Experience does teach us … that many of those who choose a career in which the empathic preoccupation with others forms the center of the professional activity are persons who have suffered traumas (of tolerable proportions) in early phases of empathy development and who have secondarily responded to the apprehensiveness concerning the danger of retraumatization with two complementary reactions: (a) they developed a hypersensitivity of the perceptive surfaces; and (b) they responded to the need to master the threatening influx of stimuli with an unusual growth of secondary processes aimed at understanding the psychological data and bringing order to the psychological material (Kohut, 1971, pp. 279-280).