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WITH MANY PATIENTS THE CLINICIAN is continually impressed by the tenacity of their attachment to blatantly abusive and malevolent parents. As we inquire into this puzzling contradiction, we begin to uncover a secret wish, a blind faith, that the parent is redeemable, changeable, and "potentially an ideal" parent. Even among our less disturbed patients, with whom the parents were not necessarily malevolent or abusive, one of the most unfathomable and distressful experiences is the patient's struggle to accept and emotionally comprehend that his parents have been chronically oblivious, inattentive, "out of touch, " with his developmental needs. These parents may be best described as narcissistic or unempathic.
Although the term empathy is universally accepted and broadly applied in psychoanalytic literature, I use it with some trepidation for it includes a wide range of subjective experiences (Moses, 1988). I agree with Levy (1985) who argues that we cannot simply equate empathy with parental adaptiveness to the child's needs and warns that we cannot dismiss "… any parental behavior which is not what the child needs as unempathic …" (p. 368). The terminology of Stern (1985) is preferred as he more specifically limits