Word: narcissistic
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Total narcissism is generally taken to mean an inability to distinguish the self from the outside world, as an infant makes no distinction between himself, his mother and a bottle of milk. Reeling from some past wound to selfesteem, the narcissist exploits and manipulates others in a quest to be admired. Says Psychoanalyst Donald Kaplan: "Other people exist like a candy machine. If there's no candy left, the narcissist starts kicking the machine...
Whose Lips? Though incapable of love, the extreme narcissist is likely to project his own idealized version of himself onto another person, then worship it for a while. A 19th century example: Herman Melville's attempt at "narcissistic merger" with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville wrote Hawthorne: "By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips-lo, they are yours and not mine...
...Jong has written a medley of a book, something of a cross between a True Confessions of a Feminist--How Tough it Is and a Portnoy's Complaint. The book is probably meant to be the new monument to the movement. It's got everything: woman as Oedipus, masochist, narcissist, feminist; woman as hostage of her fears, her fantasies, her false definitions; woman as siren seductress and sexually screwed up; woman as dependent and woman as rebel...
Finch is suitably staunch as William, and Chamberlain contributes an amusingly eccentric interpretation of Byron as a pretty narcissist who arranges his curls carefully before entering a ballroom. Margaret Leighton, full of delicate malice, is superb as William's mother. "Your wife is a mass of nothing, Willie," she announces to her son, as if she had just concluded an elementary scientific investigation with a magnifying glass and a tweezer. Not a completely unfair appraisal of the movie, either...
...seems only fitting that Samaras, whose every work alludes in some way or another to his body-by photography and metaphor, by testing it with textures and pains and memory-should have made a narcissist's mausoleum in the form of his Mirror Room: a twelve-foot cube lined with reflecting surfaces, an endless labyrinth in three dimensions. One imagines the artist at home in it, lying perfectly at ease on the crystal floor, his image multiplied to a gratifying infinity...