Empathy, Common Ground of Ethics and of Personality Theory

Systems of ethics can hardly fail to take account of the phenomena of identification and of resistance in any effort to explain how values arise.

If judgments of the sort, “This is good,” cannot be made outside of the influence upon them of spontaneous identification, ethical views can hardly be simply a problem of scientific analysis and of reduction to a language problem. There is indeed a place for both scientific analysis and semantics in ethics as there is a place for them in any discipline. It is understandable that the semanticist and linguistic analyst do not care to be concerned with the meaning of psychological origins. They have enough to do, for they are conscientious specialists, concerned, they say, with validity and present meaning, not with dubious hypotheses as to origins. But surely there is an important clue to the meaning of “the good” to be found in the conditions which make communication possible, and these conditions are, I think, within the dynamics of the transference process.

Postulating the basic process of crude identification in interpersonal relations, ethical views have first to acknowledge their origins in an unscientific process, psychologically prior to the work of science. Then, discovering empirically that interpersonal knowledge is enhanced in the transference process, the therapist, for example, will try to perfect the transference technique by fostering identification and by avoiding resistances. The effort exerted in perfecting the transference technique is thought to be good, primarily because it makes communication possible and enables the patient to clarify what the good is for him. But it is equally indicated for the therapist, for it is any easy step from the therapeutic setting to any interpersonal situation, where the “therapist” becomes also a patient and a learner. The difference in the interpersonal situation is that identification becomes mutual but need not become counter transference if the one is not trying to cont