Narcissism is considered the defining pathology of the twenty-first century: an obsession with the self that spreads like a virus through our constant online presence, worsened by the image of ourselves that smartphone screens keep sending back. In the myth, Narcissus sees his reflection in the water and is trapped by it; what if the narcissus were not only the symbol of vain loss but of the need for transformation? Tracing the history of the self-portrait, from painters such as Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt to photographers such as Lee Friedlander and Hervé Guibert and celebrities such as Paris Hilton, the book charts an alternative path of self-representation. Matt Colquhoun asks whether the age of the selfie is a period of change rather than stasis, proposing a view of narcissism as transformation, rebirth and overcoming of the ego, and asking what metamorphosis awaits once we have fallen into the lake, freed from the claustrophobic image of ourselves that capitalism has tailored for us.