Refraction

Refraction goes further than reflection and the difference is what gets redirected. In reflection the empathic conduits are all directed at an external endo-ideal. In refraction the core self is redirected, and all autonomy and will are given up to the occupying figure, so there is no remainder from which the person could assess anything. Marsh describes the clinical appearance directly. The individual feels numb to their own emotions and experiences emotions on behalf of their endo-ideal very vividly, empathizing far more strongly or even exclusively with an external self than with themselves. That is what she means by extreme dissociation resulting from refraction, since the separation is between a person and their own core rather than between a person and their circumstances. The behavioural signature is disproportion. Somebody whose strong reaction is to a slight against a company their spouse works for or a university their daughter attends has a refracted endo-ideal and is defending it, and a reflector can be perfectly accepting of insults to themselves while intolerant of insults to their endo-ideal. Refraction is that pattern completed. The consequences of the figure's loss are correspondingly severe, since people with a refracted core may live greatly restricted lives or not at all on the death of their endo-ideal, and Marsh points to the three year mourning period for parents in Confucian filiality and to traditions of suicide on the death of a husband.

Clinical psychology covers this territory through depersonalization, identity disturbance and the dissociative disorders, and the literature on coercive control and on high demand groups documents the collapse of independent judgement under sustained pressure. Codependency, though a contested concept, names an adjacent pattern in relationships. Freud's identification with the aggressor and Anna Freud's elaboration of it describe a related mechanism. Marsh's contribution is the two-stage account, since separating reflection from refraction distinguishes a role a person occupies from a redirection they have undergone, and predicts different outcomes when the external figure is lost.