ABSTRACT
Starting with Lewis Kirshner’s position – neither an untenable form of reductionism in psychoanalysis nor an “almost anything goes” antirealism – and examining Quine and Putnam’s arguments against relativism, this chapter gives a detailed account of the “empathic attitude” posited as a new approach in psychoanalytic listening. From Renik’s self-disclosure to the sharing of experience according to Spezzano, including the convergence of Kohut and Schafer’s “empathic” positions, the critique of classical psychoanalysis has paved the way for a theory of authentic psychic intimacy in which the affect would become the buttress of interpretation. Hence the dismissal of the mechanisms of repression, of distortion and reversal at work in the gap between manifest and latent contents. However, thanks to a survey of Freud’s analysis of empathy (Einfühlung) and his debate with Ferenczi on the subject of “tact,” this chapter brings the challenges of analytic work back to the fore. It shows how every psychic act arising from intrapsychic conflict has a double meaning: expression and resistance; every expression occurs in the meshwork of distorted presentations: language in psychoanalysis is at the service of fulfilment in act, while the stuff of words lends itself to distortion plastically.
