Getting Serious about Empathy in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

This essay proposes a radical reconsideration of the concept of empathy in theory and in clinical practice, shifting its focus from a cognitive and representational conception to an embodied, inter-corporeal and transformative perspective. Far from being a simple relational technique, empathy is here understood as an original modality of affective co-experience, which emerges from the shared field between analyst and patient. Through a dialogue between psychoanalysis, phenomenology and neuroscience, the bodily foundations of the therapeutic relationship are outlined, and the interpretive primacy of the classical tradition is criticized. Empathy, as a form of aisthesis, makes possible a clinical practice centered on sensitive listening, affective regulation and co-construction of meaning. The essay argues that only a truly embodied paradigm can restore to care its relational, intersubjective, human and transformative dimension.