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Having sat through a woefully unsatisfactory film documentary on “Empathy” (that was the title) and waded through a learned treatise on empathy in animals that declared that empathy was a phylogenetically continuous phenomenon1 (whatever that may mean), I approached the book titled Psychoanalytic Empathy with a bit of dyspepsia. However, like the ad for Alka-Seltzer used to say, I received instant relief. This brief treatise is a delight. Bolognini manages to make it clear that empathy for psychoanalysts demands a clarity and complexity that is too easily lost by the twin sirens of popularity and biology. In doing so, he presents both a clear definition and a host of clinical examples that capture the sense of empathy, one that seems very peculiar and even restricted to psychoanalytic work.
First, the definition:
Empathy is a condition of conscious and preconscious contact characterized by separateness, complexity, and a linked structure, a wide perceptual spectrum including every color in the emotional palette, from the lightest to the darkest; above all, it constitutes a progressive, shared, and deep contact with the complementarity of the object, with the other's defensive ego and split-off parts, no less than the other's ego-syntonic subjectivity. [p. 141]