ABSTRACT
A medicine of the ‘repression of evil’ becomes functional to a society made up of individuals who are not very different from each other, and are unable to accept difficulties extraneous to their own narcissistic self-referentiality. The only way they can admire themselves is to project evil onto others, an introduction to the Jungian concept of the ‘shadow’.
Narcissus self-destructs by knowing himself (Ovid): falling from the altar of his greatness, he cannot survive his illusion, cannot conceive of the other except as evil and depression. Narcissus dies to his complex on realizing the impossibility of his love, rising again as a coloured flower, a symbol of rebirth in the non-grandiose simplicity of the things of life. His realization of his inability to integrate faults, imperfections into consciousness has an ethical value. It interrupts the projection of evil onto the other (Neumann), indicating the alternately persecutory/depressive background of narcissism. When the ‘inner evil’ is tragically recognized, the other may become an object of love, rather than a receptacle of one’s own projections. Nowadays, however, Narcissus seems never to die, but to roam about like a wounded collective spirit. When the extreme tension between pairs of opposites from the sphere of the collective unconscious is interiorized, the individual risks an inundation of meaning which obliterates identity (Jung, Calvino). Narcissus’s crisis is desirable when he becomes aware, chiefly at an emotional level, of that pole of opposites which lies behind the self-perception, a catastrophic revelation that is also the only possible source of regeneration.
