You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Among the terms Kohut introduced into psychoanalytic discourse, empathy has been the most fiercely debated. Kohut (1959) proposed that empathy, in tandem with introspection, is the means of data gathering unique to psychoanalysis and thereby defines its subject matter. He never wavered in his definition of empathy as an observational tool. By contrast, he was initially ambivalent with regard to the function of empathy in facilitating the therapeutic process, and he found himself returning to the topic again and again, the last time in his valedictory address to the Self Psychology Conference in 1981.
However, it was not the tacitly acknowledged role of empathy in permitting the emergence of crucial archaic transferences that proved problematic; rather, it was the patient's pleasurable experience of empathy. In The Analysis of the Self the analyst is said to gather data empathically, but Kohut (1971) warns that this function is not to be confused with the gratification of a childhood wish, that it is, at best, only “a reluctant compliance with a childhood wish” p. 291; Not the presence of empathy but, rather, its absence was deemed essential to the formation of structure. Transmuting internalization, defined as the acquisition of the functions of the selfobject in small increments, which occurs when empathic failure of the selfobject in small increments, which occurs when empathic failure of the selfobject is within tolerable limits, is thus akin to the process of mourning and necessarily entails an experience of loss or frustration.
As Kohut's thinking evolved and he disengaged himself from certain aspects of classical theory, empathy assumed the dimensions of a central pillar of psychoanalysis as a meliorative procedure. Nonetheless, cure