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When Sullivan, in his theory of infantile empathy, 14 postulated “that peculiar emotional linkage” between mother and child that exists “long before there are signs of any understanding of emotional expression” he brilliantly bridged the gap between a biological (tension-euphoria) orientation and an interpersonal (mother-child) frame of reference. The infant's bodily and emotional state was seen as inextricably tied to his relationship with another human being.
But something paradoxical happened in Sullivan's thinking. Despite his emphasis on psychiatry as the study of interpersonal processes and on psychoanalysis as an interpersonal situation, he showed little interest in the subsequent role of empathy, the primal mode of interpersonal communication. He wrote: 14
We do not know much about the fate of empathy in the developmental history of people in general. There are indications that it endures throughout life, at least in some people. There are few unmistakable instances of its function in most of us, however, in our later years; I find it convenient to assume that the time of its great importance is later infancy an early childhood—perhaps age six to twenty seven months. So much for empathy.* (p. 8)
Thus infantile empathy, after such a vital and auspicious beginning, is seen to undergo an early demise—or at best, a premature senescence.
But some researchers have been dissatisfied with this view of the passing of empathy, and so a surge of theoretical and experimental interest has revived a concern with the fate of this concept.