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Empathy is a process oscillating between feeling as the object feels and recapturing the standpoint of one's own ego as observer and judge. Empathy with the infant and the child in the latency period
calls for a capacity to regress with the child's ego to manifestations of the primary process or the first stages of sublimation. It is a process which is independent of intellectual understanding and of liking or not liking. It has the capacity to pass through the object's defences to the real state of emotional affairs. It is to be distinguished, however, from various forms of regressive interplay with children originating in a narcissistic disturbance in the adult. Examples from the author's work with parents and teachers illustrate the confusion to which some pseudo- or partial-empathy subjects children when it is used for adult instinct-gratification or as a defence against adult anxieties, immediate or archaic. Equally the child's proclivity for living partly in the primary process may be felt as a threat to the mature psychic acquisitions of some adults. The adult's ability to feel with the child corresponds to the degree to which he has assimilated and been reconciled with his own childhood experiences and his own relation with his parents.