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Empathy serves … as a therapeutic action in the broadest sense of the word. That seems to contradict everything I have said so far, and I wish I could simply bypass it. But since it is true, and I've evidence for its being true, I must mention it [Kohut, 1981b, p. 530].
Empathy is the spark of human concern for others, the glue that makes social life possible. It may be fragile but it has, arguably, endured throughout evolutionary times and may continue as long as humans exist [Hoffman, 2000, p. 3].
With the exception of self-psychological psychotherapists, there are relatively few practitioners of empathy-centered therapy today when compared with the heyday of client-centered counseling and psychotherapy in the middle of the 20th century. The vast majority of professionals across the spectrum of the helping professions have, however, been trained to regard empathy as one of the basic tools in the helper's kit. This is evidenced by the fact that, since the 1970s, empathy has gotten a chapter or a major section in all standard introductions to counseling and psychotherapy. Our agenda in this chapter is to break through this utilitarian understanding and kindle (or rekindle) our readers' imaginations regarding the significance and power of empathy. We do so by building on the rich legacy of self psychological theory while synthesizing it with aspects of several other pioneering modes of thought that gained currency in roughly the same period of time: philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1990), process