Melayna Schiff Melayna.schiff@ncf.edu
In line with Kohut’s insistence that the two notions of empathy which Stolorow wants to distinguish are actually different aspects of the same phenomenon, I want read the notion of empathy as an information gathering activity together with the notion of empathy as affective responsiveness in order to get at the overarching phenomenon to which they both point and in which they are both, as I will argue, equiprimordially co-implicated. With this phenomenon in view, I will attempt to articulate a robust conception of empathy as something more than, but still indebted to, what either of these two aspects of empathic activity could make of a concept of empathy on their own. In short, the robust conception of empathy which I posit advances empathy as an essentially intersubjective and mutually regulated receptive-response exchange in which patient and analyst lead and accompany each other through a temporal process of psychical experiencing which neither of them has created but in which they both, essentially, participate. We will start by considering the final conception of psychoanalytic cure articulated by Kohut (1984). By first looking at the subtle work that empathy is playing in this Kohutian framework of effective psychoanalytic treatment, we will get a sense of what empathy, as a phenomenon, looks like in the context of meaningful situation. We will then consider the conception of empathy that Kohut articulates from the perspective of experience-distant theorizing. This will provide us with a background for our discussion of the two levels of empathy gotten from experience-near theorizing. In our considerations of the two levels, I will attempt to show that these notions of empathy function in the Kohutian framework of effective psychoanalytic treatment as the pragmatic consequences of Kohut’s conception of empathy gotten through experience-distant theorizing. The aspect of empathic activity spoken about as an ‘investigatory stance’, I argue, gets at the analyst’s pragmatic participation in empathy in the analytic space, while the aspect of empathic activity spoken about as ‘affective responsiveness’ gets at, primarily, the patient’s pragmatic participation in empathy. Thus, while Stolorow insists that these two notions of empathy get at distinct ways of being with an other, they emerge, on my account, as different aspects of a particular way of being with each other. 1
life, in general” (Kohut 1982: 397). This paper aims, in part, to show why Kohut’s continuing to signify these seemingly contradictory ‘levels’ of empathy under the same name was appropriate. 2|Page