ABSTRACT
Sympathy seems to be employed in the sense of an egocentric empathy, with 'empathy' becoming an object-centered sympathy. There is overlapping and misuse and no little amount of misconception about the intrinsic natures of sympathy and empathy. On the other hand, empathy is also subject to excesses, such as overidentification or self-justifying absolutism. A sophisticated vision of empathy as motor mimicry is available in Condon and Sander's microanalyses of sound films of human communication. Empathy belongs to the dialectic processes of the analysis. The conflict-free and autonomous functions of the work ego give to empathy a very special place in the hierarchy of functions that comprise the analyst as a psychotherapeutic instrument. Empathy occurs only in a situation of intimate dyadic communication, and it is triggered by an affective gap or separated-ness in that communication. Clinically, the primary distinction is between sympathy and empathy, in the sense that the clinical observation takes precedence over the meta-psychological construct.
