An Academic Exchange on Empathy

In creating his new scientific psychology, Freud often used the vocabulary of the vernacular German of his time. In doing so, he forever changed the meaning of many common words, such as Verneinung (negation), setting in motion a process of conceptual change as subsequent psychoanalytic writers continue to use his terms in new contexts. As changes accrue, periodic review of a specific concept can provide us an overview of its history of usage and can highlight crucial distinctions. In addition, we may be moved to reexamine key concepts by the emergence of new knowledge from neighboring disciplines and to reevaluate the relevance of such knowledge to our clinical and theoretical concerns.

The topic of this academic exchange—Einfühlung (empathy)—is a term that over the course of Freud's work—and especially after Freud through the writings of Heinz Kohut (1959)—has evolved from its everyday use to become a psychoanalytic concept of increasing importance. The two psychoanalytic papers that form the core of this section demonstrate that empathy has emerged as a key concept for our field, worthy of critical examination. Anna Aragno argues for differentiating analytic empathic listening from the ordinary quotidian variety; the latter is the hallmark of all our intersubjective experiences, whose sources she locates in the earliest caretaker-child exchanges. For their part, Siegfried Zepf and Sebastian Hartmann argue for distinctions within the day-to-day working world of analytic practice; specifically, they explore the relation of empathy to analysts' countertransference reactions to their patientsanalysts' transferences.

Although the goal of both papers is a better understanding of empathy in its specifically psychoanalytic sense, the authors cite research findings from other fields. They thus acknowledge the broader scope of the concept of empathy as it has been addressed both by the neurosciences following the discovery of the mirror neuron system and by infant-caretaker