A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis of Ovid’s “Narcissus and Echo”: Toward the Obstinate Persistence of the Relational

1 Introduction

In this article, we revisit Ovid’s text on Narcissus and Echo in Book Three of Metamorphoses and reinterpret it from a relational psychoanalytic viewpoint. In doing so, we illustrate how this “canonic”^[1] text can be reread as a narrative of how lives are socially shaped, struggles to overcome isolation, and the role of listening and dialogue in these processes. To that end, we develop three interconnected lines of argument. First, we build on the long tradition of attempts that have dared a “determined redemption of narcissism from its pejorative characterization as fundamentally anti-social … for the purpose of theorizing a reflexive and embodied subjectivity.”^[2] These attempts have been undertaken not only in the fields of psychoanalysis^[3] and the history of psychiatry and psychology,^[4] but also in sociology,^[5] literary criticism and queer theory,^[6] philosophical traditions like the Critical Theory of Frankfurt School,^[7] and Deconstruction.^[8] Second, by providing a relational-psychoanalytically informed reading of Ovid’s text, we underscore its ongoing relevance as a source for psychoanalytical inquiry. As we will demonstrate, a relational perspective offers a fresh interpretation of the text and provides interesting insights regarding the constitutive functionality of connecting through dialogue. Third, we intervene in recent philosophical attempts to establish a relational model of philosophy and politics. Such a “relational ontology” or “relational model,” as Adriana Cavarero summarizes this approach, “concentrate[s] on the category of relation to rethink a subjectivity marked by exposure, vulnerability, and dependence.”^[9]

The impact of the figure of Narcissus, a source of psychoanalytic theorizing and an inspiration for interpreting the subject and its (dis-)connection to the Other(s), is indisputable.^[10] As Adele Tutter makes clear, there is no other myth apart from that of Oedipus that “has captured the interest of psychoanalysts quite like the myth of Narcissus.”^[11] The significance of Ovid’s text in consolidating Narcissism as both a description of a clinical symptom or personality trait as well as an influential concept in the intrapsychic development of individuals is also well-documented. In Ein Beitrag zum Narcissismus, Otto Rank was the first to name Ovid as the primary reference for the myth within psychiatric-psychoanalytical studies. However, as Niclas Johansson argues,^[12] Ovid’s version is also most likely the one that Havelock Ellis had in mind a decade earlier when speaking of “a Narcissus-like tendency”^[13] in “Auto-erotism: a psychological study.” In addition, it was through Ovid’s rendition that Narcissus came to exemplify “a myth about the origins, highly idealized by us all”^[14] and to occupy an “entirely singular place … in the history of Western subjectivity.”^[15]

Despite the consensus on their importance, both Ovid’s text and the concept of narcissism are subjects of an ongoing and vivid debate.^[16] Sydney Pulver observes that “there are probably only two facts upon which everyone agrees: first, that the concept of narcissism is one of the most important contributions of psychoanalysis; second, that it is one of the most confusing.”^[17] In part, this confusion pertains to the fact that different psychoanalytic schools like Freudian drive theory,^[18] self-psychology,^[19] and object relations theory^[20] have elevated narcissism to a core concept because of its capacity to define how a self can become coherent and stable. The confusion is further fueled by the different readings of Ovid’s text that the different psychoanalytic schools have developed.

Adding more fuel to the fire, we proceed by analyzing Ovid’s text on Narcissus and Echo from a relational-psychoanalytic perspective. One central aspect that this perspective brings to the forefront is the claim that the becoming of selves must always be read in the context of encounters with others. The evident question is then: Who is Narcissus’s Other? The equally evident answer is: Echo, a figure whose absence in many interpretations, is noteworthy. As we suggest, without Echo’s involvement and participation, Narcissus would have never come to occupy his position within the psychoanalytic conceptual arsenal and the Western European cultural-collective imaginary. By highlighting how Ovid intertwines the fates of Echo and Narcissus, we follow the steps of a small but significant body of literature which underlines the role of Echo in the overall development of the plot.^[21]

