ABSTRACT
The literature on empathy extends throughout analytic history, though it was often ignored until Kohut's statement on the crucial significance of empathy and introspection in determining the limits of what is psychoanalytic. Scholars of philosophy, of neuroscience, of literary criticism, of art history and appreciation, join analysts in a multidisciplinary approach to empathy, trying to define the limits, contradictions, and implications of its meanings. Agosta is able to demonstrate empathy as the process, the interhuman competence, that makes intersubjectivity possible. He can return to empathy in its context, in its 'hermeneutic circle'. Agosta separates empathy from emotional contagion on the basis of the laying down of an echo or after-image. Empathy most authentically becomes a mode of understanding as it is transformed into and communicated as an interpretation. The historical study of self and object differentiation in the arts serves to protect from equating empathy with a simple return to primitive magical states, or psychic fusion.
