ABSTRACT
Empathy is the cornerstone of psychotherapy. It guides therapists through the twists and turns of listening, talking, and understanding. The process of listening and understanding is a natural part of the process that leads to intervention. The empathic process has different parts. It is a mind probe that helps to understand what it's like to be the other. Empathy involves dosage, timing, and tact. Psychotherapy may feel to novice patients like a strange and different venture. One reason for this is that much of it varies from what takes place in normal interaction. Conscious and unconscious resistances to working in a treatment exist throughout the treatment. A therapist would be wise to attend to resistance and to engage it sensitively, respectfully, and appropriately as evidence of it becomes palpable. Part of the therapeutic alliance involves mutual cooperation in seeing the task through, despite the inevitable internal and external resistances that arise.
