Empathy I

Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Melvin Bornstein, Donald Silver, Joseph Lichtenberg, Melvin Bornstein, Donald Silver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317970637
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

When the late Heinz Kohut defined psychoanalysis as the science of empathy and introspection, he sparked a debate that has animated psychoanalytic discourse ever since. What is the relationship of empathy to psychoanalysis? Is it a constituent of analytical technique, an integral aspect of the therapeutic action of analysis, or simply a metaphor for a mode of observation better understood via 'classical' theory and terminology? The dialogue about empathy, which is really a dialogue about the nature of the analytic process, continues in this two-volume set, originally published in 1984.

In Volume I, several illuminating attempts to define empathy are followed by Kohut's essay, 'Introspection, Empathy, and the Semicircle of Mental Health.' Kohut's paper, in turn, ushers in a series of original contributions on 'Empathy as a Perspective in Psychoanalysis.' The volume ends with five papers which strive to demarcate an empathic approach to various areas of artistic endeavour, including the appreciation of visual art.

Volume II continues the dialogue with a series of developmental studies which explore the role of empathy in early child care at the same time as they chart the emergence of the young child's capacity to empathize. In the concluding section, 'Empathy in Psychoanalytic Work,' contributors and discussants return to the arena of technique. They not only theorize about empathy in relation to analytic understanding and communication, but address issues of nosology, considering how the empathic vantage point may be utilized in the treatment of patients with borderline and schizophrenic pathology.

In their critical attention to the many dimensions of empathy – philosophical, developmental, therapeutic, artistic – the contributors collectively bear witness to the fact that Kohut has helped to shape new questions, but not set limits to the search for answers. The product of their efforts is an anatomical exploration of a topic whose relevance for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is only beginning to be understood.

II	EMPATHY AS A PERSPECTIVE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Closing the Historical Circle: Remarks on Heinz Kohut's Last Essay

JOSEPH D. LICHTENBERG, M.D.

IT IS OFTEN SAID, with varying degrees of exasperation, that Heinz Kohut did not invent empathy. The most common retort to this polemical comment has been: “He never said he did.” In an indirect fashion, Kohut answers both attackers and defenders in his paper on “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semicircle of Mental Health.” He asserts that in his earlier paper on“Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis,” he spoke of empathy as a long-familiar concept in psycho-analysis—a value-neutral mode of observation attuned to our inner life, just as extrospection is a mode of observation attuned to scientific exploration of the external world. But in that paper he was saying something which, if not new, was in sharp contrast to the direction of the then mainstream of psychoanalytic thought. He was limiting the domain of psychoanalysis to that which could be explored through empathy. Empathy then became the key to his argument against the inclusion in psychoanalysis of data obtained from biological assumptions, such as those concerning untamed drives, and from socio-psychological concepts, such as those concerning adaptation. As Kohut notes, a ruckus followed his paper—but one that never quite addressed his main point. It might be said that many of the papers in these two volumes deal with the sequelae to that scientific storm.

Whatever one's stance is in respect to the arguments for and against self psychology, one will find much to reflect upon in Kohut's return to his original paper on empathy and his summation of his thinking over the intervening 25 years. To fit Kohut's final contribution in with the other papers in these two volumes, one should note his depiction of empathy as a means of gathering information in both psychoanalysis and everyday life. These clarifications may then be compared with Kohut's epistemological stance in defining the realm of psychoanalysis, as well as with his assertion of the beneficial effects of empathy in treatment and life in general. In claiming that the presence of empathy is beneficial, Kohut ranges into areas of ethical and philosophical speculation, including the basic nature of intergenerational relations. What Kohut offers is both a narrow and broad consideration of empathy. His ideas may thus be usefully integrated with or contrasted to positions taken by other contributors.

4	Introspection, Empathy, and the Semicircle of Mental Health

HEINZ KOHUT, M.D.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, I spoke at the twenty-fifth anniversary of our institute. That celebration contained only two presentations and lasted only one day: half the day was devoted to a paper by Therese Benedek (1960)—on a psychosomatic topic, I believe, discussed by several analysts especially interested in that field. During the other half-day I presented my paper (1959)—“Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis”—which was discussed by Rudolph Loewenstein, Helen McLean, Maxwell Gitelson, and Franz Alexander.

In view of the fact that my present address will take off from the point that I had reached then, I will remark briefly on the former occasion. The discussants differed widely in their feelings about my paper: from Alexander's intense, angry, almost violent objections to it, over Loewenstein's severe but respectful critique and Gitelson's middle position to, finally, McLean's warmly expressed acceptance and praise. And yet, as I knew only dimly at that time but as I have come to see ever more clearly since, all the discussants, whether laudatory or disapproving, had fastened on issues that were unrelated to the subject matter of my paper. They all missed the essential, simple, and clear scientific message that it contains. I will begin, then, by spelling out this message once again, hoping that I will succeed in adding further colleagues to the list of those who have come to understand it. And I will then, from the secure basis that I established 25 years ago, proceed further and take an additional step in a new direction.

