The Limits of Empathy

Moliere's physician, asked why opium caused sleep, answered that it was because opium contains "a dormitive principle." Naming, crucial for learning, at times becomes a place where the mind itself begins to doze. In the history of psychoanalysis, we have seen names that started as valuable contributions too often used to close off questioning. Defenses, resistance, projective identification, holding, and containing—each of these enriching concepts has been degraded by some into a shibboleth of parochial allegiance. Caution is needed when we are tempted to expand our concepts because, in the face of unending uncertainty, we are all vulnerable to compromising discipline in our longing for final answers.

Empathy, too, is a valuable concept that at times has been stretched beyond its natural shape to serve as a universal explanation. Let us first consider some misapplications of the concept and then, returning to empathy proper, begin to place the concept in the context of new developments in analytic thinking.

Misapplications of Empathy

First, misapplications, those distortions that dilute the validity of the basic idea of empathy. Too often we debate by misrepresenting opposing views, creating straw men easy to tear down. My attention to misuses of the concept of empathy is meant to clear away misrepresentations, to protect—not undermine—what is truly valid in the concept.

The word "empathy" was imported from aesthetics, where it is used to describe a means of perception. That question of how one perceives was of concern to analysts very early on. Freud and Deutsch had been keenly attuned to unconscious communication; Fliess and Gitelson spoke of trial identification; and Racker provided a major advance by examining the process closely. It was, of course, Kohut's 1959 paper that brought the word empathy to its analytic prominence. Previously, however, as empathy had named the way a person grasped the feelings carried by a work of art, so it had been used to identify a way an analyst grasps the feelings in the patient.

The Encarta on-line dictionary recognizes both that empathy is a form of perception and that it is vulnerable to distortions introduced by imagination. After defining empathy as "the ability to identify with and understand another person's feelings," the dictionary speaks of the origin of the word in aesthetics, "the attribution of feelings to an object, the transfer of your own feelings to an object such as a painting." Empathy inexorably carries "attribution," distortions induced by the mind of the empathic person. No one can ever purely know what another experiences.

The first misuse of empathy was to elevate it from being simply one of many roads contributing to understanding to being the Royal Road, one substantially freed from the need to correct for the observer's attributing bias. Understanding another demands relentless self-analysis if one's empathizing imagination is to approach valid perception.

Kohut (1959) recognized this, having initially included personal introspection, self-analysis, when speaking of vicarious introspection. Yet, in practice, often that self-analytic discipline has been obscured as a tidal wave of enthusiasm for empathy swept over our field.

Empathy soon ballooned from being a form of perception into an explanation for all seasons. It has been seen lying at the heart of growth and development; its lack has been posited as the centerpiece of pathogenesis; and it has been put forward as the essence of what is mutative in the analytic process.

No longer limited to perception, empathy was assimilated into the greater territory of the empathic response, with reaction now added to perception. Indeed, in clumsy hands that stance was further degraded into a posture of all-accepting sweetness. This misuse of empathy sidesteps the observer's need for the uncomfortable work of self-analysis. One paradoxical result is an undermining of the patient's separateness and uniqueness. By soldering response to perception, the analyst acts as if the patient were already understood rather than being ultimately, and only partially, understandable. Sympathy replaces true empathy.

One person never truly knows what the other feels. Yes, we all want to know that another person "gets it," but genuinely "getting it...