TY - JOUR A1 - Feiner, Kenneth A1 - Kiersky, Sandra T1 - Commentary on Paper by Steven H. Knoblauch JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 04 (1994), pp. 487-497. Y1 - 1994 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Feiner, Kenneth A1 - Kiersky, Sandra T1 - Commentary on paper by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 04 (1994), pp. 425-440. N2 - Though empathy remains a central concept in psychoanalysis, attempts to explain the operations and functions in the empathic process have been as divergent as the various meanings associated with the term itself. Any explanation of the mechanism of empathy must include how we have access to the inner experience of others or account for the link between the empathizer and the inner state of the object. In this paper, the authors review different models (Freud, 1921 Kohut, 1959 Basch, 1983, 1988 Buie, 1981 Schafer, 1968 Klein, 1946, 1963) of empathic understanding and note that while these models rely on imitation, identification, merger, projection, or inference as the basis of empathic understanding, each implies only an indirect understanding of the states of others. The authors propose a two-phase model of empathy that differs from those models reviewed in that their position assumes that the perception of emotion in the other is immediately accessible through isomorphic psychological and physical processes that often result in an experience of resonance of the same emotion inthe self (Beebe, 1990). According to this view, the empathic process consists of an initial perceptual phase that generates affective resonance and a second phase in which complex cognitive-affective operations contribute to the construction of meaning. We posit that empathic understanding affords the observer direct access to certain qualities of the other's experience. The model borrows from Wolfgang Köhler's (1947) concept of isomorphism and Rudolph Arnheim's (1949) theory of the perception of expression. Evidence for this model is presented from experimental psychology. A discussion of a case from an earlier paper on empathy by Beres and Arlow (1974) illustrates how the operations underlying empathy contribute to understanding a patient in a clinical setting. Finally, we conclude the paper with a brief discussion of some of the clinical implications of this model. Y1 - 1994 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kiersky, Sandra A1 - Beebe, Beatrice T1 - Commentary on Martin Stephen Frommer's >homosexuality and psychoanalysis< JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 04 (1994), pp. 389-408. N2 - An interpretive strategy, based on current infant research, is described that facilitates engagement with emotionally constricted patients who appear to form little attachment to their analysts. Relevant research is reviewed and clinical material is presented to illustrate the presence of highly restrictive early modes of self- and mutual regulation organized in childhood and minimally transformed through later experience. These nonverbal presymbolic forms of relating constitute adult versions of the early interaction structures that protected the infant from trauma and continue to be used by patients to avoid retraumatization. How these configurations appear in the transference and can be reorganized in the analytic relationship is also detailed. Y1 - 1994 ER -