Interpretation and empathy: reading Lacan with Kohut

Abstract

This paper reads Lacan's exploration of the unconscious through the prism of Kohut's emphasis upon empathy as the basis for psychoanalytic interpretation. Lacan described the disconnexion characterizing human relationships; our experience of each other and of ourselves is radically alienated by the unconscious. Lacan's unconscious is structured like a language, revealing its complexity through symbolic forms. Language and desire always belong to the Other, a dislocation underlying all transferences. In psychoanalysis, transferences provide interpretive access to the language of the unconscious. For Kohut, interpretation depends on the prior establishment of a stable, sustaining transference; human connexion is a lifelong necessity and full understanding an achievable aim. Lacan's more structural approach to the inner world provides an important counterweight to Kohut's narrow preoccupation with the two-person field, while Kohut's concept of maternal mirroring lends a humane dimension to the icy realms of Lacan's intellectual structures. Despite enormous differences, each of these contemporary rediscoverers of Freud's legacy serves to supplement the perspective of the other.