PROLOGUE

Part I

There is a science fiction time-travel story that I read as a boy, long before I started noting down titles and authors for future citation. The main character is introduced to time travel and uses it extensively. When he attempts to return permanently to the time and place where he began, he is involuntarily swept back into the cosmic warp that has become his temporal passageway. There, his initial guide explains to him that time is like a bowl of spaghetti with its strands wrapped around each other. If you accomplish too many jumps between strands, you become part of the sauce.

Has Heinz Kohut become part of the sauce?

Outside the self psychological community, Heinz Kohut's name has not maintained a profile in the 1990s and 2000s. Yet some writers, pre-eminently Judith Teicholtz (2006), maintain that Kohut has been “quietly” integrated into mainstream practice, as well as having served a catalyst in the development of postmodern schools of psychoanalysis (p. 49).

Australians Donald Grant and Edwin Harari assert that not only the clinical practice of empathy, but theoretical constructs that add up to empathy, without naming it, predated Kohut's privileging it in a psychoanalytic psychology of the self. Freud (1921) encapsulated the concept, defining empathy as “the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life” (p. 110) but consigned this, his single reference to empathy, to a footnote. Grant and Harari trace empathy-by-another-name through the theory of the English School, relate the concept of empathy to the recent discovery of mirror neurons, and provide a clinical illustration of the way empathy enters clinical practice.

David Kitron, from Tel Aviv, provides narrative, clinical, and scriptural perspectives on the centrality of empathy to life. Kitron concentrates on the responsibility—analyst to patient, parent to child, and person to person—to respond with empathy. Kitron allows for the possibility tha