Introduction

Empathy, a single word embodying multiple ideas, has continuously been a controversial concept within psychoanalysis. A listening stance; a mode of observation; an intuitive, feeling resonance with another; a compassionate feeling for or response to another; a data-gathering tool; and, most recently, a physiological capacity located in our “mirror neurons”—each of these diverse descriptions has been understood as empathy. Is it a mode of observation intrinsic to psychoanalysis itself, regardless of theory, or is it a technique inextricably linked specifically with self psychology?

Empathy is a topic that has received rigorous scholarly scrutiny as thematic focus of entire conferences and as an organizing topic for volumes of books. A search of Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing shows 137 articles with “empathy” in the title, dating as far back as 1955, four years before Kohut (1959) wrote his seminal article on the role of empathy in psychoanalysis. A search of books published by The Analytic Press shows 64 books with “empathy” in the title. In this issue, empathy is again considered, but within a very specific context: the republication of Heinz Kohut's (1981) remarks delivered extemporaneously at the 1981 Annual Conference on the Psychology of the Self, four days prior to his death.

This issue republishes these remarks (Kohut, 1981), entitled “On Empathy,” to reflect on and to reconsider the role of empathy within psychoanalysis. How do we hear Kohut today with more than 28 years of clinical practice and theoretical development, which have been influenced by these words? With this republication and the three discussions that follow,

we affirm the tradition that Kohut (1979) himself demarcated: “Concepts and definitions,” he said, “are formulated under specific circumstances, and they serve specific—and differing—purposes at different moments in the unrolling course of our investigations.” Kohut (1979) emphasized that the concepts of psychoanalysis are not “stat