After the disappointment I experienced at being faced with a total absence of response to what I had proposed, you might expect that I would go about the task to which I decided to devote the first half of this presentation with some diffidence. But this is not the case. Both my capacity for dispassionate reflection and my sense of humor have sustained me during the past 25 years, and they do sustain me now.

In one of my favorite novels, Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne describes an episode which is relevant in the present context. Let me retell it in Sterne's words.

‘Twas nothing,—I did not lose two drops of blood by it—… thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident.—Dr Slop made ten times more of it, than there was occasion…’ ‘The chambermaid had left no ******* *** [clearly: chamber pot] under the bed:—cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up the window seat with the other,—cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?’ [Clearly, the last four words are“out of the window”—the four-lettered first, the decisive verb, I'll leave for you to fill in].

‘I was five years old.—Susannah did not consider that nothing was well-hung in our family,—so slap came the sash down like lightning upon us;—Nothing is left,—cried Susannah,—nothing is left—for me, but to run my country.’ ‘My Uncle Toby's house was a much kinder sanctuary; and so Susannah fled to it’ [Vol. V, Chapter XVII, p. 284].

I must deprive you of all the delightfully presented intervening references to the incident in question—the guilt of Uncle Toby, and of his factotum Trim, who had removed the weights and pulleys from the sash windows because Toby needed them for his war games; the father's intensive study of the ritual of circumcision in order to find out whether his son had become a Jew, an Egyptian, a Syrian, or a Phoenician, to name only a few; and the fight between Susannah and the doctor while applying a poultice to Tristram's injured penis—and turn directly to the, for us, pivotal conclusion. Dr. Slop (Vol. VI, Chapter XIV, p. 329) had apparently spoken in an exaggerated way about “Susannah's accident” and, within a week, everybody was saying:

‘That Poor Master Shandy [21 asterisks] entirely.’ And in three further days the rumor was established That the nursery window had not only [28 asterisks];—but that [21 asterisks], also.’ A family council was there-upon held. It concluded with the following pithy dialogue: ‘I should shew him publicly, said my Uncle Toby, at the market cross.’—Twill have no effect, said my father.’

But now, disregarding Tristram's father's opinion that once people have espoused a certain strong belief, even the most direct and plain demonstration to the contrary will have no effect, I will expose the central message of my old introspection essay, sound and undamaged in its essence like Tristram's penis after the sash came down, once more in the marketplace.

What does my 1959 essay discuss; what was its objective? The answer to this question was spelled out in its subtitle. It was to be“An Examination of the Relationship between Mode of Observation and Theory.” I did not write about empathy as a psychic activity. I did not write about empathy as associated with any specific emotion such as, in particular, compassion or affection. It may be motivated by, and used in the service of, hostile-destructive aims. I did not write about empathy as associated with intuition. As is the case with extrospection, it may, occasionally, be used seemingly intuitively by experts: that is, via mental processes of observation that identify complex configurations preconsciously and at great speed. But mostly, certainly in psychoanalysis, empathy is used nonintuitively, ploddingly, if you wish, by trial and error. I did not write about empathy as being always correct and accurate. As is the case with extrospection and external reality, introspection and empathy may misperceive the psychic reality we scrutinize (already on the level of data collection), either because we are guided by erroneous expectations, by misleading theories that distort our perception, or because we are not sufficiently conscientious and rigorous in immersing ourselves for protracted periods in the field of our observation. We must, in other words, be able to tolerate uncertainty and to postpone our closures.

But now, while I could, of course, go on and enlarge the list of the areas that I did not address in my original essay, I will turn from the negative to the positive, from telling you what I did not say in 1959 to what, in fact, I said. I will begin with a general statement. There are, to speak descriptively and implying no value judgment whatever, two roads in science. Let me call them the high road and the low road in science. The low road is the empirical stance—data collection and experience-near theory—vis-à-vis the field that is investigated. The high road is the epistemological stance. It examines the relationship between the data already collected and, especially, the relationship between the experience-near theories that have already been formulated. On the basis of these cognitive maneuvers, it formulates a broad and comprehensive experience-distant theory. I believe that science needs to proceed on both of these roads. I rebel against a purely speculative stance, when theory is built upon theory and the observation of the field is neglected. But I also know that every science must be aware of the experience-distant theories that provide the framework for its experience-near investigations and that it must, from time to time, reexamine the experience-distant theories it has espoused—even those that seem so basic to its outlook that they are hardly considered to be theories anymore. Luckily, there is a voice in us that will tell us, however dimly we may perceive it at first, and however reluctant we may be to acknowledge its message, that the time has come for us to question our basic theories. This voice will, in general, speak to us after we have been, persistently and increasingly, uncomfortable with the pragmatic results that we have been obtaining. It is then that we should move from the low road of pragmatism to the high road of epistemology—only to return to the first in order to test the new theoretical vantage point that we may now have adopted.