In what follows, we return to Ovid’s text and argue that it narrates a dipole, a relational drama. Narcissus and Echo are not the only figures in their monologues. Nor is Narcissus the protagonist in a play with Echo featuring solely as a stunt or sidekick. On the contrary, Narcissus and Echo are symprotagonists, co-leading characters of a mutual enactment that, as we suggest, has four distinct acts. In these acts, other figures also play significant roles in developing the main characters and the events leading to the narrative’s culmination. As we wish to make clear, Narcissus and Echo did not have their independent storylines before their fatal encounter on Mount Helicon.^[22] Rather, we suggest that they would not have exerted such a constitutive influence on one another’s further development without their distinctive biographies. We further claim that precisely therein lies the alternative psychoanalytical valence of the text, namely, in the dipole’s functionality as a paradigm for the subject’s becoming on the basis of relations within which it finds itself entangled.

By highlighting Echo’s development, we do not intend to establish Echo as “the Other” of male-dominated psychoanalysis.^[23] Further, we do not intend to reenter the debate concerning gender-specific applications of narcissistic tendencies^[24] or retrace narcissism’s history as a perversion,^[25] behavioral personality disorder,^[26] developmental stage (primary narcissism),^[27] coping mechanism (secondary narcissism),^[28] and/or essentialist “anthropomorphic”^[29] disposition.^[30] On the contrary, we intend to derive from Ovid’s text the relevance of the “in-between” in subjectivation processes, which can be understood as a product, collection, and condensation of interconnected intrapsychic dynamics.^[31] In the scenes that unfold between Narcissus and Echo, the “stage”^[32] or “plateau”^[33] is set for the two subjects’ relational becoming, where peripheral biographical elements and experiences that both subjects have accumulated throughout their development encounter, clash, and get translated, integrated, and fused with one another. Each subject is not just the result of the relation with another subject. Subjects are also the result of their relationalization with the past of another subject or other subjects. From this perspective, the subject’s formation is better understood as a “constellation,”^[34] “assemblage” (agencement),^[35] or “amassment” (struction)^[36] – the entangled amalgam of different stories that need to be retold from different angles, and the point at which different outcomes are to be hypothesized and expected after different variables have been factored in. In this light, the subject’s becoming is not simply interpsychic but also intrapsychic; not just intersubjective but also collective; and not just monocausal and monosemantic but also necessarily, in the Freudian sense,^[37] overdetermined.

Following this introduction (Section 1), the article is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly presents the main characteristics of the relational psychoanalytical paradigm. Grounded in this approach, we use a relational perspective to reconstruct Ovid’s text on Narcissus and Echo as a tale of two equals (Section 3). Finally, (Section 4), we scrutinize the outputs of this relational reading of Ovid’s text on Narcissus and Echo for the “relational model” of subjectivity according to current tendencies within the humanities and especially philosophy. As we demonstrate, such a relational reading of Narcissus and Echo serves as a model of relational subjectivity as a type of decentered, social-ontological, collective, processual, and dynamic subjectivity production. In Der Andere in der Psychoanalyse. Die intersubjektive Wende, Michael Ermann mentions explicitly philosophy’s contributions toward the consolidation of the relational psychoanalytical paradigm.^[38] In this last section, we wish to briefly demonstrate how the relational psychoanalytical paradigm can germinate philosophical thought.

2 On the Necessity of Relational Reading: The Theoretical Framework

In his Essential Papers on Narcissism, arguably one of the most comprehensive collections of psychoanalytic literature on the matter, the editor Andrew Morrison condenses the story as follows:

A handsome young man, Narcissus was much loved by the nymphs, including Echo, who was rejected by him. The Gods vowed to punish him for his callousness by causing him to fall in love with his own image as reflected in a mountain pool. However, the mirror image fragmented each time that Narcissus reached out to embrace it, causing him to pine away in melancholy, and ultimately die. In his place, the nymphs found a flowering plant growing where once his body had been.^[39]

