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The 17th International Neuropsychoanalysis Congress took place in Chicago at Venue SIX10 of the Spertus Institute from 7–9 July 2016, and was followed by a Sunday post-congress discussion on 10 July. We had attendees from all over the world, including Japan, the United States, Panama, Peru, Finland, South Africa, Germany, Austria, Puerto Rico, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Canada, Singapore, Egypt, Australia, the Russian Federation and Mexico.
The Congress was preceded by the traditional Educational Day which included three presentations. The first was a presentation entitled Empathy and the prosocial brain: Integrating cognitive and affective perspectives in human and animal models of empathy, given by Douglas Watt, who reviewed the controversies around differentiating concepts such as sympathy, compassion and empathy. Watt explained that the first two terms sometimes are thought to refer to the process of “feeling for” someone, implicating an affective concern, while empathy is sometimes defined as “feeling with” someone, experiencing an affective resonance with another one's affect. However, he cautioned those who might make a hard principled distinction between “feeling with” versus “feeling for” in terms of whether these distinctions truly reference meaningful and natural kinds in the real world, or simply reflect semantic hairsplitting. Additionally, he argued that opening one's self to another's affect (“feeling with”) may be virtually impossible in the context of any real lack of affective concern about the other's suffering (“feeling for”) – further challenging any hard distinction between compassion or sympathy, and empathy.
Contagion is another term frequently confused in the literature, sometimes almost pejoratively defined by some authors as experiencing the feelings of others without knowing the source of them; Watt offered the alternative notion that contagion may be better