This article presents a condensed appraisal of Kohut's groundbreaking conception of the method and the boundaries of psychoanalysis, republished here with permission. Kohut reinstated Freud's original claim that empathy was the only way to enter the inner world of another and he extended and redefined its functions. Empathy not only permits a prolonged, sustained entry into the inner world of the patient, it also designates the boundaries of psychoanalysis as a pure psychology—in the sense that only what is accessible via empathy is psychoanalysis. A description of empathy and its functions are then presented in a more detailed fashion, and include a highly abbreviated clinical example. In this example, a prolonged theory-driven analysis ultimately gave way to a search for the patient's subjective experience and its understanding, leading to a therapeutically more effective analytic approach.