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Psychoanalysis has been almost without contact with philosophy. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer anticipated some of Freud's discoveries—though in a more unsystematic way—as in Nietzsche's deduction that the conscience develops out of aggression (Genealogy of Morals). The first to appreciate psychoanalysis was Max Scheler, the outstanding representative of phenomenology. Ekman tries to show parallelisms between phenomenological and psychoanalytical thinking by means of the phenomenon of sympathy. Scheler assumes two forms, true sympathy and the transmission of feelings (Gefühlsansteckung). In contradiction to Freud, he denies the effect of an identification process as essential for true sympathy, while he postulates identification in the case of Scheinmitleid. Here we have to deal with a condition for which Pascal said 'vivre d'une vie imaginaire dans la pensée d'autrui'. Jekels in his paper, Zur Psychologie des Mitleids (Imago, XVI, 1930), refers to Freud's remark that 'sympathy is borne out of identification with the suffering person; it is a reaction-formation to one's own sadism but not a transformation to the opposite reaction'. Jekels states that there are two forms of identification: an introjecting, narcissistic one, and an identification whereby the object remains intact. In his first assumption Jekels comes very close to Scheler's conception of the rôle of identification in the process of sympathy and we owe thanks to Jekels for the first investigation of the metapsychological occurrences in true sympathy. Neither he himself nor other analysts drew the full consequences of his findings, even though some investigators dealt with the same problem (Fenichel, Sterba). True sympathy belongs mainly, if not exclusively, to the genital level. Scheler expresses it by saying that 'sympathy parallels the quality and intensity of love'. Scheler's precise formulations drew our attention to the important fact that the more sympathy