This summary gives insight into some of the shortcomings of the text’s representation in the (psychoanalytic) literature. By suggesting that Narcissus is a man, Morrison fails to reflect on and adequately grasp Narcissus’s stage of psychic development. As a matter of fact, according to Ovid, it is indeed ambiguous as to whether Narcissus “could be taken/Either for boy or man.”^[40] Yet, as Maryanne Hannan points out, beyond this quote the text refers to Narcissus exclusively as a boy or a boy lover (puer).^[41] Second, this is important since it allows for an ethical evaluation of narcissistic behavior as essentially “callous,” which would be illegitimate otherwise, i.e., if Narcissus’s behavior were a (self-defensive) reaction of a personality in a still (self-)developing stage amidst an environment that seeks to determine (if not dominate) him. Third, Narcissus’s callousness justifies his being cursed by the Gods “to fall in love with his own image.”^[42] However, as the text bears witness, the curse of the goddess Nemesis was not to fall in love with his own image, but to love without being loved back: “Love one day, so, himself, and not win over/The creature whom he loves!” (“sic amet ipse licet, sic non potiatur amato!”^[43]). This curse might come true as soon as Narcissus sees himself reflected in the water and chooses himself as his love object. However, the curse’s essence is rooted in the ban on being with the loved object/Other and not simply in loving his own image.

From this perspective, we suggest that the story unfolds its greatest potential when reread through a relational lens. Although the notion of relationality has gained considerable momentum in the social sciences in general^[44] and especially in psychoanalysis over the last three decades,^[45] the importance of relationships to psychic life and the development of symptoms was recognized early on. It was none other than Sigmund Freud who in the opening statement to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego famously suggested that Individual and Social Psychology cannot but ultimately converge with one another:

It is true that Individual Psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instincts; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is Individual Psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent, and so from the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social Psychology as well in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words.^[46]

Despite these early recognitions, only around the 1990s did the theorizing of relationality gain greater importance and acceptance. This is due to the dominance of what Michael Ermann has described as the intrapsychic as well as the relationship paradigms.^[47] The intrapsychic paradigm focuses on looking at a person’s inner development and is essentially what Michael Balint has termed and critiqued as a One-Person-Psychology: the fact that external, objective truths determining the patient’s inner processes can be discovered.^[48] The relationship paradigm acknowledges that a person’s psychic development is ultimately a function of (internalized) relationship experiences; a core assumption also of object-rationalists like Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, or Ronald Fairbairn. In contrast to both, the relational paradigm, which we will explore in the following, recognizes individual trajectories and accounts for the mutual becoming that takes place in a “third space,” namely, the relational process.^[49] As Harry S. Sullivan puts it early on, a “personality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person lives.”^[50] While the relationship paradigm underlines the importance of relationships, the relational paradigm stresses the shaping power of relational dynamics and sees in relations the primary form and vector of the individual’s development. Individuals do not just meet each other in relationships, but individuality is continuously constituted and maintained within an intersubjective field. In other words, individuality is continuously socially constructed and constituted and maintained within an intersubjective field. As Stephen A. Mitchell writes, “mind is composed of relational configurations. … Experience is understood as structured through interactions.”^[51] It is thanks to the relational psychoanalytical approach that relationality has been brought back into the center of current debates.^[52]

While much of the (relational) psychoanalytic literature is directed toward understanding and interpreting the relational matrix of therapist and patient and thus the transformative nature of the lived experience within the therapeutic setting, we argue that the core relational assumptions apply to all (intensive and) lived relational experiences and thus can be used as an interpretative template toward further dynamics.^[53] The following four conceptual shifts belong to the conceptual core of relational psychology and provide the cornerstone of our study of the story of Narcissus and Echo:

i. From sexual drives to relational affect: The first aspect concerns a shift from sexual drives to relational effects. Based on a critique of classical drive theory, relationalists like Harry Sullivan, William Fairbairn, and Sandor Ferenczi argue that “our dependence on human relationships is primary rather than derivative of drives.”^[54] What precedes and forms, both causally and temporally, the subject’s motivation is not the drives but human relationships and how they get internalized to form the subject’s motivations. This is not to say that sexual drives, one of the most innovative elements of early psychodynamic theorizing, ought to be overhauled. Rather, the binarity between drives or affects needs to be considered obsolete and replaced by an understanding of libidinal–sexual and relational drives as two interlinked systems.^[55]

