Empathy in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

The great ethologist Konrad Lorenz (1987) mourned the imminent destruction of the environment and perhaps the extinction of the human species. He bemoaned the decline of all the attributes that uniquely constitute humanity. He complained about our reckless pursuit of power and our neurotic and insatiable greed as manifest in the development of our technocratic systems and today's rampant global capitalism. More generally, Kohut (1978) depicted the tragedy of humans suffocating in an increasingly inhuman environment that humans themselves continue to create. Sartre maintained it is need and scarcity that force our inhumanity to each other. He defined the practico-inert as the material environment and everything else producing our finitude, including our human bureaucratic structures and social arrangements. There is a constant tension between the human as a product of his or her contemporary means of production, and the sociocultural superstructures built on the prevailing economic base. The practico-inert works perpetually against the human, who is essentially an historical agent trying to actualize his or her basic project.

Academic philosophy has been of little help on these problems. Jacoby (1987) pointed out that the last generation of intellectuals wrote for the educated reader, but these have been replaced now by the high-tech intellectual in academia, who writes in a jargon barely intelligible even to his or her colleagues. The nonacademic or “public” intellectual who is widely read and politically concerned has become an endangered species. Similarly, scientific positivism as the prevailing materialistic intellectual philosophy conceals a commitment to technology behind a facade of value-freedom, and it cannot justify itself.

Kohut (1978, p. 345) asked rhetorically some questions reminiscent of Nietzsche: Is the present world not different than the 19th century? Does it demand new values, new yardsticks, and new viewpoints by which to evaluate, measure, and u