Confessionalism and narcissism are closely linked. By exploring psychoanalytic roots of narcissism and examining recent readings of the term\\\'s place in contemporary literature and culture, it is possible to recover the adjective narcissistic and demonstrate its importance in apparently divergent artistic traditions (poetry and painting). With the help of Psychoanalysis (Lacan, Freud), Cultural and Comparative Studies, this article tries to re-read the confessional art of Allen Ginsberg (1926-97, American poet) and Frida Kahlo (1907-54, Mexican painter) beyond biography. Their creation is not merely biographical but a reconstruction of their existence-- textually (Ginsberg) or visually (Kahlo). Ginsberg’s poems present a fundamentally narcissistic moment--a moment of crisis in the subject\\\'s sense of self and his relation to the external world. That’s why there’s the implicit I/you dialogue in most of his poems. Narcissism is revealed to be public and discursive rather than a private and hermetic gesture. The personal preoccupation (\\\"my\\\") gives way to public responsibility (\\\"your\\\") blurring the boundaries between private/ public and un/authoritative art in a fluid and intertextual way. The object of gaze in white male, heterosexual dominant culture is the Other (woman, gay,…) who is not allowed ultimately into the ‘House of Phallus’. Therefore, the artist wants to conquer the notion of gaze with the help of narcissistic narratives in confessional art and the depiction of nude body (Ginsberg’s nude pictures, confessional poems and Kahlo’s self-portraits). Body begins to speak about its own experience and to refuse the mind/body distinction, revealing the two to be mutually one. With the comparative study of visual and textual narratives of Kahlo and Ginsberg, this article concludes that narcissism is not a disease/ disorder but the testimony to artists’ struggles for survival; both ego and object libido become conjoined as part of the ‘life instinct’, in conflict with the ‘death instinct’.

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