Eros and the Shattering Gaze: Transcending Narcissism

This timely and innovative expose by contemporary Jungian psychoanalyst, Ken Kimmel, reveals a culturally and historically embedded narcissism underlying men’s endlessly driven romantic projections and erotic fantasies, that has appropriated their understanding of what love is. Men enveloped in narcissism fear their interiority and all relationships with emotional depth that prove too overwhelming and penetrating to bear--so much so that the other must either be colonized or devalued. This wide-ranging work offers them hope for transcendence. Explores: Transcendence of Narcissism in Romance Men’s Capacity to Love Kabbalistic Mysticism Post-modern Philosophy Contemporary Trends in Psychoanalysis Table of Contents Part One - Narcissism in the Romantic: The Mother, Her Son, His Lover 1 The Great Round 2 The Death Coniunctio: Tales of Fatal Love 3 The Split Feminine: Mother, Lover, Virgin, Whore 4 Analyst, President, Surgeon: The Split Feminine in Contemporary Man Part Two - The Predator Beneath the Lover 5 Hatred for the “Taint of the Human” 6 Demon Lover and the Abuse of Imagination 7 A Deadly Narcissism: Saturn’s Wounded Eros 8 Clemency on the Way to the Gallows: Transcending Trauma and Dissociation Part Three - The Shattering Gaze 9 Wounded by the Other 10 Emergence of the Father 11 The Capacity to Love: Transcendence of the “Heat-Death” of Eros