Chapter 4 Template or Transference: Some Thoughts About Mark Gehrie's “Empathy in Broader Perspective”

In his January address to the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, “Empathy in Broader Perspective: A Technical Approach to the Consequences of the Negative Selfobject in Early Character Formation,” Mark Gehrie (1996) described a class of patients profoundly traumatized in early childhood. In Gehrie's view the early negative experience of these patients forms a preverbal psychic structure, or “template,” which shapes all of their later affective experience. As I read him, Gehrie suggests that such patients are at the outset of treatment beyond empathy, transference, and interpretation. They are beyond empathy—at least empathy conventionally so-called—because empathy inevitably fails to reach them at the template's diacritical level of affect; beyond transference because it is the template-driven, nearly biological compulsion to repeat that shapes these patients' responses to the analyst, not a relationship to a narcissistically or libidinally significant other; and beyond interpretation because the experience that the template organizes is not verbally encoded. The patient learns of this lost experience only when the analyst (re)constructs it from enactments that Gehrie likens to secondary process revisions of the patient's earliest preverbal experience. Only what Gehrie thinks of as the “dynamite” of the therapist's appropriately intense (often negative) affect is able to engage these patients at their emotional core and make egress from their archaic state possible. Thereafter, Gehrie believes they may be analyzed