The Psychogenesis of Empathy

It seems to be important for personality theory and for ethics to recognise the central role of what Freud developed as a technique but which, he modestly admits, is a universal human experience. “In every analytic treatment there arises without the physician's agency, an intense emotional relationship between the patient and the analyst which is not to be accounted for by the actual situation… this transference soon replaces in the patient's mind the desire to be cured, and, so long as it is affectionate and moderate, becomes the agent of the physician's influences and neither more nor less than the mainspring of the joint work of analysis. It must not be supposed, however, that transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence, and in fact dominates the whole of each person's relations to his human environment.” 1 (The acceptance of the concept of transference as soundly drawn from behavioral situations, need not imply the acceptance of Freud's psycho-sexual theory.)

If it is true that transference does indeed “dominate the whole of each person's relations to his human environment,” it cannot fail to account for the way people know other humans and their mutual attitudes towards one another. Any working out of the concept of transference will entail, therefore, a personality theory, an ethic, and an art of psycho-therapy.

To neglect transference in the observation of one's fellow humans and in the talking and writing about them in ethics and in personality theory is to espouse the hypothesis that man is either a machine or a ghost in a machine. In the absence of transference, if Freud is on the right track, there can be no rapport between people enabling them to know mutually their purposes. Unless psychology recognises transference as a reputable concept to be reckoned with, it is committed to an impasse in the treatment of personality problems. On th