mirror, mirror on the wall...or the ground

This is "Metamorphosis of Narcissus"--the Dali painting mentioned in the notes. It is based on the story of Narcissus from Greek mythology, a tale in which Narcissus falls in love with his reflection in water and is later turned into a flower by the gods. Dali painted this during his "paranoiac-critical" phase wherein he basically induced paranoia (without drugs...there is apparently an amusing quote where he says something like "I don't need drugs. I am drugs.") and then painted the resulting images. As is also noted in the sidebar (?), this piece is roughly contemporary with Lacan's development of the mirror stage.

Before delving into any sort of commentary, I must say, I have thought and thought about this article and the concepts involved in the mirror stage, and, mostly, I am still confused. So, to keep the disclaimer trend going, if any of this seems like a wild misinterpretation or just wildly illogical, I apologize and I tried.

Anyways, here goes: As I said above, Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection, but is never able to grasp the image--the love is unfulfilled. He loves an illusion, not an actual person, so there is a gap between what he thinks he should be able to love and what he can actually hold onto. This also happens for infants encountering the mirror stage; they see their chubby little faces in the mirror, but their realization of any sort of "I" is incomplete. They cannot recognize selfdom until others are involved (There are 8 people on the left with the whole man, as opposed to one statue turned away on the right). This unfulfillment/incomplete knowledge results in alienation and a sense of fragmentation often represented in dreams by "disjointed limbs" (i.e. the hand on the right as opposed to the man on the left). Also included in the painting are a typical Dali motif--ants, which, I believe usually represent sexual frustration if I am not mistaken.

As a side note, this reminded me of a sociological concept proposed by Charles Horton Cooley coincidentally called the "looking glass self." In his case, however, the mirror is others. Essentially, your perception of yourself is based on what you think others think of you; you cannot know yourself without others.