Introduction

Again, the spark that took the term "empathy" -once employed with relatively little argument by analysts from a variety of schoolsand elevated it to its current position was Kohut's self psychology. Yet, as these volumes attest, the illumination shed by a consideration of empathy exterids far beyond the initial spark. From different theoretical foundations, the contributors to these volumes cast light on

both familiar and unexpected clinical and extraclinical psychoanalytic issues through their reflections on empathy.