ABSTRACT
An essential feature of psychoanalytic interpretation to avoid setting up and endorsing drastic antitheses. The idea of an inevitable tension of opposites is fundamental to the analytic understanding of psychic reality. It is this feature of analytic understanding that controls Gail Reed's learned, and illuminating analysis of the language of empathy. Reed treats the feminine meaning in terms of maternal activity and the phallic meaning in terms of heterosexuality, though either meaning may be part of a fantasy of homosexual interaction. Reed's account of conventionalization of language, communal fantasying, and shared training and experience is appropriately and usefully ego-psychological. Empathizing could be regarded as being at best a delicate balancing or alternating of dynamically significant perspectives on doing analytic work in general and on working with specific analysands. In the case of empathy, the process and the product are not only close to unconscious modes of thought, they are also references to the analyst rather than the analysand.
