ABSTRACT
Empathy is at the heart of the person-centred approach and of self psychology, but is also more widely accepted in the integrative ®eld as essential to the establishment of a good working alliance. It involves a process whereby the therapist senses, enters into, conveys his understanding of, and responds to the client's way of experiencing the world: it represents `a way-of-being-inrelation to the client' rather than merely a technique (Mearns and Thorne, 1988: 41). Kohut (1978) spoke of introspection and empathy as an essential constituent of psychological observation. He saw the domain of psychoanalysis as information that was available only to introspection and empathy: thoughts, wishes, feelings, fantasies, anxieties (Mollon, 2001). It was from this position of examining phenomena consistently from within the patient's point of view that his insights, for example into selfobject transferences, arose. We are usually able to understand others psychologically through the discovery of some common experience. Kohut (1990) sees the analyst as giving `himself over temporarily to a full empathic absorption in the mental state' of his client without `losing the capacity to return to a subsequent cool scrutiny of the experience which he had thus allowed to resonate in him' (p. 87). In this way empathic enquiry and empathic resonance allow the therapist to gain a valuable understanding of the client's process. Kohut also uses the term `vicarious introspection' (1984: 82). `To Kohut, the essence of an analytic cure is the gradual acquisition of structure through an empathic contact with a mature self object, accompanied by explanations that follow the understanding phase of treatment' (Lee and Martin, 1991: 116). Kohut's emphasis on the centrality of empathy was a challenge to classical psychoanalysts who prioritized interpretation, but does not come as a surprise to therapists from a humanistic tradition.
