title: Interpretation and empathy: reading Lacan with Kohut.
abstract: This paper reads Lacan's exploration of the unconscious through the prism of Kohut's emphasis upon empathy as the basis for psychoanalytic interpretation. Lacan described the disconnexion characterizing human relationships; our experience of each other and of ourselves is radically alienated by the unconscious. Lacan's unconscious is structured like a language, revealing its complexity through symbolic forms. Language and desire always belong to the Other, a dislocation underlying all transferences. In psychoanalysis, transferences provide interpretive access to the language of the unconscious. For Kohut, interpretation depends on the prior establishment of a stable, sustaining transference; human connexion is a lifelong necessity and full understanding an achievable aim. Lacan's more structural approach to the inner world provides an important counterweight to Kohut's narrow preoccupation with the two-person field, while Kohut's concept of maternal mirroring lends a humane dimension to the icy realms of Lacan's intellectual structures. Despite enormous differences, each of these contemporary rediscoverers of Freud's legacy serves to supplement the perspective of the other.
authors.affiliation: General Psychiatry Practice and Eating Disorders Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston 02114.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hamburg
mesh_terms: D004645:Empathy; D005619:Freudian Theory; D006801:Humans; D009769:Object Attachment; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology