"Oh, that I might be parted from my body": mirror perplexity and the nonrelational self

Psychoanalytic models have a commonly held view of necessary and accurate mirroring in the dialectic of emergent and already formed aspects of the self. Mirroring-perplexity, however, is a cognitive and affective state found in a group of patients for whom reflective mirroring results in a dissociative rather than a unifying experience of body and mind. A review of the myth of Narcissus reveals that mirroring requires a relational mediation of self and mirror image through another. This ontological organization affectively links the simultaneous sense of being in the body and in the reflected image after experiencing a state of dyadic union. Clinical vignettes illustrate the effects of missing maternal relational response initially made evident in unmirrored self-representations in the transference.