Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Kohut (1984) defined empathy as the capacity to think and feel the other’s internal world. Empathy serves two clinical objectives: (1) Comprehension, by which the analyst perceives what the patient is experiencing at a particular moment and communicates in a verbal or non-verbal manner that the patient’s experience is understood, and (2) Explication, in which the analyst uses this comprehension, accumulated over time, to explain the meaning of the patient’s experience, connecting it with past experiences. In the current article, a continuum theory of empathy is offered, whereby empathy may be viewed as composed of three continuums: the resonance continuum, the comprehension continuum and the identification of needs continuum. These elements are not linear but in interaction with each other and will be detailed below.
It is further proposed that empathy exists in two dimensions: a non-verbal/facial dimension that is timeless, existing only in the here and now, and a verbal dimension that is necessarily in time and involves communication.
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