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The attunement or empathy of psychotherapists with their patients in enabling them to become more fully conscious of what is going on in and around them (rather than suffer the ills of unconsciousness) is often equated with femininity. Specifically it is equated with women's empathy in looking after and mothering others. But what is empathy? These books, by and about women, provide two rather different answers, as I will seek to illustrate and explain. Gail Hornstein's very readable biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann highlights the immediate, other-directed empathy or intuition of another's feelings from their facial and other bodily expressions. Julia Kristeva's much less easily readable account of Klein's work highlights the self-generated empathy involved in projecting or imagining oneself, as it were, into the shoes of another.
I will begin with Hornstein's book To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Hornstein is a women's studies psychologist. She situates empathy as intuition in the context of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's achievement in helping pioneer the psychoanalytically-based therapeutic community treatment of schizophrenics in Germany and America. In recounting her life, Hornstein makes much of the teaching of the Jewish religion in which Frieda was brought up regarding putting others first so as to redeem and enable their spirit to flourish. To this Hornstein adds other details of Frieda's early life. She recounts her birth in Karlsruhe on 23 October 1889, followed by the birth of two younger sisters, Grete and Anna. She also recounts examples of Frieda's very early intuition of the feelings of others in her immediate childhood home, and later of psychiatric patients from her first days in medical school, which she began in 1908. Hornstein also recounts Frieda's work as foster-mother to the child of one of her friends, and her self-sacrificing feeling for others in treating non-paying as well as fee-paying patients