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The note that I believe to be key to the spirit of the topic of this publication is: We may be on our way to fulfilling the goal Freud (1895) set in his aborted project for a scientific psychology. A hundred years ago, Freud wanted psychology to become scientific. Now we recognize that unless any science is psychologically informed, the reflective awareness necessary to recognize the influence of the observer will be lacking. How can we, pre-21st century psychoanalysts, become psychologic? That is where empathy and intuition must come into focus.
This essay deals with three major themes: (1) the empathic mode of perception (Lichtenberg, 1981), (2) the developmental hypothesis of five motivational systems (Lichtenberg, 1989), and (3) the clinical yield (Lichtenberg et al., 1992). Rather than talk about the interdisciplinary quest as a broad generative orientation, I shall take the liberty of presenting my own use of interdisciplinary resources as an exemplar. I begin with “The Empathic Mode of Perception,” written in 1980, 30 years after my becoming a physician, 25 years after becoming a psychiatrist, and 20 years after becoming a graduate psychoanalyst. I hold that the approach taken in that paper, and that of Evelyn Schwaber in the same year, and Anna and Paul Ornstein in 1985, provide the essential basis for my present approach to psychoanalysis.
The empathic mode of perception in psychoanalysis is a means employed by analysts to gain information in which they orient their listening stance to be from within the perspective, the state of mind, of the analysand. Listening from within the analysands' perspective means perceiving and conceptualizing the whole context of how analysands sense themselves, how they sense others, how they sense the source of their affective cognitive state and what they feel is the range of their active and passive potential