You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Empathic Imagination sings. Its song is composed of clinical scenes and case narratives whose lyrics are woven together with literary references and inspiration from a marriage between psychoanalytic and phenomenological attitudes. Central to both the psychoanalytic and phenomenological methodologies is a suspension or bracketing of received ideas and closed-off states of mind (what Bion calls “saturated preconceptions”) in order that what shows itself may shine forth with poignant luminosity. Margulies finds in the phenomenological method the most fruitful approach to describing the structure and genesis of the psychoanalytic way of knowing. Empathy is the medium through which the object of analytic epistemology, psychical reality, shines forth.
Margulies emphasizes that empathic contact is built on two conjoined perspectives. The first one takes an architectural view of mental life: like a Gothic cathedral, “the facade is the structure” (p. 33). The second perspective suggests that the condition for the possibility of empathic knowing is grounded in a capacity for sustained negative capability. The poet John Keats described negative capability as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (cited in Margulies, p. 12).
Negative capability is the ground out of which feeling grows into the life of another—the definition of empathy. The negativity essential to being in uncertainty is not a straightforward perceptual defense (disavowal or denial, for example), nor is it a version of negation or nihilism. Rather, it is the growth-promoting paradoxical negativity of generative emptiness, what Marion Milner calls a “psychic womb” and what the apophantic religious tradition calls the “cloud of unknowing.” To attend to one's patient out of this state of mind is to be in for surprises and the pull of consciousness toward its ecstatic capacity—its ability to go beyond itself toward the Other. It is this pull that is the