ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author summarises the reasons that echoism is prone to being missed, marginalised, or completely ignored. She describes the findings of her research and provide a clear working definition of the term echoism as a clinical phenomenon within a theoretical framework, for recognition and further exploration by therapists of all orientations. The author considers the therapist’s experience of working with echoistic patients as the work progresses, and discusses some of the clinical implications of recovery. She provides an invitation to fellow practitioners and theorists to consider ways in which the concept might be developed further in terms of treatment, method, and training. The author describes ways in which the imbalance of the existing paradigm, in which the echoist was invisible through the dominant lens of narcissism, might be redressed. In psychoanalysis much has been written of the death instinct and it has been discussed widely in relation to destructiveness in narcissism.
