ABSTRACT
We define empathy as a state of mind. As such, it has multiple components, including perceptual, emotional, conceptual, and behavioral ones. The perceptual component entails a direction of attention toward specific representations of the patient or his (or her) objects. The emotional one includes attractions or repulsions toward the patient or his objects at any given time. The conceptual component involves an integration of emotional and cognitive aspects, and the behavioral one contains either imitative or interactive trials of action. Herbert Schlesinger sees empathy as a process within the mind of the analyst. It is one of tuning in and staying tuned to the meanings of the patient's experiences and behaviors. What does this add to our psychoanalytic understanding of empathic activity? The key point on which we agree with Schlesinger is a recognition of empathy as a shifting focus within a repertoire of self- and object schematizations. If we were to regard analytic patients as each having only a single self-concept, then whenever we were empathic, we would feel as they felt in a situation. But we recognize that our patients have multiple self-concepts and multiple patterns of relationship. Their conflicts are often struggles between different, simultaneous emotional potentials in the same situation. To respond empathically, one must choose between various ways of reacting within a given interpersonal situation being described by the patient. One must choose between a variety of role relationship models simultaneously being applied to a situation by the patient—including those relationship models or self-concepts that the patient dreads, wards off, or uses for defensive purposes, as well as those on which the patient is basing his most realistic adaptive reactions. Schlesinger appropriately emphasizes this aspect of choice in the empathic state of mind.
