Establishing the Therapeutic Impact of Empathy Through “Affect Sharing”

Abstract

What if the enduring desire of the psychoanalytic discipline to be seen as scientific provoked the suppression of certain therapeutic practices? It would explain why Kohut defined empathy only as a mode of clinical observation when he began discussing it, because even that proposal risked being seen as unscientific and controversial. Today, there exists a more favorable professional atmosphere, which should allow for empathic phenomena to now be included in a theory of cure. Clinical examples in this article demonstrate how “affect sharing” can be used in this way. Affect sharing occurs when the therapist believes he or she is reverberating with the affect the patient feels, resulting from a “sharing” selfobject transference, the aim of which is to elicit a shared emotional state with the therapist. In “descriptive affect sharing,” therapists are encouraged to feel what their patients are feeling when listening to their patients’ evocative descriptions. In “active affect sharing,” an activity introduced by the patient can lead to a shared emotional experience within the analytic dyad. These patient-initiated empathic events are experienced as having been shared when the therapist communicates—verbally or non-verbally, directly or indirectly—that affect sharing has occurred. Incrementally escalating affective communications are defined as “reciprocal intensifications” of affect sharing, where both patient and therapist use emotional phraseology and tone to intensify and solidify the shared empathic connection. Affect sharing is a form of empathy that constitutes its own selfobject experience, with mutative properties that firmly establish empathy as an integral component of therapeutic change.