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From the time of his earliest forays into the psychology of the self, Heinz Kohut (1959, 1966, 1971) emphasized the signal importance of empathy, “the mode by which one gathers psychological data about other people” (1966, p. 261), as the primary mode of access into the experiential world of the patient. His emphasis on this concept has had a reverberating effect throughout the analytic world and has been recognized by most analysts as a critical foundation for virtually every analytic intervention, although exactly how it is defined (beyond “vicarious introspection”) has varied considerably, along with the specifics of its application and conception of its effects. Kohut's (1977) commitment to “long-term empathic immersion” (p. xxii) was a commitment to a methodology he considered not only essential for the pursuit of analytic goals, but a sine qua non of the analytic enterprise—one that vastly expands the analyst's capacity for understanding the range of the patient's experience, and communicating that understanding to the patient.