ABSTRACT
Because psychoanalytic theory started out from Freud's early one-body neurologically based picture, and then in Freud's later work and the work of subsequent analysts tried to reach out from there to give an account of the irreducibly social nature of human psychology, psychoanalysts can sometimes ®nd themselves confused about the order and logical hierarchy of their concepts. We catch ourselves trying to explain simple notions by more complex ones. We have a lot of specialised concepts, with names like intersubjectivity, alpha-function, projective identi®cation, and mentalisation, but have often overlooked or, more accurately, have failed to recognise, an elementary building-block on which all these concepts depend. The ordinary name in English for this building-block is sympathy, but to use this word nowadays can be problematic.
