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Empathy in Client-Centered Therapy

A Contrast with Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology

Department of Psychology, California State University Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA 90747.

While empathy is important in psychoanalytic, self-psychological, and client-centered therapies, its primary function is seen as different in each. For client-centered therapy, the major function of empathy is to create a certain kind of learning experience through which clients come to live and relate to themselves differently. Specifically, it is to help people develop the "skill" of learning to use experiential referents in making moment-to-moment life decisions. For psychoanalysis, empathy is used primarily to help the therapist (and subsequently clients) develop insight into client unconscious dynamics. For self psychology, empathy functions to strengthen self-structure. These functions are not incompatible. Self psychology, in particular, converges on the client-centered view of empathy's curative power, over and above its insight-enhancing function, though the two approaches explain this differently.

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