The Centrality of Empathy in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article presents a condensed appraisal of Kohut's groundbreaking conception of the method and the boundaries of psychoanalysis, republished here with permission. Kohut reinstated Freud's original claim that empathy was the only way to enter the inner world of another and he extended and redefined its functions. Empathy not only permits a prolonged, sustained entry into the inner world of the patient, it also designates the boundaries of psychoanalysis as a pure psychology—in the sense that only what is accessible via empathy is psychoanalysis. A description of empathy and its functions are then presented in a more detailed fashion, and include a highly abbreviated clinical example. In this example, a prolonged theory-driven analysis ultimately gave way to a search for the patient's subjective experience and its understanding, leading to a therapeutically more effective analytic approach.

Notes

The first part of this article [Introductory Remarks] reprints my earlier introduction (with some changes and insertions), originally invited by Dr. Glen Gabbard, entitled “The Significance of Heinz Kohut's “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis: An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observations and Theory”—chosen by the Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, vol. 4, no. 2, as a “classic paper.” It is reprinted here with permission from the Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research (Copyright, 1995). American Psychiatric Association. Kohut (1959), Schafer (1959), and Greenson (1960), at about the same time, reemphasized, from different perspectives, the significance of empathy in psychoanalysis.

Paul H. Ornstein, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry [Emeritus], Professor of Psychoanalysis [Emeritus], Cincinnati; Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard University.

¹My relentless search for copies of his three formal discussants and for a possible summary of Alexander's off-the-cuff remarks remained fruitless. I obtained a copy of McLean's discussion, which was found among her papers after her death. Her discussion attests to the fact that she praised Kohut's contributions without reservations, but did not grasp its essential claims either. Kohut himself had no copies of these discussions among his papers.

² Kohut's (1968) unpublished response to Brenner has since been included in Volume 3 of The Search for the Self (Ornstein, 1990).

³For more extensive comments, see Kohut (1981) and Ornstein and Ornstein (1994).

⁴The indented text was inserted in the previously published narrative.

⁵Five published books of collected papers, prior to the 20 annual Progress in Self Psychology volumes, now a quarterly International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology in its fifth year of publication, attest to this steady expansion.

⁶A designation introduced by Ferro (2002): The “intent [of these interpretations] is to make the assumed unconscious phantasy conscious” (p. 310, italics added). This is where the cat is buried! The paper presents a number of additional samples of these decoding interpretations, which reveal the reasons for the unhelpful analytic atmosphere and the so-called standard [?] interpretations some theories promulgate.

⁷To avoid interrupting the flow of this narrative, I add here what I stated in my original discussion regarding the analyst's subjectivity.