Empathy on a continuum – Response to Amanda Kottler

ABSTRACT

This article is a response to Amanda Kottler’s discussion of my paper “Empathy on a Continuum.” I define my favored version of psychoanalysis as an experience about experience, in which the situations in the patient’s lifeworld are as important as the here-and-now situation between them in the telling. This version requires that the analyst engage the two forms of empathy described in my main article. But it also requires that analyst and patient meet each other in a virtual space of imaginative storying. I go on to to propose that this imaginative, experience-oriented psychoanalysis offers a more intuitive way to interact with patients around racial and cultural differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• self psychology
• imagination
• culture
• Fanon
• race
• narrative
• experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Goldin

Daniel Goldin serves as editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is a training and supervising analyst on the faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and has written numerous articles for Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalysis: Self and context and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. His book Storying in Psychoanalysis and in the Everyday World will be published by Routledge this year. He and Daniel Posner create and host the popular podcast “The Conversation,” which confront important issues of the day in a psychoanalytic vein.