Empathy in Psychotherapy: What Is It and What Else Do We Need?

In their 1949 paper, “The Empathic Responses” (Cottrell & Dymond, 1949) the authors call attention to empathy as a neglected concept in psychiatry and highlight the work of Harry Stack Sullivan as seminal to understanding its proper place. Empathy has long had a checkered career in psychiatry and psychotherapy, having been looked upon as largely irrelevant in some schools (Havens, 1973) and centrally essential in others (Rogers, 1957). Psychiatry’s struggles with empathy begin with the difficulty of agreeing about the meaning of the concept (Batson, 2009). A dictionary definition of empathy as “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another” (Oxford Languages) provides as good a general orientation as any to the term. This essay attempts to clarify some of the complexities of empathy in psychotherapy, leaving aside its more general social, philosophical, and moral implications. For more general discussions, an excellent review by Elliott et al. (2011) deals with research on empathy in psychotherapy and one by Steuber (2018) with philosophical and social aspects of empathy. EMPATHIC UNDERSTANDING