In order to prevent confusion let me stress here that during the first half of this presentation I will be primarily talking about empathy in the context in which I used it in my 1959 paper and in which I have continued to use it, until very recently, almost entirely (for exceptions, see Kohut 1973a, 1973b). I will, in other words, be talking about empathy in an epistemological context. In this context, as should go without saying, empathy is a value-neutral mode of observation; a mode of observation attuned to the inner life of man, just as extrospection is a mode of observation attuned to the external world.

It is true, however, that, as I mentioned earlier, empathy can and should also be examined and evaluated in an empirical context as a mental activity, whether employed in everyday life or in scientific pursuits. And I have indeed, very recently, begun to look upon empathy from this point of view—a complex but still manageable undertaking, if one keeps in mind that even with regard to this“low road,” that is, with regard to this experience-near approach, we must differentiate between two levels: (1) empathy as an information-gathering activity, and (2) empathy as a powerful emotional bond between people. Before addressing myself, as I did in 1959, to the role of empathy in the most experience-distant, epistemological sense, let me therefore briefly consider the specifics of the examination of empathy in these latter two, more experience-near contexts.

As an information-collecting, data-gathering activity, empathy, as I have stressed many times since 1971, can be right or wrong, in the service of compassion or hostility, pursued slowly and ploddingly or “intuitively,” that is, at great speed. In this sense empathy is never by itself supportive or therapeutic. It is, however, a necessary precondition to being successfully supportive and therapeutic. In other words, even if a mother's empathy is correct and accurate, even if her aims are affectionate, it is not her empathy that satisfies her child's selfobject needs. Her actions, her responses to the child will do this. In order, however, to achieve their end properly, these actions and responses have to be guided by correct and accurate empathy. Empathy is thus a precondition for a mother's appropriate functioning as the child's selfobject, it informs parental selfobject function vis-à-vis the child, but it is not, by itself, the selfobject function that is needed by the child.

I wish that I could stop my discussion of empathy as a concrete force in human life at this point without having to make one further step, which appears to contradict everything that I have said so far, and which exposes me to the suspicion of abandoning scientific sobriety and of entering the land of mysticism or of sentimentality. I assure you that I would like to avoid making this step and that it is not the absence of scientific rigor but submission to it that forces me to tell you that even though everything I have said up to now remains fully valid so long as we evaluate empathy as an instrument of observation and as an informer of supportive, therapeutic and psychoanalytic action (in therapeutic analysis the action is called interpretation), I must now, unfortunately, add that empathy per se, the mere presence of empathy, has also a beneficial, in a broad sense, a therapeutic effect—both in the clinical setting and in human life, in general.

Let me first support my claim that the assertion that the presence of empathy per se is beneficial is a scientific hypothesis and not an outgrowth of vague sentimentality or mysticism. It is the former because it suggests an explanation for certain observable contents and/or sequences of events in man's psychic life; it is not the latter because it is not the expression of hopes or wishes and/or of an openly espoused or more or less hidden morality.

For the rest, in view of the fact that I am basically dealing here, at least in the first part of my presentation, with experience-distant, epistemological considerations about the interrelationship between empathy as a mode of observation and psychoanalytic theory, I will restrict myself to enumerating a number of concrete examples of the beneficial effect of the mere presence of empathy to which I have referred in my writings. I will first mention my hypothesis that the fear of death and the fear of psychosis are, in many instances, the expression of the fear of the loss of the empathie milieu that in responding to the self keeps it psychologically alive. Second, I will adduce again the experiences of the astronauts when their space capsule seemed out of control, an episode which I described in my correspondence with Professor Erich Heller.¹ Third, I will again call attention to the psychologically destructive effect of having faced impersonal, dehumanized“extermination” experienced by those who survived the Nazi concentration camps—as opposed to the far less psychologically destructive experience of having been exposed to impassioned hate-motivated killing. And I remind you of the artistic renditions of the experience of exposure to the total absence of empathy (mainly by Kafka, as in Metamorphosis, but also by O'Neill, as in Long Day's Journey into Night [Kohut, 1977, p. 287; 1978b, pp. 680f; 743n, 780f, 872]). And, finally, I will refer to the significance for self-development of the shift from the sustaining effect of early empathy-informed physical contact between mother and child (that is, contact which occurs without direct, discrete“responses” on the part of the mother) to the sustaining effect of the mother's empathie response itself (as when the child moves away and, turning around, sees the mother's face expressing pride in the child's achievement). And, alternatively, I will mention that the shift from the sustenance supplied by the analyst's“understanding derstanding” to the sustenance signified by his “explaining” can be understood as a shift from a lower to a higher form of empathy, analogous to the aforementioned shift in early development.

It is with the foregoing considerations in mind that I will now return...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• I. Toward Adefinition of Empathy
• II. Empathy as a Perspective in Psychoanalysis
• III. Empathy in the Arts
• Author Index
• Subject Index