Response to Gallese

We are grateful for the opportunity to provide a short reply to Vittorio Gallese's comments on our paper “Empathy and Countertransference.” We have limited our response to five main points.

First, we do not object to a “broad” usage of the notion of empathy. Yet, like any science, psychoanalysis uses terms from ordinary language and specifies their meanings. It is the specific meaning of empathy in the language of psychoanalysis that we focus on in our paper.

Second, we do not in fact reduce empathy to the “psychology of emotions.” Gallese overlooks the fact that in reference to empathy we understand emotions as a means of gaining insight into the patient's psychic contents, which are meaningful in the sense that they relate to the patient's emotions.

Third, we reject the idea that there is a genetically prewired relationship between a specific facial expression and a specific affect. We also do not agree that mimetic display alone can afford any information about the mental contents that may possibly be reflected in that display; while Gallese maintains that there is such an invariant inter-individual relation between specific affects and specific facial displays and that the facial display alone suffices to inform one about a specific affect of the observed individual.

Fourth, we do not dispute the findings of infant research (as Gallese asserts); we simply deny the relevance of these findings as applied to psychoanalysis. As knowledge is always method-specific, and as the psychoanalytic method, with its tie to language (see, e.g., Freud 1916-1917, p. 17; see also Leavy 1973; Michels 1983), differs qualitatively from that of infant observation, the findings of infant research cannot be read directly in psychoanalytic contexts. Asserting the clinical usefulness of this research would require one of two maneuvers: either it must be confirmed that psychoanalytic theory licenses behavioral observation as a method that meets its objectives, or, failing that, the methods by