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WHAT IS THE FUNCTIONAL SIGNIFICANCE of empathy in psychoanalysis? One of the more appealing statements on the subject was published by Ella Freeman Sharpe (1930):
The first task is to get the patient to tell us and to tell us more and more. In this telling we must "go" with the patient. Empathy is the important thing. He will not go with us unless we go with him. We can see what he cannot, but we cannot make him see what we see unless we see first with him (pp. 32–33).
Thus, empathy was to establish an emotional link with the patient, so as to facilitate open communication on the way to achieving insight.
The title of my presentation is taken from a felicitous paper by Ferenczi (1928), cited appreciatively by Ernst Kris (1951). The significant passage reads:
One might say that (the analyst's) mind swings continuously between empathy, self-observation, and making judgments. The latter emerge spontaneously from time to time as mental signals, which at first, of course, have to be assessed only as such; only after the accumulation of further evidence is one entitled to make an interpretation.