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We are pleased to offer commentary on the scholarly and ambitious contribution of Douglas Watt to the neuroscience of empathy. In the brief space allotted, we will be selective in approaching the task, first addressing what we see as some of the central arguments of the paper and then turning to clinical psychoanalysis in an effort to encourage the kind of interdisciplinary dialogue for which this journal is designed. Implicit in this approach is the view that psychoanalytic perspectives on empathy are relevant to any comprehensive neuroscience of this complex phenomenon.
We shall critique Watt's perspectives on the use of animal data for a model of human neurophysiological and psychological functioning, the idea of contagion and its subcortical roots as “paradigmatic” for empathy, and the notion of gated resonance induction. Watt's conception of empathy will then be contrasted with a view that emphasizes the importance of mirror neuron systems and embodied simulation. We then turn to data from the psychoanalytic literature before suggesting a tentative, albeit partial, synthesis of the current neu-roscientific data in light of empirical psychoanalytic evidence. This synthesis acknowledges the omnipresent role of contagion while placing greater emphasis on the concepts of simulation, embodiment, and action as expressed through the closely related phenomena of enactment and transference/countertransference in the clinical situation.
Watt defines empathy as a “virtual synonym” of compassion, making suffering and its relief central features of his definition. We see this preference as motivated, in part, by an adoption of the “heuristic value to first developing an animal model … and then testing this against the more complex process in humans.” The “simple animal paradigm” used as an initial “template for the study of empathy in humans” is the response of maternal mammals to separation-distress signals. In other words, the focus on sufferin