ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud continues to polarize sciences and humanities into two antagonistic cultures. Scientists critical of Freudian literary theorists accuse them of failing to apply truth-criteria; Freudian literary theorists find scientists' 'true or false' analysis simplistic. A weighty example of recent Freudian criticism is David E. Wellbery's The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. In Freud and Lacan, the relations between mirroring, identity-formation, narcissism and the mother-child dyad are more complex than Wellbery suggests. Both Freud and Jacques Lacan distinguished, after the constitution of the ego, a so-called phallic phase or moment in the psychic life of the child, and both regarded this as contemporary with the Oedipus complex. Specularity, the look into the loved one's eyes, undoubtedly does signify narcissism or self-absorption, but in the sense of entrapment in interiority, in the mind.
