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The Character Echo as a Symbol of the Absent Female Voice in Psychoanalytic Literatures
Author(s) -
Savery Donna Christina
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
british journal of psychotherapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.442
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1752-0118
pISSN - 0265-9883
DOI - 10.1111/bjp.12598
Subject(s) - narcissism , psychoanalytic theory , psychology , symbol (formal) , mythology , character (mathematics) , psychoanalysis , feeling , phenomenon , echo (communications protocol) , presentation (obstetrics) , preconscious , oxymoron , social psychology , unconscious mind , literature , linguistics , epistemology , philosophy , art , mathematics , computer science , medicine , computer network , geometry , radiology
Echoism is a phenomenon observed most often in those who find themselves in repeated relationships with narcissistic partners, or who are recovering from narcissistic parenting. I have, over the course of seven years, carried out work with patients who have come to identify themselves as echoistic, or who have echoistic traits that may predispose them to seeking out, often unconsciously, relationships with narcissists, resulting in what I call an echoistic‐narcissistic complex . I return to the myth of Echo and Narcissus, as it is found in the work of Ovid, and consider the roles and feelings of the character Echo, in much the same way as Näcke and Ellis used the same myth to provide understanding from the presentation of Narcissus, for the condition Narcissismus, which later became widely known as narcissism. This paper questions why the character Echo has been largely ignored in psychoanalytic theory, and discusses how her clinical counterpart the echoist is prone to being missed, silenced and even mistaken for a narcissist.