ABSTRACT
Empathy, too, is a valuable concept that at times has been stretched beyond its natural shape to serve as a universal explanation. First, misapplications, those distortions that dilute the validity of the basic idea of empathy. The word “empathy” was imported from aesthetics, where it is used to describe a means of perception. The first misuse of empathy was to elevate it from being simply one of many roads contributing to understanding to being the royal road, one substantially freed from the need to correct for the observer’s attributing bias. Empathy soon ballooned from being a form of perception into an explanation for all seasons. It has been seen lying at the heart of growth and development; its lack has been posited as the centerpiece of pathogenesis; and it has been put forward as the essence of what is mutative in the analytic process.
