Reflection

Reflection is the process and reflector is the role it produces. The mechanical claim is precise: all of a person's empathic conduits are directed to a single external endo-ideal, so their capacity for shared understanding runs in one direction only. Enforcement follows from that rather than from obedience, since a person whose only channel of understanding points at one figure will read every situation from that figure's position. The reciprocal claim is the one that matters most in the framework. The endo-ideal does not exist without reflection, and yet nobody else exists without the endo-ideal, so the centre is created by the people pointing at it. A good reflector reflects all good onto their endo-ideal and in doing so creates them, and a reflector has the power and the responsibility to assign all virtue to the endo-ideal while the endo-ideal has the duty to accept it. Marsh's examples show the reciprocity working in both directions. Fans claim to have created celebrities with their support, and politicians are reminded that they are allowed to work by voters, both of which are accurate descriptions of the relation and neither of which prevents the figure from holding power. The gendered version she describes is the extreme case, where a woman's infallible purity could make a man better but depended on her being entirely empty of her own will or desires, existing solely as the image of virtue. A perfect saviour is a woman with no will, reflecting not what is but what ought to be.

Cooley's looking-glass self describes identity formed through others' perceptions, and Freud's group psychology has members substituting a leader for their own ego ideal, which is close to the mechanism Marsh describes. Weber's charismatic authority makes the leader's legitimacy dependent on recognition. Parasocial relationship research studies one-directional attachment to public figures. What Marsh adds is the conduit claim, since specifying that empathic capacity itself is redirected rather than merely attention or admiration accounts for why a reflector cannot assess the figure independently, which the recognition-based accounts describe without explaining.