ii. From repression to dissociation of the unconscious: The second aspect marks the transition from repression to dissociation.^[56] Instead of jumping to a moral evaluation, relational psychology uses the concept of dissociation to draw attention to the operationalization of the subject’s disarticulation and disentanglement from its (social) environment. According to Donnel B. Stern “dissociation allows to avoid the formulation of experience that we cannot even acknowledge belongs to us.”^[57] In doing so, it suggests that a state of psychic equilibrium is created by means of an “unconscious refusal to articulate or realize these aspects of our subjectivity.”^[58] Dissociation thus detaches the person from the lived experience that the person relationally shapes with others, rendering encounters void of attachment. Further, dissociation needs to be differentiated between depersonalization and derealization. In depersonalization, a person detaches all affect from the body, thus splitting the self into mind and body. In derealization, a person feels disconnected from the world as if experiencing it through a thick layer of fog. In both cases, dissociation serves a regulatory function. To tackle the unconscious anxieties that the individual develops by merely being with Others in the world, the individual either disconnects himself emotionally from the world or splits itself to encapsulate (and thereby protect) the self.

iii. From symbolic representation to relational enactment: Further, relational psychology shifts the focus from symbolic phantasies as a form of communication between parts of the self toward the analysis of relationship enactments as a circular dynamic of transference and countertransference.^[59] Enactment is understood as a self-replicating pattern of experiences and behaviors that aims to actualize “the nuclear configurations of self and other that constitute a person’s character. Such patterns of conduct may include provoking others to act in predetermined ways, so that a thematic isomorphism is created between the ordering of the subjective and the interpersonal fields.”^[60] What is essential to such an understanding of enactment is that it is constituted by and simultaneously constitutes specific modes of (communicative) interactions. Seen this way, the relational paradigm emphasizes the importance of culturally rooted scripts and addresses the importance of socially acquired meanings for the creation of unconscious desires and needs.

iv. From the Freudian to the intrapsychic and relational unconscious: Finally, relationalists have a rather ambivalent relationship to Freud’s notion of the unconscious. In their view, the concept of the unconscious should be transformed into a relational unconscious.^[61] The latter conceptualizes a third, in-between, and enclosing space within which two subjects are engaged and execute their unconscious entanglement. There are two crucial aspects of the theory of relational unconsciousness that are important for our analysis. First, the theory values the unknown and unknowable (underlying) relationship dynamics that shape subjects’ encounter with one another. Second, it draws attention to the fact that while the subject can know with certainty what it thinks of the/its Other, the Other’s stance toward the subject can never become totally disclosable. A merit of this approach is that relationship patterns are not seen as static but as dynamic representations of historically developed intrapsychic processes that result from the subjects’ immediate interactions as they unfold through time.

From our viewpoint, relational psychoanalysis can be reappropriated to do justice to the multiple layers of which storylines and biographies are composed. The relational unconscious has most commonly been used for an in-depth interpretation of psychoanalyst-patient relationships. As Peter Wolson argues, “transference and countertransference provoke an unconscious enactment, which consists of a co-created infantile drama emanating from the internal worlds of analyst and analysand.”^[62] Given the fruitful insights such case analyses have yielded, we suggest that the relational unconscious concept can also be used to analyze further social-relational processes. As we intend to show by reading Ovid’s text on Narcissus and Echo, the relational paradigm can highlight the backstories of the involved persons (dramatis personae), their individual development up to the moment they encounter each other, as well as how they mutually influence each other to determine each other’s further development. As Ruthellen Josselson et al. rightfully suggest, “relationships, because they have (always shifting) meaning at unconscious and affective, as well as cognitive, levels, become exceedingly challenging to render in language, let alone with the precision of terminology require[d] in science.”^[63] Yet, as we would like to counterargue, therein lies the advantage of the relational reading: In managing the complexity of relationships by obviating the monosemantics lurking in every specific interpretative perspective, while being aware of the limitations of every retelling.

We now move on to explicate Ovid’s text on Narcissus and Echo from a relational perspective, showing how such a relational reading can underpin a “relational model of subjectivity.”

