Endoself

An endoself takes energy from others because they cannot or will not obtain it any other way. Secondary anima is what is available through sublation and violation rather than through connection, so the definition describes a supply problem before it describes a character. The mechanism is a blockage. An endoself has blocked or inhibited euphoric conduits and cannot access primary euphoria, which leaves only the routes that require somebody else to lose. This is why Marsh keeps the term apart from the endo-ideal, which is a position rather than a condition. An endo-ideal has inhibition of empathic conduits, an endoself has inhibition of primary anima conduits, and the two failures produce different behaviour. An endo-ideal may have perfectly working euphoric conduits and an endoself may have perfectly functioning empathy, which is how someone can understand another person precisely and exploit them anyway. Two qualifications matter and are easy to lose. Nobody is purely an endoself or an exoself, since either extreme would end life, so the words name a tendency rather than a category. And the tendency is not permanent or unchangeable, being a response to environment rather than a fixed trait. The endo-ideal position is nonetheless extremely attractive to an endoself, and the combination is particularly lethal, since the position supplies both a supply of anima and a group that will find reasons for whatever is done with it.

The nearest clinical territory is the cluster around psychopathy and narcissism, measured by instruments such as Hare's checklist and framed as a stable personality disorder with a substantial heritable component. Erich Fromm's necrophilous character and the authoritarian personality research reach for something similar in a social register. Marsh's term differs on two axes the clinical literature treats as settled. Hers is a state rather than a trait, responsive to environment and reversible, and her diagnostic criterion is where a person's energy comes from rather than what they lack in feeling. That produces the finding that an endoself may have perfectly functioning empathy, which most clinical accounts of the same behaviour would not predict.