The previous chapter concluded with the notion that Nicholas Nickleby, and his creator, could successfully exit theatre, all that damnable “fooling here!” (xxxx, 398). Such an exit would evade the shame Dickens and his contemporaries associate with unmanaged public exhibition without having to forgo the admiration and esteem the hero, like his author, so obviously and desperately craves. But an option to Exit makes sense only if it faces with some symmetry a counter-option marked Entry, in this case entry to a non-theatrical world where ambition has a reasonable chance to satisfy the entrant's grandiose psychic demands. A world, then, that heartily cheers the immature, the agamous, the episodic, the mimetic: that hails a hero who, forsaking all others, forgets who he's been, to forge himself into whoever at the moment he wishes to become. A world su.ciently broad-minded not merely to accept but to acclaim Narcissus, supreme connoisseur of the self.

Narcissus haunts the second half of After Dickens. But my Narcissus loves his I with a difference, the difference elaborated by his most empathic post-Freudian defender, Heinz Kohut, the father of “Self Psychology.” Kohut follows psychoanalytic convention in marking a crucial split between object love and narcissism, the libidinal cathexis of the self. But he also breaks with that tradition, refusing its impulse to downgrade narcissism into a jejune sort of psychic second best.