3 Rereading Ovid: Narcissus and Echo as Tale of Two Interrelated Equals

Ovid’s ingeniousness lies in laying out a perfect template for the prototypical narrative of co-dependent development. He presents his subjects, provides some background information that explains how they ended up at the place where they met, and then starts describing their encounter in detail. After both characters have undergone their respective transformations as a result of their individual stories and encounters, a reunion occurs, bringing the narrative to an end and allowing for a series of questions. Following this pattern, we propose four acts to retell the story. The first act is a sort of prologue, a Vorabend, where we provide each character’s backstory. The second act retells the encounter of the two symprotagonists. It contains two scenes: a first in which both Echo and Narcissus orbit each other and become interwoven in the phantasies of their respective other, and a second in which they collide with each other and thereby also with their own and each other’s reality. The third act consists of Echo’s and Narcissus’s individual transformations, followed by the fourth act, where Echo and Narcissus finally meet and merge in ether.

4 Outlook: Toward a Psychoanalytically Informed Model of Relational Subjectivity

We began by declaring that we would treat Ovid’s text as a template for a subjectivity that finds itself in a state of continuous becoming. We hypothesized that this was to be derived from the effects of the encounters between subjects. What, then, are the conceptual and philosophical components of the relational model of subjectivity that we can extrapolate from our relational rereading of Ovid’s text? What role does listening play in this process? As mentioned at the end of the introduction, if reread from a relational perspective, Ovid’s text helps us qualify and corroborate the “relational type of subjectivity” as a form of decentered, social-ontological, collective, and processual/dynamic subjectivity production.

Every encounter creates a relationship, the consequences of which inevitably unravel to bind subjects to one another even after their separation. This relational entanglement of the subject results in decentering the subject. The subject is decentered because its becoming does not rely solely on itself but on its relationalization with others. However, these Others that decenter the subject embody and engender different social structures, roles, and protocols. Through every encounter with the subject, these Others do not infuse themselves only. They also embody social structures, roles, and protocols that they vectorize in the subject’s becoming. The story of Narcissus and Echo might have been different if they had not been caught among the power dynamics, enmities, feuds, and rivalries of gods like Zeus and Hera; if Echo had not needed to fulfill a concrete social role and act loyally to the other nymphs, her peer-group; or, finally, if Narcissus had developed a different way of reacting to or coping with the advancements of his suitors. Therefore, the subject’s relationalization results not only in the subject’s decentering but also in the subject’s social-ontologization and ascription in different social embeddings. This decentering relationalization couples the subject to different institutional or societal structures that henceforth determine its biography as soon as it enters a relation with another.

In addition, the subject’s social-ontological and decentering relationalization renders subjectivation into a process of collectivization: The subject is not the product of a linear, self-centered development but the result of processes of socialization and inter-personal encounters that the subject embodies and synthetizes within itself. In the case of Narcissus and Echo, although it might seem at first sight that what we are dealing with here is merely interpersonal relation, we are actually dealing with the encounter of two collective events. Narcissus and Echo are not two bodies that each contain one, singular identity, but two persons carrying a collective identity that they bring into the encounter. First, due to the plurality of the different social structures that calibrate it, the subject is a collective entity embodying all those different modes of subjectivation. Narcissus is not only the son of Liriope but also the offspring of rape, a citizen of Thespies, someone who is considered young and attractive according to the prevailing criteria, the object of Echo’s desire, etc. Similar considerations apply to Echo. She might be a nymph by birth, but she is also a friend of the other nymphs, someone perhaps as young as Narcissus who chooses to act in solidarity with her peers to protect them, a stigmatized social outcast and pariah after Hera cursed her, a nomad or refugee forced to wander since she could no longer communicate and subsequently be understood as the prevailing norms demand; finally, a love interest to whom Narcissus, in contrast to his treatment of the majority of his rejected lovers, decided to attach himself and actively pursue. Second, the subject needs to be addressed in a collective way in order (for us) to do justice to the subject’s different possibilities of becoming. Narcissus is not the exclusive effect of only one of the above modes of subjectivation. Rather, he is simultaneously the outcome of each one of those modes of subjectivation and all of them together. Narcissus is the son of Liriope and offspring of rape and a citizen of Thespies and a very handsome young man etc. Equally, Echo is a nymph and a friend of the other nymphs and someone who is solidary with her peers, and a stigmatized social outcast and pariah after Hera cursed her, etc. Third, the subject is collective since it is not only the result of the relation with its/the Other but also the result of the subject’s entire individual biography paired with the entire individual biography that the Other brings into the relation. Narcissus’s comportment toward Echo might have been different if Echo had not been traumatized by Hera’s curse and had not been withdrawn and cautious in her rapprochement with him, which made her attractive to Narcissus. Analogously, we do not know what drove Narcissus to be seen by Echo on this – only ex-post fatal – day in the forest. Perhaps he had been worried about the continuous efforts of his prospective lovers to “touch him”^[101] and sought some respite, or he could have followed just another social protocol like hunting.^[102]

