The Language of Empathy

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
http://apa.sagepub.com The Language of Empathy: An Analysis of Its Constitution, Development, and Role in Psychoanalytic Listening
Anna Aragno J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2008; 56; 713 DOI: 10.1177/0003065108322097 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/56/3/713
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Anna Aragno
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THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY: AN ANALYSIS OF ITS CONSTITUTION, DEVELOPMENT, AND ROLE IN PSYCHOANALYTIC LISTENING
Viewed from an epistemological perspective, empathy in psychoanalytic practice is described as that aspect of a specialized attentional stance that opens channels of interaction facilitating the formation of a trusting bond and enabling one to gain access to the emotional qualities of anothers experience. A literature overview traces the origins of the concept in Freud and its role in psychoanalytic listening (including its controversial, divisive evolution in our field). Empathy is then examined from a semiotic-developmental framework. Its constitutional origins, differentiated forms, and distinctive purpose in clinical discourse are discussed. A developmental line is proposed, and clear distinctions are drawn between empathy in everyday life and its specialized technical application in clinical work.
. . . we react to the unconscious with all our organs, with our various instruments of perception and comprehension. . . . The word empathy sometimes means one thing, sometimes another, until now it does not mean anything at all. THEODOR REIK (1948, pp. 143, 356357)
mpathy has tacitly been playing its pivotal role in psychoanalytic listening from the outset, yet this has not prevented it from becoming a source of debate and dispute, even divisiveness, in our fieldsuspect to some, idealized by others. This probably has less to do with empathy itself than with the scant knowledge we still have of its forms, development, and functions, particularly in our specialized dialogues. Adequate
Private practice, New York. Submitted for publication March 10, 2007.
DOI: 10.1177/0003065108322097
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definitions do not automatically provide clear referents to which its diverse forms, operative functions, and uses apply: we still have not fully understood how it works. One thing we may all agree on: neither too sympathetic nor too detached, clinical empathy provides that baseline, benevolent disposition that enables us to put ourselves in others emotional shoes in order to better understand them. With deep phylogenetic roots recapitulated ontogenetically, its own developmental line, and specific forms, empathy will here be viewed from an epistemological perspective, as a way of knowing, a way of arriving at an understanding of anothers feeling state, potentially generating a bidirectional interactive field of considerable power. The gradual erosion, even in popular culture, of a deeply dichotomizing Cartesian paradigm has now given way to the idea that emotional intelligence is as significant as any purely cerebral faculty in shaping social adaptation. And with the recent discovery of the mirror neurons, current neuroscience corroborates what psychoanalysis has maintained all along: that emotional cognition plays a crucial role in penetrating human experience. Further, the attentional stance from which it emanates appears to have a profound impact on the other. From the Greek empatheia (en: in; pathos: passion, feeling) and coming into English as a translation of the German Einfhlung (ein: in; fhlung, feeling), empathy is defined as understanding so intimate that the feelings, thoughts and motives of one are readily comprehended by another (American Heritage Dictionary in Basch 1983, p. 103). Close on its heels, however, comes another definition, here paraphrased, generating doubts on the validity of this mode of understanding: the projection of ones own personality onto the personality of another of ones own emotions, responses, etc., in order to understand them better, or the pathetic fallacy (Websters 1966, p. 457). The first definition suggests resonating with anothers experience, the second projecting into, or attributing, ones own experience to the other. The subtle yet significant issue of detecting the source and assessing the accuracy of understanding arrived at via empathic pathways is one problem. Another is that empathy is a verbal noun objectifying what is perhaps the most subjective aspect of a complex, multimodal, specialized listening stance: empathy is not a thing but a way of interacting, of putting oneself in anothers emotional experience, a mode of apprehending another persons feelings. Empathy is empathizing; and we understand its constitution better by tracing its origins, developmental features, and 714
THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY
specific functional uses. To observe its processes we will find no better methodology than the one we have, and we learn more about empathy in our dialogues when we look at its effects: at what empathy does interactively; how it operates in vivo, contextually and bidirectionally. This essay is designed to refashion our understanding of the workings of clinical empathy: I will examine its ontogenetic development and subsequent bifurcation into (a) an almost instinctive, unmediated mode of entering into or mirroring anothers emotional state; and (b) its highly mediated, completely rational, technical application in clinical listening. In and of itself empathy is value-free, nonjudgmental: the sophisticated use of empathy in clinical listening is characterized by a referential, interpretive dimension that is constantly monitoring (consciously and preconsciously) qualities of feeling that are being registered and identified privately by the listening analyst. Mature clinical empathy, in this sense, sharpens sensibilities to unconscious dynamics that may produce even confrontational interventions, yet fitting therapeutic responses at that moment, nonetheless. To better identify the specific features of its clinical application, we will examine empathy from semiotic and referential perspectives along a developmental continuum, teasing out the unique, multimodal integration required for its use in a semantic of the unconscious. By this I am referring to the full continuum of experiencefrom organic sensations, representational images, and raw emotions, to verbal expressions, metaphors, enactments, dynamicsthat constitute the vast range of unconscious meanings that are verbalized and interpreted in the clinical situation. Before launching into a developmental mapping of this process, I will present a brief overview of how the field has understood the workings of empathy thus far.
