ABSTRACT
Empathy is often described as an intrapsychic rather than an interpersonal phenomenon. Not only does it seem to be conceptualized as though the patient has nothing to do with the therapist’s singlehanded acquisition of empathic insight, empathy is sometimes viewed as ending with what the therapist understands internally. In contrast, we would propose that the empathic process not only involves taking in the patient’s influence (Reception), followed by analyzing and arriving at tentative understandings of this material (Internal Processing), but also entails the process of “giving back” to the patient. Questions of what, when, and how a therapist communicates to a patient, both with respect to verbal (especially interpretive) and nonverbal channels, are not merely matters of technique and timing. Answering these technical questions requires an immediate and in-depth empathic sensitivity to the patient and to the status of the interaction.