Further, the continuous reconfigurations that the subject experiences through every encounter with Others and their tense and conflictual pasts render it impossible for the subject to remain or become integral, uniform, and congealed. The subject’s trajectory is not an optimization of its abilities, a teleological process toward the subject’s completion, or an expression of its capacities and qualities. Rather, the subject’s becoming is an erratic process shifting with every encounter, fluctuating, and oscillating between the possibilities that every encounter brings along with it and deviating from previously prescribed paths as soon as a new encounter emerges. The subject’s collectivizing and decentering relationalization forces the subject to be reconfigured, manifesting thereby the processual and dynamic character of its processual becoming.

Finally, the myth of Narcissus and Echo demonstrates the constitutive character of listening within the process of the subject’s becoming. In Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy differentiates between two forms of listening: the one, écouter, refers to the physical activity of perceiving sounds and organizing them into words. The other form, entendre, refers to the attention needed to be given to Others when hearing them speak. This second form of listening has a productive functionality and accounts for a process of subjectivity production that unravels within the space of resonance created by listening. As Nancy puts it:

When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same as and other than itself, one in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense. But the sound of sense is how it refers to itself or how it sends back to itself [s’envoie] or addresses itself, and thus how it makes sense.^[103]

Narcissus’s and Echo’s primary mode of interaction occurs through listening and not through visual contact. Listening is the vector of their communication. The various stages of their relationalization – from recognition, identification, attraction, and the creation of expectations and anticipations to disappointment, despair, isolation, and transformation – are sonically instead of visually mediated. To be sure, visuality becomes quintessential in Narcissus’s story arc, and it is the perfidies of visuality that bring about Narcissus’s demise. However, Narcissus’s and Echo’s relationalization with each other and the promises or potentialities for the respective development accompanying their relationalization are based on the resonance of their voices. As such, listening acquires spatial characteristics. It provides the space where voices resonate; where subjects can experience the liminality of the selves they purport to be, share, and communicate (partager).^[104] It is also a space that can lead to partition and dis/association. As Nancy writes:

To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a “self” can take place. To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other.^[105]

Ovid’s text is a marvelous mise en scène of these tropes and modalities of subjectivation. Of course, we will never know whether Echo’s and Narcissus’s drama was inevitable, just as we will never know whether they would have behaved differently toward each other if they had brought different past experiences into the encounter. At the same time, we will never really know the level of significance of their past experiences and the extent to which they really influenced the course of events. Finally, we will never know what would have happened if the people that played a role in the development of Narcissus’s and Echo’s story (Hera, Zeus, the rapist Cephissus, etc.) had chosen to act differently.

However, what we can attest is that the subject is the result of relationships among participants within a certain historical/biographical dynamic and – most importantly – that it is impossible to create a direct causal link to one past event or to one past relationship that is exclusively determinant of the subject’s structuration. This observation corresponds to a post-foundational understanding of the subject that is the contingent result of more than one mode of subjectivation.^[106] The fact that this Other also is the intersection of more than one mode of subjectivation discloses the relation as having never been simply intersubjective but always already hyper-dyadic, which is to say – once again – collective. The relational reading to which we have subjected Ovid’s text, namely, we have retold the events presented in the text from multiple perspectives and experimented with many possible outcomes, reveals the immanent constellational character of every relation. It is to Freud’s credit that he recognized in the tale of Narcissus and Echo something that was not only diagnostic but also palliative against both psychical and social pathologies. As he mentions in “On Narcissism,” if the ego is to develop “there must be something added – a new psychical action – in order to bring about narcissism.”^[107] It is just that this new psychical action does not originate in the subject but is implanted in it through the subject’s entering into a relationship with its/the Other. Paraphrasing Jean Laplanche, who paraphrased Freud,^[108] it would not be wrong to argue that the new Copernican revolution lies – as Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo demonstrate – in realizing that “where Id was, there shall be relation.”