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Staemmler's new book on empathy, Empathy in Psychotherapy: How Therapists and Clients Understand Each Other (2011), is a tour de force. Rarely have I read a book—surely not in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy—so scholarly and so accessible, so theoretically challenging and so humanistically rich. Having placed empathy at the center of his study, Staemmler first produces a devastating critique of the intellectual, cultural, and therapeutic ideas that have corrupted our understanding of empathy. These include one-sidedness (we might say a “one-person psychology”), disembodiment, and individualism. In the traditional view of empathy, we attempt to enter the mind of the other and thus gain access
to the other's experience. Such empathy can be hot or cold, used for good or evil, as Heinz Kohut (1977) also reminded us. Trapped in the old philosophical “problem” of mind and body, it loses the embodied holism into which we are born and within which we attempt to work out our lives with each other.
Staemmler engages these problems seriously and challenges us to rethink our “Western common sense,” especially when it interferes with humanistic clinical work. His access to the philosophical literature makes his project especially rich for me. Edith Stein (1917/1964), for example, whose work on empathy when she was Husserl's assistant brought it into the foreground of phenomenology, could only see it from one side. Staemmler uses her work to show what we now need to understand if we are to understand empathy as a fully mutual or intersubjective phenomenon. He also quotes Hans-Georg Gadamer to challenge the traditional idea of empathy:
For what do we mean by “transposing ourselves”? Certainly not just disregarding ourselves. This is necessary, of course, insofar as we must imagine the other situation. But into this other situation we must bring, precisely, ourselves. Only t