ABSTRACT
Given that the author is a historian with psychoanalytic training and the son of Heinz Kohut, the psychoanalyst who emphasized that introspection and empathy defined psychoanalysis as a field, the relationship played by empathy in history and in psychoanalysis has been considered throughout this book. The concluding remarks focus on that relationship even more explicitly and directly. It also considers the implications of acknowledging the important role that empathy can play in historical knowledge for graduate training in history and for conducting historical research. And finally, the chapter summarizes the principal points made about the role of empathy in historical knowledge over the course of the book, in the process also considering the implications of acknowledging empathy as a way to know and understand others as a response to the contemporary assumption that we can only know and understand those who are like ourselves.
