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.
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
Our creation is the modification of relationship.
If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.
With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen
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