Donna Savery, 'Echoism and narcissism: the silenced voice in psychoanalysis'

This paper considers the poetic resonance of a character, silenced by a curse and sentenced to repeat the words of another, as a real person whom we meet in our consulting rooms, and about whom little has been written as a subject in her own right. Her absence in the literatures and in psychoanalytic theory has contributed to the echoistic individual being understood through the dominant lens of narcissism, producing a further objectification of the sufferer who resembles closely the Echo of the original myth. Why, it asks, has the treatment of Echo as an object or co- dependent of her subjectivised other, prevailed, and how might this have led to not only a dominant reading of a text, but in psychoanalysis, the occurrence of an ‘overvalued idea’ (Britton, R., and Steiner, J. 1994), substituting for an actual experience of being with such a patient? 

    Myths are containers for the most dreadful aspects of the human condition, in which fundamental ontological anxieties can be contained in much the same way that the mother, in Bion’s model of the symbiotic container-contained relationship, can bear with her infant a feeling of unbearable dread, in order that transformations can take place through the process of alpha function; enabling the development of a mind and, as a consequence, an ego and a self. For the echoist, it is an absence of self that we encounter in the consulting room, much like that of Echo in the myth.