R E V I E W O F T H E L I T E R AT U R E
Freud formalized a dialogue to serve the specific goals of investigating and interpreting the unconscious. To these ends he devised a specialized speech form and matching way of listening that together generate a bidirectional psychical field of mutual influence (Freud 1914, p. 153). Because he recognized the dangers of a method that instigates, isolates, and makes use of a potentially explosive human situation, virtually all of Freuds technical recommendations (1912, 1913a, 1914, 1915) were designed to optimize its instrumentality and minimize its pitfalls. This set of tightly interrelated procedural principles, which in my opinion 715
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function synergistically, remain indispensable in establishing viable analytic and supervisory situations. Everything we have learned about the tenacity of defenses, the interpenetrative power of projective mechanisms, the trenchant hold of transference distortions, and the inflammability of psychical fields points to the wisdom behind Freuds select technical recommendations. Freud had stumbled on an epistemological frontier in that tuning in to this range of unconscious meanings employs a broader than normal range of sensory-emotive and cognitive sensibilities. To access this vastly expanded sphere of referents, many of which are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to put into words, we are enjoined to listen with all five senses and even the help of an extra ear! Psychoanalytic situations stimulate the emergence of vivid enactments from a polyphony of unconscious currents which, like the contrapuntal lines of a fugue, are played simultaneously. We are to remain equidistant from a hierarchy of modes of interaction, each transmitting different kinds of information at the same time. In order to register and respond analytically while at the hub of this dynamically laden situation, we are to be perceptually and emotionally attuned to, and aware of, our own responses while formulating interpretations of meanings that are partly enacted, partly expressed, partly projected, and partly spoken. The dialogue and the analysts functions in it are both instruments of the method: implicit in this instrumentation is the idea of attunement. To register and interpret unconscious communicationsthat is, to use oneself as an instrument in the analysis (Freud 1912, p. 116)is to be receptive, at unconscious and preconscious levels, without unbidden personal intromissions. Freud (1912) put this into a formula; the analyst must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient (p. 115). This personal instrumentation calls to mind words in vogue today describing analytic listening: resonance, attunement, authenticity, empathy. Of Freuds three overused and distorted famous analogies (1912) the telephone (p. 115), the mirror (p. 118), and the surgeon (p. 115)it is the surgical one that is most often cited, but in such a way that obfuscates the particular meaning the analogy was designed to convey. Freud was emphasizing the necessity of putting aside personal feelings such as sympathy in order to concentrate all mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skillfully as possible (p. 115). He used a medical analogy because he was a medical man, but its meaning ought to be acknowledged for its broader implications: requisite emotional distance 716
from ones material is a technical necessity in any interpretive art or skill embodying the very concept of technique. Appropriate psychical distance (Bullough 1912), combined with immersion in ones mediumso as to become its instrumentis the hallmark of aesthetic mastery and artistry in any field. It is impossible to perform a technically demanding task, or to realize something symbolically, while wallowing in personal emotions. Only when these emotions are mediated and rendered symbolically through the medium can we speak of interpretive acumen. Freuds technical recommendations converge on the intent to create for the analyst a counterpart to the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis (1912, p. 115): to loosen barriers created by everyday discourse conventions in order to generate a psychical field. His principal methodological concern was to make sure that neither member of the dyad introduced obstructions to the establishment of a free flow of unconscious communications between them. We are, in essence, to both open and close psychical boundaries simultaneously, while maintaining a requisite vigilance provided by the observing ego. Given his position on analytic neutrality and abstinence, Freud recommended that analysts be opaque to their analysands, reflecting back only what is shown to them (1912, p. 118). True to his style, Freud provided loose guidelines for how but not really what to do: aside from a few procedural rules, his only technical instructions are on the subject of when to begin interventions. Here he assigned prime importance to the establishment of a proper rapport (1913a, p. 139): It remains the first aim of the treatment he wrote, to attach the analysand to the analyst and the process, a task for which nothing in particular need be done except allow time, carefully clear away initial resistances, show genuine interest, and avoid making certain mistakes (pp. 139140). The following sentence became controversial due to the apparent mistranslation of a key term in it: It is certainly possible to forfeit this first success if from the start one takes up any standpoint other than one of sympathetic understanding . . . (p. 140). Sympathetic understanding is the term in question, apparently mistranslated from the German Einfhlung, properly translated as empathy, a word used sparingly by Freud elsewhere (1905, 1906, 1921) and selected here presumably for its particular significance. If Shaughnessy (1995) is correct, Freud emphasized the importance of adopting an empathic attitude as an essential component of analytic listening. From the very beginning, then, empathy was considered an integral quality of the psychoanalytic attentional stance and a main ingredient in cementing the therapeutic alliance. 717
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This ought to dispel the idea that Freud was anything other than humane and interactive during his analytic conversations. He would have been familiar with the Lippsian theory of empathy, as his selective use of differentiated terms when referring to understanding, sympathy, or feeling into anothers experience clearly indicates. When he used Einfhlung he used it deliberately for its specific psychological and etymological implications. Since he believed the rapport (alliance) might be forfeited by adopting anything other than an empathic attitude, it must have been central to his analytic stance. In his study of group psychology, in discussing the nature of mutual interactions between ego and objects, Freud (1921) offered this definition: A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards anothers mental life (p. 110, n. 2). On several other occasions Freud used the concept to convey this particular way of bringing oneself closer to anothers experience: only somebody who can feel his way into the minds of children is capable of educating them, and we grown-up people cannot understand children because we no longer understand our own childhood (1913b, p. 189; emphasis added). For the most part, analysts have been content with the longstanding psychoanalytic explanation of empathy as a trial identification (Fliess 1942), or partial (Greenson 