ABSTRACT
Empathy discusses the educator’s developmental assessment of the beginning clinician in the key areas of empathy, boundaries and emotional intelligence. As the educator teaches intentional clinical decision-making and the dialectic between goals and process, she helps the student augment capacity in the Feeling-Sensing Style of the Therapist-Self. The clinician’s duty to understand is examined in three typical presentations of student therapists: the I-don’t-know-where-to-go-from-here problem, the education-without-understanding problem and the I-can’t-stand-the-client’s-negativity problem. The Einfühlung group is an in-classroom experiential, developmental exercise sequence allowing the student in the therapist role to feel into the experience of the student-client and facilitate the emergence of the dilemma and its main feeling. The sequence discloses the importance (to both client and clinician development) of the student therapist developing the ability to “dwell” with the client in the stuckness of the dilemma. The Einfühlung exercise necessarily develops student competencies in process-based methods while also rebalancing conceptualization of the interplay between goals and process in counseling and therapy.
