Reading Kohut Through Husserl

“As primal ego, I constitute my horizon of transcendental others as cosubjects within the transcendental intersubjectivity which constitutes the world” [Husserl, 1970, p. 184].

Kohut's introduction of the empathic method has been both lauded and critiqued. At once recognized as a significant advance in psychoanalytic clinical technique, the empathic method has also come under fire for ultimately remaining within a one-person model of psychic functioning. In this article, I wish to reexamine Kohut's introduction of the method of empathy as vicarious introspection by taking up the seminal 1959 paper in which that term was introduced, and briefly augmenting that paper with some of Kohut's later writing on empathy. My purpose will not be to enter the ongoing debate as to whether empathy, itself, is curative or whether it reengages stalled developmental processes. I will instead concentrate on Kohut's initial presentation of empathy as a method of inquiry, in order to reassess whether claims that his was a one-person psychology hold true; and to better understand what it was that might have been meant by Kohut in his consideration of the objective and scientific use of empathy in the clinical situation. Empathy as an epistemological avenue leading to knowledge of the other, is what I wish to further investigate. Admittedly, I seek to create a retrospective reading of Kohut that may not follow his work chapter and verse, but may find in that work the seeds of what will later flower as postclassical relational theory.

It is clear that Kohut strongly advocated the employment of empathy as a facet of what he termed a scientific endeavor. As a mode of observation, Kohut (1959) did not neglect the fact that this “observational method defines the contents and the limits of the observed field” and later would more firmly locate the analyst within this field (Kohut, 1984, p. 465). Kohut (1979) claimed that it was through this empathic methodology that he was able to “p