Healing Narcissus : reaching out to Echo

The main thing about narcissism, from what I have read and experienced, is that  it has a poor prognosis. Therapist have theorised  for generations about the best way forward in attempting to heal this distressing, dark, self destructive and generally negative way of life.

My feeling is that Echo is the answer.

To remind you, Echo was the nymph who loved Narcissus, but that love was not reciprocated. All his energy was directed towards maintaining contact with his other half, his Beta twin, who could never love him back, but whose continuing presence was essential.  Here is her story:


 Here is the poem

I, Echo, stand unheard and voiceless - 

Save the last fragments of your voice in the air. 



Yet what a language there is in the looking and feeling;

In the isolation and repudiation! 



Here is a silent story of unimaginable pain, of rejection and loneliness



Of hatred and love in equal measure.


I don't see your face but the back of your neck as you gaze endlessly upon your reflection



Seeking and never finding; lost and always out of reach.




Over the long years I have watched you fading into something insubstantial;



I have watched the stillness of your grief, transfixed upon tragedy



Yet rejoicing in your own triumph over death.



I see Someone is there for you, 



But for me he is not there, he lures you away from me



He consumes you, he repudiates me. 



Each moment is a moment of utter contradiction.



Surely you live a life of confused imaginings where life can be death;



Where love can be hate; where continued being can be total annihilation



And birth must mean death.

That world is not mine.

It is your world



Created out of perpetual re-enactment of a primal tragedy. 



Amid the wordless language of your still gaze upon the lake, communication is complete.



I too am grieving for you, my heart's desire.

I too am searching for you never to find you. 



I too am repudiated yet I too still remain loyal,

I also have been annihilated -

Yet I manage, by inches, to exist.



For myself, only love and desire remain in an echo of what once was. 



It is desire that consumes me, yet desire helps me to survive. 



In eternal loyalty I resolve to stand sentinel at your grief



'Till death us will unite.



If Narcissus could only turn away from the lake and see how much he is loved - by a real, living person, not a fantasy in a Dream -  he will be healed.

Tomorrow, we will explore a little some of the  ways in which this may be acheived.