1967) or temporary (Beres and Arlow 1974) identification, experienced as a voluntary and transient regressive merger leading to an inference of what the others emotional experience is like. In my opinion, borrowing the term identification for the mirroring mechanism in empathy is a mistake: identification operates unconsciously during development and contributes to overall personality structure through wholesale internalizations that are neither transitory nor deliberate. Additionally, the metapsychologically fuzzy implications of regression (what kind of regression?) as presented in the papers just cited provides a perfunctory and incomplete explanation. Similarly, to refer to empathy as an innate capacity (Fliess 1942; Furer 1967; Bachrach 1976), a basic human endowment (Kohut 1971), an intrapsychic experience (Fliess 1942; Greenson 1960; Furer 1967; Bachrach 1976), a mode of cognition that together with introspection is essential to psychological inquiry (Kohut 1959), a royal road to the private (Blechner 1988), or a mode of analytic listening based on attunement (Schwaber 1981), or to affirm its scientific value as a mode of inquiry (Schwaber 1981; Hayes 1994; Kohut 1959) corresponding to 718
Sullivans participant-observer stance (Caligor 1984), all of which may be true, is still to say little about its origins or how its basic operative mechanisms function in diverse situations of human exchange. Empathy is clearly not a creative fiction of the German language (Shapiro 1981, p. 434), since we, and many other nationalities, readily understand what it means. And now, with the expedient discovery of mirror neurons, we have neurophysiological evidence to validate experiential observations of subtle emotional, postural, and neuroendocrine synchronizations. The possibility of feelingly thinking ones way into anothers emotional state is a real neurophysiological phenomenon, although here a caveat is in order: the emotions out of which I conjure the experience of another cannot but be my own. The unconscious origins of these mechanisms point to the early communicative function of affects (facial expression, sound, tone, movement, breathing rhythms, muscle tonus, etc.) but also, in clinical empathy, to the involvement of cognitive input from which we draw inferences and form hypotheses open to validation (Schafer 1959; Sawyer 1975; Beres and Arlow 1974; Kohut 1959, 1971; Shapiro 1981; Buie 1981; Basch 1983). What identifications do take place are with the other persons experience, not the other person per se, writes Basch (1983, p. 105); empathy is with an individuals communications (p. 123), not the persons conscious or unconscious demands. By itself, empathy neither prescribes nor proscribes behavior any more than does the knowledge gained from logical reasoning alone (p. 123). An early established belief in the involvement of identificatory processes (Freud 1921; Deutsch 1926; Fliess 1942; Furer 1967; Beres 1968) and momentary merger as central mechanisms led many analytic authors to trace the source of capacities for adult empathy to where most interpersonal patterns originate, in the undifferentiated phase of infantile symbiosis of the primary dyad (Olden 1953, 1958; Kohut 1966; Burlingham 1967; Furer 1967; Easser 1974; Shapiro 1974; Schafer 1968; Buie 1981). Associating this innate capacity with primary process functioning (see also Beres 1968), Kohut (1966) named this earliest form primary empathy (p. 262), while Schafer (1968), seeking to differentiate immature from mature empathy, wrote: Merging seems to be the chief factor in the most primitive, infantile forms of empathy. On the highest level of empathy, . . . elsewhere termed generative empathy, merging is included as one component along with others (sameness and likeness) of a more articulated and sophisticated kind (p. 153).
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This leads logically to the necessity of postulating a developmental continuum through which to differentiate the earliest forms of empathy from later, more evolved ones. Various writers have attempted to identify its types in developmental terms (Olden 1953, 1958; Schafer 1959; Buie 1981); examine its metapsychological composition (Shapiro 1974, 1981; Buie 1981; Bolognini 2001); explore its cognitive dimensions (Buie 1981); identify its misuse by adopting hyperconcordant attitudes in defensive empathism (Bolognini 1997); and trace its functioning in a line of emotional development, viewing affects as our primary communicative means (Basch 1983). While these contributions did advance descriptions of a complex process, they did not identify the semiotic, semantic, or referential/discourse processes that explain the difference between ordinary and clinical empathy. For this, further theoretical integration is needed. Two papers stressing different facets of the empathic process stand out for their focus on (a) the affective-communicative origins from which empathy evolves (Basch 1983) and (b) the cognitive categories of the internal referents used by the ego while empathizing (Buie 1981). I would agree that affective resonance and cognitive referents are two operative strains that converge in the deliberate or conscious use of empathy. However, their specific semiotic and referential activities need to be understood within a comprehensive theoretical framework with explanatory principles that identify (a) semiotic processes differentiating early from mature empathy and (b) the particular discourse processes further differentiating mature from clinical empathy. If it were not already clear that empathy is not magical, mystical, primitive, or particularly intuitive, that it is not a discrete function but an attentional disposition employing ordinary sense-receptors as well as reflective, referential capacities, these papers by Basch and Buie help demystify its sources and processes. They do not, however, get to the essence of its developmental line or its operative mechanisms in psychoanalytic situations.
FOR AND AGAINST THE CLINICAL C E N T R A L I T Y O F E M PAT H Y
Attempts to dissect the complex anatomy of empathy did not prevent the explosion of a controversy over its value, use, and role in clinical psychoanalysis. This controversy divided the field between those like Freud 720
(1921), Ferenzci (1928), Kohut (1959, 1971), Loewald (1970), Ornstein (1994), Lichtenberg (1989), Schwaber (1981), and Post (1980) who deem it essential in (a) establishing trust and forming an alliance, (b) penetrating anothers inner state in psychological inquiry, and (c) facilitating therapeutic regression and redevelopment, and others, such as Hartmann (1964), Shapiro (1981), Shevrin (1978), Buie (1981), Stern (1994), and Klugman (2001), who consider it an unscientific, potentially misleading, and unreliable source of information. This controversy was certainly exacerbated by Kohuts close pairing of introspection and empathy as sole modes of psychoanalytic inquiry and by self psychologys preponderant emphasis on understanding over insight. It is doubtful that either party held views so extreme as to exclude either insight or understanding as central epistemological factors in psychoanalysis. Yet the debate left unfortunate residues supporting the inaccurate assumption that empathy plays no part in exploration and interpretation, both important intervening steps in sequences leading to working through and insight. The controversy was fueled by superficial understanding of the convergence of perceptual, cognitive, and mediating referential processesindeed scant knowledge of any semiotic