Empathy

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EMPATHY

Empathy is the capacity for concrete representation of another person's mental state, including the accompanying emotions. The English term is a translation of the German word Einfühlung, coined in 1873 by the German philosopher Robert Vischer. Vischer used it to refer to a modality of aesthetic sensibility. In contrast to the theory that categorized objective qualities inherent in the object as beautiful, Vischer described the subjective nature of an experience where beauty resulted from the projection of human sensibilities onto natural objects. Theodor Lipps (1851-1914), a philosopher who taught in Munich, gave empathy a broader, psychological range, attributing to this form of intuition access to knowledge of another's subjectivity. It is in this sense, and most likely from reading Lipps, that Sigmund Freud used the term, which was still uncommon at the time.

Freud used the term in a number of his essays. He used it for the first time in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) in relation to the economic explanation of the pleasure associated with humor. He returned to it several times to refer to a form of intuitive understanding of others essential to psychoanalytic communication. For Freud, however, the term had no specific psychoanalytic meaning but rather a general psychological meaning, moreover, one that was still poorly understood. This is likely one reason that James Strachey did not feel the need to propose a single English translation; the other reason being that the term empathy, which had already been proposed in 1909 by the psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener and taken up by Ernest Jones, did not generate much enthusiasm from Strachey. In France the term emphatie come back into use following the publication of the translation of Freud's works under the direction of Jean Laplanche. This resulted in the misunderstanding of a precise concept for Freud, in particular, in his correspondence with Sándor Ferenczi.

The concept did not become important until 1960, when Ralph Greenson studied it, no doubt influenced by the interest in countertransference that occurred after the work of Heinrich Racker and Paula Heimann. Since then a number of studies have emphasized the importance of the concept for communication during analysis. There have been some reservations arising from what was felt to be the somewhat obscure and slightly irrational nature of the phenomenon. Other authors (Buie, 1981; Widlöcher, 1993) have tried to specify the psychological mechanisms operating in this complex form of intuitive understanding, specifically emphasizing the role of identification and inference. From the metapsychological perspective, the debate continues between those who assign empathy a decisive role in the discovery of the unconscious and the therapeutic activity of the psychoanalyst (Heinz Kohut) and those who deny that empathy can play a role in identifying the unconscious.

Daniel WidlÖcher

See also: Counter-identification; Counter-transference; Elasticity; Greenson, Ralph; Identification; Kohut, Heinz; Lebovici, Serge Sindel Charles; Projective identification; Self, the.

Bibliography

Buie, Dan H. (1981). Empathy: Its nature and limitation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 29, 281-307.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE, 8: 1-236.

Greenson, Ralph R. (1960). Empathy and its vicissitudes. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 41, 418-424.

Widlöcher, Daniel. (1993). L'analyse cognitive du silence en psychanalyse: Quand les mots viennentà manquer. Revue internationale de psychopathologie, 12, 509-528.