Empathy and Lacanian psychoanalysis? A qualitative study.

In contrast to other major schools of psychoanalysis, Lacanian psychoanalysis views the concept of empathy with circumspection because as a way of knowing something about the analysand’s experience it is seen to operate in the Imaginary order; that is, empathy from this perspective understands the other’s experience on the basis of one’s own experience, thus colonizing the other’s difference and obscuring the domains of the unconscious and the Real, or that which escapes and resists being symbolized. The present research seeks to critically question and complicate this view of empathy in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using transcriptions of our qualitative interviews with twelve practicing Lacanian analysts about their views on empathy and what place if any it has in their analytic practice, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis to discern how empathy may play a number of unacknowledged roles in Lacanian psychoanalysis and/or be used in novel ways that might contribute to the theorizations of empathy within Lacanian as well as other traditions of psychoanalysis. To interpret the analysts’ viewpoints, we used Lacanian discourse theory because it provides an account of how Lacanian analysts listen and intervene in analytic practice. We applied a reflexive thematic analysis to identify four themes: empathy in the imaginary can be harmful, empathy in the imaginary can be helpful, empathy exercised from the analyst’s position in the Symbolic can honor the difference of the analysand, and such an empathy can be attuned towards the Real or the impossible but without claiming to understand.