The downside of narcissism explained

People are obsessed of narcissism and narcissists. They want to know if they have one narcissistas they are to date a narcissist, like them boss is a narcissist, as their dog is a narcissist – and on and on. But much less seem to ask about the opposite of narcissism: echoism.

To understand this humble character trait, it is worth first delving into Greek mythology, where the terms “narcissism” and “echoism” come from.

Echo was a nymph with a beautiful voice – a voice she used to carry on a pleasant conversation to distract Hera, the queen of the gods, so that she could explain her husband’s (Zeus) infidelity with Echo’s friends (other mountain nymphs) would not notice. .

Hera eventually understood Echo’s game and punished her so that she no longer had control over her own tongue. Echo could only speak when she was spoken to, and she could only repeat the last words of the person who had spoken to her.

While the punishment took a heavy toll on Echo, her real suffering began when she fell in love with Narcissus, a hunter who had become known for his extraordinary beauty. Narcissus’s brutal rejection of Echo due to her inability to speak her own words caused her so much grief that in the end there was nothing left of her except her voice.

As in the myth in which Echo helped other nymphs to mate with the king of the gods, echoists focus on meeting the needs of others to keep them from thinking about their own. And they are unable to express their own desires and thoughts for fear that this may lead to feelings of shame or loss of love. They are usually empathetic and may even avoid or reject attention.

Other characteristics of echoism may include an inability to set boundaries, a tendency to take on substantial self-blame, and to ask very little of others for fear that this would burden them – or that it might be seen as an attempt to steal attention to pull.

In the myth, Narcissus and Echo are opposites depicted as intertwined but separate entities. To understand echoism, one must understand narcissism, as the former is seen as the opposite end of the narcissism spectrum.

Opposites attract each other

Echoists and narcissists can be attracted to each other. And while it may be easy to think of the narcissist as the aggressor and the echoist as the victim in a relationship, the truth is that both parties have certain needs met.

A narcissist will monopolize attention without any challenge or threat to his ego. Meanwhile, the echoist will hide in the narcissist’s shadows so that their tendency to reject attention is satisfied.

Looking beyond the simplistic dichotomy between good and bad personalities, the moral of the myth and the interpretation of recent findings on narcissism suggest that too much or too little of anything can be disastrous for the person and the people around him or her. her.

In the myth, both Echo and Narcissus die tragically at a very young age in despair caused by poor choices and unmet needs. Both today narcissistic personality disorder (the highest end of the narcissism spectrum) and echoism (there is no echoism equivalent for narcissistic personality disorder) can contribute to mental health problems, isolation and loneliness.

On the other hand, a healthy – even slightly elevated – level of narcissism, mainly ‘grandiose narcissism’ (an inflated sense of importance and a preoccupation with status and power), can contribute to positive resultssuch as fewer mental disorders and better performance under stress. This is because mildly elevated levels of grandiose narcissism have been consistently associated with greater resilience to mental disorders.

We also showed that grandiose narcissists, when under pressure to perform in a cognitive test, appeared to have had the ability to ignore misleading feedback and focus on the task.

But to understand how much narcissism or echoism it takes before it becomes toxic, we need to change the way we perceive human nature. Instead of viewing personality traits as something that is fixed (you are an echoist or not), we should focus on understanding how our behavior and personality change from one day to the next depending on what is required of us within the complex social environment. in which we all operate.

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