ABSTRACT
Far beyond cognitive bias, empathy has an inbuilt liability to epistemological and ethical destabilization that originates in its derivation, which centrally involves projection, from Einfühlung. To the extent that empathy can be defended as a concept reliably explaining our knowledge of others’ feelings, it amounts to no more than sympathy as theorized by Hume and Smith; for their account projection, once properly understood, is largely mitigated. However, when projection is complex, empathy is intrinsically unreliable epistemologically and ethically compromised in practices involving it. Drawing on Richard Wollheim’s distinction between simple and complex projection, and on ordinary, philosophical and psychoanalytic psychology to characterize projection itself, I show the varieties of its interaction with sympathy in emotional communication. As natural ‘propensities’ unreflectively employed in concert, projection provokes sympathy, and sympathy responds to projection. I further show how the interaction of sympathy and projection makes up a functional whole in human emotional communication. This theoretical analysis also explains and underlines empathy’s harmful potential for practices of investigation, care and therapy.