or discourse processesinvolved in psychoanalytic empathy, and by a general tendency in our field to be content with loose descriptive formulas for complex multidimensional phenomena. Clinical empathy necessitates indepth understanding of the semantic, semiotic, and discourse processes involved in its specialized use in situations that aim at verbalizing often very subtle qualities of experience. Most analysts will agree that empathy provides access to emotional, unspoken dimensions of anothers experience, and that an empathic attitude is more than a stance but also conveys a disposition, establishing nonverbal channels that depend on the transmission of affect (Basch 1983, p. 106) and hence is a way of interacting. Yet most would not want to leave it at that, arguing that empathy also entails cognitive processes involving a temporarily regressed ego state (Schafer 1959) reminiscent of Kriss controlled, creative ego regressions (1952) leading to participatory involvement (a state adopted when partaking in artistic production). Most authors agree that despite transient de-differentiation the mature empathizer maintains, and is aware of maintaining, intrapsychic separateness while empathizing (Fliess 1942; Beres 1968; Schafer 1959; Beres and Arlow 1974; Greenson 1960). Yet, as Shapiro (1974) queried, how can we support both the idea of merging and object distance within 721
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a single function of the ego? (p. 11). (The answer is in the mediating effects of semiotic and semantic reference, described below, which bifurcate ego functions into experiential and linguistic processes.) Countering the merger idea even more pointedly, Buie (1981) stressed that full adult empathy is object-centered, not self-centered (p. 287). Yet decentration by itself does not sufficiently explain a way of knowing that employs as instruments of understanding a wide range of sensory-emotive and cognitive-linguistic faculties in all three systemsUcs., Pc., and Cs. To trace the development of empathy from its phenomenologically unmediated form to its most consciously controlled, deliberate application in clinical listening, we have to understand its roots and ontogenetic source, and the semiotic and referential mediations according to which it becomes increasingly specialized within psychoanalytic semantic fields. The term semantic field as used here refers to the creation of a sphere of increasing conscious awareness brought about by the semantic application and linguistic use in discourse of specific referential terms. With respect to the psychoanalytic semantic, these terms refer specifically to a broad range of unconscious meanings, processes, and phenomena. The unconscious, in this semantic, becomes our worldview, the perceptual prism through which everything in its discourse situations is observed and understood. Because empathy is associated with immediate, nonexplicit forms of apprehension affording direct access to anothers emotional state (Feiner and Kiersky 1994, p. 425), it arouses suspicion in those who, perhaps rightly, seek less elusive exploratory tools for use in our science. Actually, clinical empathy ought to be a fully differentiated and specially mediated response accompanied by verbal exploration and validation. The fact that its differentiated forms and specialized use have not been fully explicated has created a false or naive dualism pitting empathicists against rationalists. Thus the concept played right into the old Cartesian dichotomy that placed affects in opposition to thought and cognition, thereby reinforcing the Freudian idea (expressed in the id/ego dichotomy) that what is nonverbal or emotional cannot also be rational that feelings and rationality are immutably irreconcilable. These extremely polarized viewpoints were expressed through the voices of Kohut (1959) and Shapiro (1981). In a landmark paper examining the relationship between mode of observation and theory, Kohut (1959) was categorical:
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Only a phenomenon that we can attempt to observe by introspection or by empathy with anothers introspection may be called psychological. . . . We . . . designate phenomena as mental, psychic or psychological if our mode of observation includes introspection and empathy as an essential constituent. The term essential in this context expresses (a) the fact that introspection or empathy can never be absent from psychological observation, and (b) that it may be present alone [p. 462].
Here empathy and introspection are considered the defining means by which psychoanalytic inquiry takes place. Kohut fails to acknowledge the mediating cognitive and referential dimensions implicit in interpretive activity and consequently also their corollaries in the analysands laborious but crucial working through that leads to insight. Understandably, Shapiro, after his earlier consideration of empathy (1974), is by 1981 far more critical of the concepts general use (or abuse), calling the fields shift toward a romantic vision (p. 427) a conceit born of disappointment (p. 428) due to a failure to achieve genuine scientific status:
psychoanalysis is, above all, a rationalist enterprise devoted to observations involving all the senses and employing judgments about those perceptions without the requirement that we make of empathy an additional function that will remove us prematurely from the rest of science. . . . the quest for a psychology of meaning and its relation to conscious and unconscious dynamic states associated with the potential for affective expression is too important a change in psychoanalysis object of scrutiny to segregate from science. Understanding these ideas and their disposition is, and should continue to be, the aim of psychoanalysis [pp. 436437].
In the overheated atmosphere of this controversy, Shapiro, Buie, and those sharing the rationalist agenda wrote papers intended to dispel the notion that empathy is a distinct organ of perception (Shapiro 1981) providing direct powers of intromission into anothers experience. Whereas I share similar convictions regarding the psychoanalytic enterprise, I fail to grasp why admitting the use of empathy as part of our attentional stanceeven as an essential part of itcan dampen the scientific or rational basis of our method. That primary empathy originates in unconscious nonverbal resonance does not imply that it is mysterious or intuitive, or is an unscientific mode of inference. It bears repeating: an empathic clinical stance employs ordinary perceptual, sensory-emotive, cognitive, and linguistic faculties. Moreover, rationality is not a segregated 723
