Toward a queered psychology of the self: Empathy and passibility from the margins to the center

ABSTRACT

Beginning with Kohut’s classic 1959 paper on the subject, empathy has been conceptualized as a process of finding something in one’s self (introspection) that has resonance with one’s experience of the other. This paper, inspired by advances in queer studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the Black American theater, identifies the limitations of this understanding. By putting Kohut’s ideas about empathy in dialogue with French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, Black American playwrights Jeremy O. Harris, Michael R. Jackson, and James Ijames, and the author’s own clinical experience, a queered empathy is theorized that relies less on self-reference and more on passibility. The theoretical and clinical implications of this shift are explored, and the possibilities for a queered Psychology of the Self that contain a heightened possibility for responsiveness to marginalized experience are suggested. The hope of this paper is that the reader, from a multidisciplinary perspective, will be inspired to imagine a psychoanalysis and Self Psychology for all that has the potential to flourish for generations to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• Kohut
• LGBT
• passibility
• queer
• Self-Psychology

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Willa France for her thoughtfulness and attention to the ideas in this article, and for her support more broadly for the intentions behind this project. Karen Weiser and Mike Strupp-Levitsky provided invaluable feedback on various drafts of the essay. My father, Peter Guzzardi, spent countless hours helping me clarify the ideas and the writing here; I am eternally grateful. And special thanks to Avgi Saketopoulou for the rigor, the inspiration, and the relentlessness.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ The question of who is the “real” Jim versus a performance for the sake of the slave play exercise is one of the gentle ambiguities that motorizes the potency of this final act, appropriately entitled “Exorcism.” For a much more robust discussion of this portion of the play, see Saketopoulou (2023), pp. 128–130.

² This is in no way to denigrate the seminal contribution to contemporary thinking made by Judith Butler (1990) work on this topic, where she outlined with rigor and sophistication her argument that gender is to a great extent about the way one works with and within pre-established scripts—hence “performance.” It is, however, to take serious issue with the not only sloppy but also dangerous appropriation of this idea, exemplified by the unconscionable 2021 piece by David Schwartz in the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy wherein he, as others have, bastardizes Butler’s notion to suggest that because gender is “performance” it is somehow fake or insignificant or fleeting—which he then uses to support his argument against providing medical intervention to trans youth.

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Notes on contributors

Sam Guzzardi

Sam Guzzardi is a member and graduate of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (IPSS) in New York and is a faculty member there and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. His 2022 publication in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association “The Only Fag Around: Twinship in Gay Childhood” was the winner of the Ralph E Roughton Paper Award for making “an original and outstanding contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding and/or treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans*, or gender-variant people.” His work has also been published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues.