ABSTRACT
Empathy betokens a state of faith in our relationship to an object and a sense of its protection, nurture, and stimulation. An absence of empathy or the presence of negative empathy has disastrous effects. Heinz Kohut's emphasis seems to be that psychopathology stems from too little proper merger-that is, too little empathy from too defective a self object merger relationship. The therapeutic task is not only to be empathic to the understandable needs of the patient, but also to help discredit a archaically established internal object. The perceptual and cognitive techniques used by the separate self can be thought of as detached observation and those of the merged state as forerunners of empathic observation and experience, as vicarious introspection. Narcissistic defects may be thoughts of as failures to achieve reciprocity between the separate self and the nonseparate self-failures due in turn to failures in the maternal selfobject function, on the one hand, and the infant's endowment, on the other.