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function of thought or cognition isolated from the rest of the organism and nervous system; rather, it is the integration of a way of understanding articulated through a system of well-reasoned ideas. Empathy and rationality are not antithetical: quite the contrary. Each in its own way harnesses a whole spectrum of sensibilities and cognitive faculties, apportioned entirely differently for different purposes and interpretive aims. The relative balance of these sensibilities, and the skill and precision with which they are put to use, are reflective of personal acuity and intelligence rather than inherent properties of the faculties themselves. Supporting the idea of empathy as a mediated response inclusive of, but not limited to, the affective dimension, Schwaber (1984) offered a serviceable definition: Empathy . . . is that mode of attunement which attempts to maximize a singular focus on the patients subjective reality, seeking all possible cues to ascertain it. . . . As a scientific modality, empathy employs our cognitive, perceptual, as well as affective capacities (p. 160); or, to revisit Buies succinct definition (1981), in essence it is an intrapsychic phenomenon based in a human capacity to know another persons experience . . . (p. 282). Its inherently interactive, dialectical nature has been noted by few (Greenson 1960; Shapiro 1974; Buie 1981; Basch 1983), as has the operative centrality of its oscillations between participant-observation and referencing, so crucial in the controlled, conscious use of empathy (Reik 1948; Kohut 1959; Greenson 1960). Drawing attention to its reciprocal, two-way quality, Greenson (1960) stressed that our ability to empathize may be facilitated or thwarted by the others receptivity or resistance (p. 422); Shapiro (1974, p. 4) decried the omission in our literature of important data regarding the patients use of empathy. The dialectical quality and bidirectional impact of empathy, and its increasingly mediated functioning, are in fact central points to be taken up in the following discussion. What is missing entirely in these accounts, however, is attention to, or understanding of, the semiotic, linguistic contributions of semantic and propositional reference working side by side with emotional resonance in clinical listening. Empathy is a necessary component of the attentional stance for our semantic because so many of our referents are nonlinguistic. The papers I have reviewed designate terms without having identified the underlying operative principles; naming a psychological phenomenon is not to have understood its constitution. To do so requires a full metapsychological examination along topographical, dynamic, semiotic, developmental, interpersonal, and even evolutionary 724
or adaptive lines. Only Feiner and Kiersky (1994) have come close to identifying and analyzing the full range of mechanisms underlying empathic understanding. While some distinction is made between primary and mature empathy, no distinction is made between ordinary, mature empathy and the specialized use of mature empathy in a specific discourse situation, within a particular semantic field, for specific purposes. All psychological processes undergo changes akin to morphological transformations under the mediating impact of signs and symbols. The interpolation into human experience of any semiotic process increases its complexity, radically transforming that experience by adding representational, referential, and conceptual dimensions. This radically alters its functional constitution, meaning that later versions of earlier forms are different in kind as well as in functional form. An epigenetic conceptualization of human interactions implies that earlier modes of attunement continue to coexist with later forms, though highly abbreviated and subdued, creating multistratal phenomena operating at multiple levels simultaneously. This means that both automatic modes of attunement and highly mediated interpretive activities go on simultaneously in clinical empathy. The categories organizing semiotic development are better viewed not so much as from primitive to mature as from natural to mediated, as following a continuum that originates in undifferentiated, innate forms and moves to increasingly differentiated forms. Consideration, however, must also be given to the semantic and referential dimensions of the discourses overall purpose (to interpret the unconscious), as well as the interlocutors, roles, and speech activities in it. This allows for the question, What kind of empathy are we speaking about? How does it develop and function in our specialized discourse? Without due consideration of the developmental principles of symbolic mediation and discourse reference, psychoanalysts are left pointing to complex cognitive processes underlying clinical empathy, intuited but left unexplained. Psychoanalytic discourse situations are semantic fields soaked through and through with interactions that run the gamut of a hierarchy of modes of human communication from least-differentiated projective-introjective modes to the highest symbolic conceptualizations and abstractions. It is, I believe, through the explanatory principles of symbolic mediation and semantic and discourse reference that a theoretically clarifying breakdown of the empathic process can emerge. Once its origins, development, and bifurcated operative features are elucidated, they 725
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account for the key role it plays in gathering information and promoting understanding of those dimensions of human experience that we seek to integrate when words must be found to fill the gaps where feelings have spoken.
D E V E LO P M E N TA L T H E M E S : S E M I O T I C S A N D A F F E C T S
Along with other analysts, notably Edelson (1975), Rosen (1969), Litowitz (1990; Litowitz and Litowitz 1977), Lacan (1968, 1978), Shapiro (1979, 1981), Muller (1996), and Olds (2000), I believe in the value of integrating linguistic and semiotic principles to understand psychoanalytic phenomena. With roots in linguists and philosophers like Saussure (1916), Cassirer (19521957), Langer (1942, 1967), Werner and Kaplan (1963), and Goodman (1984), and in developmental theorists (Piaget and Inhelder 1969; Bruner 1983; Mahler, Pine, and Bergman 1975; Vygotsky 1978, 1981), my work builds on an organismic, developmental paradigm. To clarify the semiotic points that will be highlighted, a definition of terms and their specific usage throughout this paper may be helpful. Semiotic is a descriptive term originating in the Greek semeion (sign), generally referring to a system of signs in language. Since we are examining the operative features of an interactive or communicative phenomenon with potentially deep phylogenetic roots, when using the term I refer to a singularly human trait that enables us to make use of signs and symbols as designators and signifiers of thingsto point to, refer to, represent, stand for, and depict complex meanings as no other species can. Clear distinctions are made between the biological signal, a mode of communication that we may share with primates and other species, and systems of signs and symbols, which due to cerebral anatomy and evolution are unique to humans. With reference to further functional distinctions between signals, signs, and symbols, I operate theoretically from a biosemiotic developmental framework (Aragno 1997, 2008) positing a developmental sequence, phylogenetically programmed in the human child, that develops unevenly in ontogenesis. The developmental continuum moves from natural (biological) global affective expressionssignals and moves through the sign (serving either indicative or referential functions) to the formation of the symbol proper (or symbolic function). A symbol stands for something else, is often layered, and may be highly condensed in its more elaborated forms. These are not uniform stages definitively arrived at but specific functional forms, often content- and 726
medium-specific. Not all symbols are linguistic; however, those leading specifically to conscious awareness are necessarily so. In its primary, or natural, form the empathic response originates in an automatically triggered, affect-matching induction, generating the contagion and expression of a similar feeling-state. This species-specific signal system is phylogenetically programmed and destined to be modified fairly rapidly through advances in semiotic mediation to which only our species is privileged. Very soon, therefore, its automatic/reflexive quality is modified by proprioception and shaped by the interception of learned responses. Early forms of mimicry and imitation are the first in a series of unconscious introjective processes initiating capacities that evolve into the ability to internalize experiences by representational means (Piaget and Inhelder 1969). Mimicry in early childhood is an organismic, sensorimotor affair involving the whole body and nervous system: the overt expressions of affect-matching will be interiorized and subdued as feelings are modulated and mediated by increasingly differentiated, ever more expedient defenses and/or acquired referential processes. Their intensity diminishes to a mere signal-of-a-signal. And eventually even this goes under until only the faintest, merely suggestive neurophysiological trace remains. Yet it is on this minuscule, barely perceptible neurophysiological tracesignal that the activation of affect-resonance or an emotion-like response continues to depend. I know of no better description of this than Langers: the perception of emotional expression leads the observer to an unconscious, merely incipient imitation of the fleeting act, and . . . the resulting faint tensions involve an equally faint feeling by which he understands what is passing in the other person (1967, p. 176). The mature empathizer responds to this faint, mirrored arousal as to a subtle signal concomitantly mediating its activation with an array of signifying referents and ideas associated with all that is known of this state and that person, and all that is inferred from the others entire communication. This engaged response implies focus and attention, feelings and thought. The human autonomic nervous system is genetically prepared to react in like fashion to affect signals from other humans: it is this automatic resonance-induction, implicating a global neurophysiological reaction pattern, and not identification proper, that originates the biological roots of empathy. It will be some time before the informational value of these emotional states is endowed with associations signifying specific meanings: and more time still before there is sufficient differentiation for a controlled, mediated response to replace automatically aroused feeling. 727
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Affects are somatic responses to the intensity of stimulation of the nervous system, and not the content, quality or symbolic significance of the stimulus, writes Basch (1983, p. 107), emphasizing the communicative function of affects. Our understanding of empathic attunement in psychoanalysis has been hampered, thus far, by the absence of a comprehensive developmental theory of affects. My theoretical penchant is to view empathy as a mode of interaction and to examine how it works bidirectionally in specific situations. A biosemiotic, developmental model of human communicative modes (Aragno 2008) illustrates how empathy originates in our species-specific instinctual repertoire of eight basic emotional expressions (Tomkins 1962, 1963) and becomes mediated by various semantic and semiotic socializing and/or verbalizing processes. This continuum emphasizes the primary communicative/interactive function of emotions at the start of life, as well as the continued bidirectionality of empathic processes later on. In this framework, as an unmediated, essentially instinctual reaction, contagionout of which empathy will growcounts as a signal, not yet a signified communication proper, in a full psychological sense. The most basic encounter in which affective communication occurs exclusively is the infant/caregiver dyad wherein an adult translates involuntary, automatic affect expressions into meaningful communications. Infants look up at caretakers, responding to them with vivid facial expressions and sounds accompanying actions. The quality of mutual mirroring in this dialectical process is the interactive soil through which is recorded both how we felt and how we perceive we were responded to. These interaction units, together with mimicked facial expressions, are encoded in lasting sensorimotor traces. They set the stage for how we will experience our own feelings and how we will, or will not, attune to others emotional states. Familiar expressive triggers mobilizing affective responses become forerunners from which we assess and understand emotional states in others. In this sense, parents unconsciously endow their infants affects with meanings generated by feelings to which they can themselves relate, and then they label them as such. Affective experiences are . . . perceptual experiences, writes Basch (1983), reminding us that, as with cortically mediated perception, how much information they convey and how meaningful they become depends on what is done with them associatively (p. 116). This is not to say that empathy is a special mode of perception, but rather to stress that it originates in the undifferentiated soil of infantile synesthesia when the anlage for emotional apperception, 728
attachment, and social-affiliative bonding are also laid down (Aragno 1997). The quality of early care, and of familial and cultural styles of emotional expression, will all color later tendencies to both empathize with and accurately read others emotions. And empathic tendencies will be subject to dramatic upheavals during any separation-individuation phase or crisis whenever the developmental pull away, toward separation, is stronger than the impetus to feel with the other. Constitutional proclivities toward empathic resonance, which is also motivated by a desire to lessen anothers distress, vary from person to person, however the basic capacity itself is forged or thwarted in the earliest attachment experiences of the primary dyad and group. This is also because neuronal connections associated with global expressions of primary emotions share deep limbic roots with attachment-behavior constellations. Looking at the feeling/perception connection from the opposite direction-that feelings need not have first been incited in social interchangeLanger (1967) found the source of a primal responsiveness to expression in our basic neurophysiological response to dynamisms inherent in form, claiming that feelings may be engendered by certain perceptual configurations. She cites Volkelt (1920)The feeling-content emanates form the perceptual content. By virtue of the existence of the perceptual content, the feelingcontent exists too (p. 93; quoted in Langer 1967, p. 175)stressing that some percepts convey ideas of internal feelings, without being cathected by association with any emotive experiences (p. 175). This suggests we may be primed toward schematizing tendencies, or Gestalten, impelling us to respond viscerally or aesthetically to expressive forms, be these facial, vocal, figurative, or gestural. The emotional response would emanate instinctively before the sensory stimulus of such forms. Physiognomic perception, as this used to be called, refers to this pronounced sensibility to gross expressive features in various sensory modalities. Its disregard for detail or specific content hearkens back to early development, when feeling, perceiving, and everything else is little differentiated. Given this bidirectional gut-brain, brain-gut, stimulus pathway, it seems to me that phylogenetically our sensibilities toward reading emotional cues have been acutely sharpened for their survival value. Contagion points to receptive processing of a handful of affective expressions-our primordial vocabularydeeply embedded in limbic and subcortical areas, while conscious empathic responses stress top-down activation of emotion by appraisal and cognitive processing (Watt 2005). 729
