ABSTRACT
The degree to which a teacher believes that an individual's empathic capacity can improve will determine his tendency to accept for psychoanalytic training candidates who may initially display a low capacity for empathy. Empathy normally serves as one of the main cognitive instruments for human communication and mutual understanding. It is the presence of the basic sensitivity that determines the possibility for the psychotherapeutic improvement of the capacity for empathy. A psychopathological condition exists, if the empathizer is selectively unable to use projection in his closest relationships, or if he cannot project at all. In pathological development, discrepancies occur between their relative dominance, or between their rates of development. Through the onto and phylogenetic development of the secondary process, a new organizing principle, previously unknown in the biological world, emerged-the ability to detach information processing from its self-centeredness and to perceive, represent, and comprehend reality on its own.
