Where Empathy in Psychotherapy Originated: C. Rogers, His Psychoanalytic Predecessors and Followers

Abstract

This article presents a historical-psychological analysis of how the concept of empathy appeared and became established in psychotherapy. It examines in detail the early psychoanalytic approaches of S. Ferenczi and O. Rank and their possible influence on C. Rogers’s laying the groundwork for the role of empathy. For the first time in Russian psychology, the article illuminates certain aspects of the biographies of Rogers and H. Kohut as the founders of new schools in psychotherapy, of which empathy is the paramount feature. Kohut’s self-psychology is analyzed from the standpoint of his postulation of the “threefold” status of empathy as a method of psychology, a tool of the analyst, and the subject of a universal requirement of development. It briefly considers the development of the views of Rogers and Kohut in the latest “experiential” schools in the person-centered approach and intersubjective psychoanalysis.