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T H E N E U R O B I O LO G I C A L S U B S T R AT E : T H E R O O T S O F E M PAT H Y
It will be useful here to include a few words about the neural substrate and the implications of the discovery of mirror neuron circuitry for our understanding of the biological roots of empathy. Insofar as validation is always welcome, this recent discovery and Vittorio Galleses subsequent work provide corroborative neurophysiological anchorage for theoretical points arrived at by observation and conceptual inference alone long before these mirroring networks were identified. Nevertheless, extrapolations from neurobiological data to semiotic processes are always delicate, to say the least: more so since this research initially focused on perception and motor centers in the macaque monkeys brain (and subsequently on dancers in nonverbal activity), whereas my focus here is on the semiotic-linguistic, strictly human overlay of biological processes. Space allows for only a brief summary of the essential themes in Galleses contributions (2001, 2003, 2007; Gallese, Eagle, and Migone 2007), especially those bridging the neurophysiological substrate from monkeys to humanshence from perceptual/action centers to perceptual/ emotional centers and thought functions. Semiotic processes cannot be seen in brain studies; nor are they confined to any strict location or even cortical layer. In a sense they oblige us to study and understand them through their own functioning! However, this research is important, particularly for its potential contributions to the sociobiology of early attachment, communication, and learning, and presents many points of convergence with the overall theoretical content of this paper. We are indebted to Galleses neuroscientific laboratory in Parma, Italy, for his discovery in the late 1990s of mirror neurons, so named because the neural circuitry involved in deliberate (or willed) action and experienced emotions and sensations were found to become activated also when witnessing or observing similar actions, emotions, and sensations in others. From this seed Gallese (2003) now posits that a whole range of different mirror matching mechanisms may be present in our brain (p. 171), an hypothesis with far-reaching potential. One startling finding that emerged from his early research was the homology between the monkeys area F5 and Brocas area in humans (associated with language) as apparently sharing analogous functions: Brocas region appears to be not only involved in speech control, but also, similarly to the monkeys area F5, in a pre-linguistic analysis of others behavior (Gallese 2003, p. 174). These 730
centers seem to bypass any representational or cognitive/linguistic system by directly feeling into the others state and intent. Recognition of the perceived action, state, or emotion goes straight to the sensorimotor matching state in the viewer, suggesting that the experience is underpinned by activity of a shared neural substrate providing instantaneous, unmediated understanding. This takes place by way of embodied action simulation,1 another of Galleses central concepts (2007). He differentiates automatic mimicry from the simulation process occurring during motor imagery, the main difference being the trigger, or motivewhether it is deliberate1 (consciously willed) or merely observed. Both share activation of parietal and premotor cortex networks in the simulation of action, but each clearly originates in different kinds of impulses. This observation confirms a point stressed in this paper, namely, that ordinary empathy, unmediated by conscious application, is different in kind as well as in neural substrate from deliberate or specialized empathy as used in the clinical stance. Galleses research also underscores the species-specific foundations, or common recognizable repertoire of behaviors and emotions, underlying empathic attunement, and the survival value of instinctual mirroring: for monkeys the automatic practice and rapid learning of action-patterns are essential adaptive mechanisms, whereas in humans a grasp of emotional messages and concomitant semiotic patterns is a crucial forerunner of social adaptation and verbal communication. Relating the mirroring circuits to the human empathic response, Gallese (2001, 2003; Gallese, Eagle, and Migone 2007) invokes the idea of the shared manifold of intersubjectivity, a reciprocating, mirror-matching mechanism by means of which we recognize others as being like us, in a shared commonality of experience. His use of this concept, I believe, points to the profound dialectic that is established through an empathically attuned stance: The observer and the observed are part of a dynamic system governed by reversibility rules (Gallese 2003, p. 176). To return now to the analysis of the empathic process, the mediated empathic response is fed by two vectors. One registers and reacts to perceptual, auditory, and sensory-emotive cues; the other, tied by associative inference to linguistic constructs, responds interpretively. Degrees of
1 To developmental theorists this idea is not really news; Piaget had already expressed a very similar concept in The Psychology of the Child (Piaget and Inhelder 1969, p. 68) with respect to movement. What is new is having pinpointed the precise neural circuitry involved.
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sensitivity or empathic acuity vary, and what to do with information thus derived depends on the situation and ones role and goals in it. Rapid oscillations between participant-observation and private verbal referencing characterize differentiated, truly symbolic forms of deliberate attunement: these yield understanding that can be verbalized. While this aspect of our specialized stance remains deeply attuned to nonverbal undercurrents, clinical empathy must be well integrated with more differentiated, semiotically mediated listening. This enables verbalization of experiential patterns that are transmitted partly as signals and partly through signified meanings at symbolic levels of communication. The signal stimulates action, generating a reaction; the sign points to, denotes, something; only symbolic organization condenses multiple levels evocatively, meaningfully. Resonance with and verbal interpretation of the unconscious requires attunement to all three, simultaneously. This implies a technically controlled, multimodal listening stance. Transient dedifferentiation, or participatory resonance, is common to all forms of attunement to nonverbal stimuli (as in the arts). This consciously controlled, interpenetrative stance filters nonverbal stimuli through sensoryemotive registrations that are, however, not limited to emotional patterns: they include resonance with any kind of directly presented figurative, imagistic, ideational, movement, or sound pattern. Semantic resonance in our psychical fields is also important in grasping deeper unconscious evocations woven through linguistic tropes such as synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, analogy, anecdote, and, that great gnsis of causal belief, narrative form. The unconscious merges what is lowest and highest in human experience, and attunement to its emotional sentience has to move fluidly between a spectrum of direct transmission and verbal communication.
