he is uniquely qualified to act as a spokesman -- both for himself and also for the the vast army of people who may share his problems but who lack a matching gift of self-analysis. So perhaps, by giving close attention to what he has to say, one can arrive at new and valuable insights into a number of psychiatric disorders....
  
  This book was written to bring these possibilities to bear on a relatively small area of psychopathology --"

The themes Fraser finds recur, the archetypes, are: Emotionally inexpressive, repressed or inaccessible (dead) mothers: represented by the Moon, as a house, or as the sea. Fathers are equally distant, and are damaged, missing an arm or a leg, weak. The star-child is beyond emotion, is without parentage, and has something very foreign about him or her.

From this point, Fraser explains the inversion process, his main thesis,

• "...narcissistic inversion in childhood is the core of paedophilic fantasy."

He gives copious examples from literature: girl-mothers, shadow imagery, reflection, mirror-phobia, portraiture, Doppelgänger, walking backward, White Queens, "EVIL/LIVE", anagrams, mirror writing, stairs, ambidextricity, right-left confusion, twins, and more ...

The inversion process is explained this way,

• "To find an answer, one must recall the factors .. then imagine each taken, in effect, to extremes. These factors were, first, a failure to find emotional satisfaction with either parent (and hence a failure to resolve the Oedipus complex), and then the unusual acuity, or sensitivity, so that the process of inversion begins before psychological puberty. Suppose then, that we have a sensitive and timid child who has deeply reserved parents, and that this unhappy state of affairs for the child is combined with rare intellectual precocity."

The customary parental love objects are inaccessible. And the young boy, intelligent and sensitive enough to already have discovered (his) sexuality, he has no other object available but to fall in love with himself. He falls in love with his childhood self,

• "Doubly frustrated, the boy turns back on the only love-object left -- himself. Thus narcissistic inversion takes place and, as he grows older, he remains deeply in love with the child he was then. This is impossible, so he must project ... onto other children of a similar age to this lost child, who thus become love-objects for him."

Fraser quotes Sartre,

• "Narcissus ... asks only to be slightly distanced from his own body, only for there to be a light covering over his flesh and over his thoughts."

Fraser has some difficulty accounting for heterosexual inverts. But he is a wonderfully liminal writer, and he writes this part well despite the limitations of fitting traditional Freudian inversion to the topic at hand.

We are however not left with just this. The author sees that denial of death and anxiety (dread) are the source of things. As with the main part of the book on inversion, Fraser uses his broad knowledge of topical literature as data and proof of his interpretation. He makes an interesting observation about the following line,

• "I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!" (which was very likely true)."
  
  "...this is the first death joke in the Alice books. There are many more to come...."

Fraser tells us, there are "twenty-eight" beheading references throughout Alice. Anecdotes show Carol as a serious anxiety neurotic.

Or of writer George Selwyn, Fraser tells us,

• "The reputation that he left behind, except a scrape at Oxford, was of being both fond of going to executions and particular to little girls."

There is a sketch of a very loose "push and pull" model toward the end of the book, this is the only model that could bring together the vast and subtle assemblage of poems, myths, and quotations that The Death of Narcissus contains,

• "...most unusual human behaviors are, in fact multi-determined, that is, they arise at the meeting point of two or more powerful drives."

Little girls are made of sugar and spice. Fraser elucidates some of the obvious subtle things that go into it, but really the ingredients that make a girl-lover is a secret recipe.

"Enigma treading upon enigma."

- McDonald, Lilith