ABSTRACT
The concept of empathy is one that has been receiving an increasing amount of attention in recent psychoanalytic literature. A great deal of attention has been paid to the developmental antecedents of how one adult comes to “know” another's emotional state. The capacity for empathy has been reconstructively traced to various points in human ontogeny. In this way, different understandings of empathy have emerged, shaped by views on the developmental period in which it is thought to originate. Some investigators, for instance, conceive of empathy as a special ability to merge with another and assert that its genesis lies in certain optimal conditions during the symbiotic phase (Olden, 1958; Greenson, 1960; Schafer, 1968). Others view the capacity for empathy as a form of identification and locate its point of origin at a more advanced developmental stage, when self and object are more differentiated (Fliess, 1942; Beres, 1968; Beres and Arlow, 1974; Bachrach, 1976). These investigators follow Freud (1921), who noted that “a path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life” (p. 110).