SUMMARY
Originating in automatic affect contagion, the empathic response achieves informational value in its more mature forms when it combines fully differentiated, internal referencing that formulates linguistic or conceptual correspondence with anothers experience without necessarily participating in the others feelings. This is very important when considering the disciplined psychoanalytic use of empathy as part of an interpretive technique: for if its undifferentiated roots originate in affect mirroring, its uppermost branches reach sophisticated ideational forms of conceptual correspondence that, thanks to language and speech, enable 732
us to transcend separateness. Mature and psychoanalytic empathy depend on the ability to formulate an idea of what the others experience is like, and on having come to this understanding by way of a synthesis of perceptual, sensory-emotive, and ideational referents generated in oneself by the other. The bidirectionality of this process is contingent on the unimpeded flow of emotional (and unconscious) information passing through less differentiated channels of communication and, where blockages or defensive obstructions arise, on making these impediments the very targets of interpretive understanding. One cannot but be impressed by the dialectical power of these intertransmissive modes of interchange enabling profound emotional sentience of anothers experience. Empathizers may learn of experiences they personally have never had, and this receptivity enlarges the scope of ones general understanding, enriching the pool of referents with which to further understand others. While it may be true, in a physicalist paradigm, that the material out of which I create the other person in me cannot but be my own (Fliess 1942, p. 213), it is not necessarily true in a paradigm of form, where input and experiencethat is, information can be taken in and assimilated as part of personal knowledge. The role and function of an interpreter, as that of an instrument, is not so much to partake of anothers emotions as to convey them; to understand them well enough to formulate an interpretive portrayal through a symbolic medium. This way of knowing moves through experience as a means of witnessing and understanding. What does such a stance transmit? It communicates benevolent interest, acceptance, compassion, tolerance, respect, forbearance, understanding, closeness, separateness; it is a type of attention that opens channels of interaction generating a sense of safety in being seen, engendering commitment to a process in which progress is slow, unfolding over time. By its disciplined, unswerving analytic commitment and the high value this places on language and the shared utterance, it is a stance intrinsic to a process that plants firm, functional roots in integrations resulting from the struggle to put everything into words, sharpening that transformation into mind that comes of repeated cycles of working through and insight. If it is anchored in benevolent motives, the empathic quality in analytic attention gradually induces trust; a sense of value and purposefulness in a collaborative process; increased tolerance of imperfection and shame; faith in linguistic negotiation; and hope in the possibility of being seen and understood, and of gaining self-mastery through self-inquiry and 733
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communication. For many if not all analysands, at the most archaic levels analytic listening probably functions as a substitute, or equivalent, for the maternal gaze of early mirroring, ideally conveying unconditional presence, attention, and acceptance. This is not to say that profound attunement resonates only with benign chords: the empathic stance is open and willing to enter into the emotional sway of any interactive clinical moment provocative, aggressive, negative, or even hatefuland experience its dynamisms in a truthful way. Precisely because of the engaging, safe quality this stance conveys, it cultivates the interactive soil for unearthing and confronting even the most unpleasant dynamic undercurrents. In this sense an empathic disposition may consistently transmit something quite intangible in the human exchange, fulfilling some basic developmental need a quality of attention that is inherently freeing, growth-promoting, and emotionally maturational. Gratifications within the confines of analytic procedure are plentiful, but they are of an uncommon kind. We are speaking of situations in which language is the only medium, the analyst its instrument. In order for this interpretive instrument to be incisive it is essential that it be carried out at a requisite symbolic distance from its material. This fully differentiated, referential di-stance can be logically explained; it is simply the experience of apprehending through a symbol what was not articulated before (Langer 1942, p. 223). We recognize this immediately as an essential feature of the analytic attitude and of all interpretive activities in our semantic, engendering a special kind of echo so that when something is symbolized linguistically what it produces is not emotional response, but insight (Langer 1942, p. 223). Psychical distance (Bullough 1912), thus contextualized, becomes an aesthetic principle of interpretation: in the clinical setting it is also an ethical anchor fortifying the formal character and specialized speech codes of a situation that ought not be degraded by unmediated expressions of human sympathy. This distance creates the correct referential space in which to practice the procedures of a dialogue that has specific integrative, therapeutic, and educative purposes.
CONCLUSION
The psychoanalytic use of empathy is that aspect of an interpretive disposition that maintains referential awareness with less differentiated modes of engagement employing listening, observing, and particularly
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feeling to gain access to qualities of emotion and ideation. Empathic attunement in psychoanalytic discourse is a way of reaching to the heart of the emotional sense of anothers experience, beyond and beneath surface signifiers, by resonating with its unreferenced, nondiscursive, expressive, and emotionally evocative elements. By resonating with sublinguistic interactive modes, it is also a way of establishing a mutually interpenetrative dialectical nexus at the core of this psychical field (Freud 1914, p. 153). But never, in this discourse, is it an unmediated or undisciplined response. While operating in this communicative field, the analysts function is to maintain sufficient psychical distance from all emergent experiences to be able to refer rather than react to them. The technical use of empathy in clinical psychoanalysis, then, must be founded on the most differentiated of positions, balanced by vigilant self-monitoring and mediated through verbal inquiry and negotiated exchange. Empathy has its own developmental line, frames of reference, and modes of application. The referents to which it provides interpretive access in our discourse range from undifferentiated transmissions to symbolically structured meanings. This mode of attunement is quite different from intersubjectivity as the term is currently used in our field. Clinical empathy is adopted particularly to register special qualities and kinds of nonverbal information. However, empathic attunement also inheres at higher levels cutting across different modes of communication. Perhaps the most important aspect of the analysts role and responsibility is to create and maintain a semiotic field that is symbolically grounded. Analysts ought not respond to signals with signals, but with signs and symbols. For this reason analysts ought to be versed in recognizing the form of response being called up in themselves. Only from a fully differentiated, symbolically grounded stance that integrates auditory, perceptual, and emotional stimuli, signifying them linguistically, can one become aware of the range of unconscious meanings that fluidly pass between interlocutors and must eventually be interpreted in our semantic fields. Analysts must become adept at moving between modalities, quickening the rate of registration of multidetermined, multileveled communications simultaneously signaling, signifying, and symbolizing often ambiguous and ambivalent feelings, images, and ideas. In accordance with the principle of multiple function, our interpretive semantic necessarily activates a type of listening that is multi-tiered, multi-vectored,
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with a polyperspectival spread, hovering evenly over an array of informative stimuli and signifying forms. It is a type of listening that must be guided by the many functional organizations and forms of the communications themselves and hence necessitates attunement to a full spectrum of human meanings, anchoring our investigation and interpretation of psychical phenomena in their enduring biological roots.
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THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

THE LANGUAGE OF EMPATHY

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