How the Empathic Process Heals: A Microprocess Perspective

Kohut struggled tenaciously for many years with his ambivalent attitude toward empathy's potentially curative effect. In his final lecture, Kohut clarified his belief that “empathy per se is a therapeutic action in the broadest sense…” His premature death, however, prevented him from formulating the specific and myriad ways that empathy contributes to the healing process. Contemporary self psychologists continue to debate whether and how empathy may contribute to the healing process, but these discussions tend to be more theoretical than clinical. Rarely discussed or articulated are the experience-near clinical questions of how the therapist or analyst actually enters another's subjective world, how he allows the patient into his own world, and how empathy impacts intersubjective healing processes in any given therapeutic session. This article delineates, from a microprocess perspective, how empathy contributes to healing. I attempt to formulate an intersubjective definition of empathy as a mutual analytic process, describe empathy's general contribution to psychic healing, present a verbatim analytic hour in which I endeavor to remain embedded in an empathic process, and then, through a progressive discussion of that hour, enumerate more specifically how empathy benefits the healing process.