ABSTRACT
The title of the panel for which this paper was prepared was “Critical Issues in the Developmental Line of Empathy,” which implies that empathy is a capacity present from birth, perhaps manifesting itself in different forms beginning with infancy and progressing throughout life depending on cognitive maturity. My position regarding a developmental line of empathy is that there is no such animal. Instead, as I have explicated elsewhere (Basch, 1983), empathy, or, more correctly, empathic understanding, is itself the endpoint of the developmental line of affect. The developmental line of affect begins with the basic, physiologic phenomenon of affective resonance that is already seen in infancy; when the child is approximately two years old, affective resonance becomes what we call feeling, when it is joined to a concept of self; feelings become emotions as they are joined with various experiences and cognitively subdivided and refined; and, finally, when in adolescence it becomes possible for one potentially to separate oneself from one’s own feelings and emotions and look at them dispassionately, empathic understanding becomes a possibility. Empathy—in which affect, cognition, and perception are joined in complex fashion—is the endpoint of mature relatedness. In this chapter I try to address the question of why the confusion around the term “empathy” persists and what if anything we can do about it.
