Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.
Interpretation
Empathy involves understanding and sharing the feelings of others.
This quote by Heinz Kohut emphasizes the importance of empathy in human relationships. It suggests that true understanding arises when one can not only comprehend but also emotionally connect with the experiences and feelings of another person, allowing for deeper connections and more compassionate interactions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation on emotional intelligence.
If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true - that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound.
Difficulty empathising translates into a whole set of hurdles. You might be last person to get the point of a joke, which can leave you feeling like an outsider. You might end up saying something that another person finds hurtful or offensive, when that was the last thing you intended.
HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug: Heaven knows they need it.
She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America.
The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting.
Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice.
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