ABSTRACT
Across a wide range of disciplines, empathy has been standardly understood to involve some form of sharing another person’s psychological states. Focusing upon empathic interaction in certain psychotherapeutic and political contexts, this chapter argues that there are many cases—readily understood as empathic—in which the success of the interaction does not depend upon sharing at all. In fact, in some cases sharing would be inimical to the success of the interaction. The chapter details versions of ‘sharing’ models in the philosophical and psychoanalytic literature on empathy and shows that none of these models do justice to the phenomena at issue in these cases. What is needed here is a notion of ‘empathic responsiveness’: a form of emotional connectedness that involves responding sensitively and productively to a real emotional need without sharing the relevant psychological states.
