In a presentation to his colleagues given just 4 days before he died, Heinz Kohut, an important and celebrated theorist in the field of Self Psychology, talked about Empathy. I was able to hear his last words on this subject on a DVD available from Lifespan Learning.
Kohut's primary focus was to set straight his position on empathy, a subject he first presented in 1959, as it relates to analysis and how analysis cures. He begins by warning that merely sentimentalizing ones patient through compassion and being nice is a misuse of empathy. He stressed that to attempt to cure a patient the analyst must take this lower form of empathy to it's higher form in two steps from compassion and holding, like a mother, to giving interpretations and explaining in "genetic dynamic and socioeconomic terms".
Kohut implores the analyst to not abuse empathy as a vaguely supportive measure but to grasp it on all its levels. He describes the developmental line of empathy as one that travels from the archaic level of understanding to the highest level, barely touching the original holding, providing the patient the ground to stand on his own, like the child who ventures out from the mothers arms and while looking back and sensing the pride in the mother for his accomplishment.
He defines empathy as understanding that can be used for either good or evil. "Empathy informs action" is what he said. Using the analogy of the Nazi concentration camps, Heinz Kohut says that is was not sadism or cruelty that was the worst of the experiences there but the encounters which lacked any expressed empathy. Acts of total disregard for the humanness of victims creates "disintegration anxiety", an annihilation of the Self.
I have read various texts describing the characteristics of (malignant) narcissism. A lack of empathy is common among them. If we apply Kohut's description of empathy as informing action for either good or destructive purposes then it leads me to conclude that the narcissist, if in fact he is incapable of empathy, is not acting with the intention of destruction as it may feel to those around him. The narcissist's action must nessesarily be a one of total disregard, resulting in the annihilation of the "Other". Kohut believes that the resulting emptiness (dehumanization) leads to the greatest suffering in the patient.
No comments:
Post a Comment