Pseudo-empathy: The Analyst’s Help or Hindrance?

Pseudo-empathy is one of the more disheartening trends of our time. It is a false claim of caring or understanding, usually by someone trying to get something he or she wants. It is a form of manipulation, a cynical consequence of the increasing narcissism, and also narcissistic pain, in American society.

People are hungry for affirmation and validation. They want

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to know someone “gets” them. So a political candidate seeking votes only has to act like she or he cares. Bill Clinton set a standard for pseudo-empathy during the 1992 presidential campaign, not just with his declaration “I feel your pain,” but also with his charismatic ability to connect with voters.

Pseudo-empathy is also a ploy, a strategy. Advertising and the media are full of pseudo-empathy. A bank whose aim is profit has an ad campaign that uses words like “relationship” or “understanding.” A TV station’s nickname is “My9.” Talk show and home shopping hosts act like everyone’s best friend. The fake touchy-feeliness is aimed at getting people to spend.

Books purportedly about empathy that are now on the market include The Empathy Factor: Your Competitive Advantage for Personal, Team, and Business Success and Men, Women, and the Power of Empathy: You Can Really Connect with Him!

This phenomenon bears little resemblance to the empathy that is an integral part of analytic work. Ralph R. Greenson (The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis I, 1967) defined real empathy very simply: “Empathy means to share, to experience the feelings of another human being… Its motive, in psychoanalysis, is to gain understanding; it is not used for vicarious pleasure” (368).

Greenson’s theory of where empathy resides in the psyche—in what’s known as the preconscious, or the part of the psyche that is just beyond the conscious state—underscores the difference between pseudo-empathy and real empathy. Pseudo-empathy is quite calculated, which puts it into the conscious part of the brain. Real empathy, even though an analyst may examine and question it during or after a session, is not something that can be calculated.

Although it’s false, pseudo-empathy resonates with so many people in our society. That raises for me the question of whether the spread of pseudo-empathy will help or hinder analysis and analysts. Most patients crave empathy. But will people who are gratified by pseudo-empathy be able to tolerate the empathy and empathic responses offered by an analyst—responses that may not always be warm and fuzzy?

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Sometimes an analyst is angry, yet still empathic. I remember snapping at a long-term patient, “What are you doing?” in response to another self-defeating plan she was about to carry out. At first I wondered about my countertransference and technique, and then reminded myself that this treatment was very much about someone who didn’t have enough limits but also wanted those limits. The patient’s response, after we talked about her reaction to what I had said, was to stop and think about what she was doing.

Stephen A. Mitchell (Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, 1993) may have the answer in the patient’s need for authenticity: “What the patient requires more than anything else is some sense of his impact on another, some honest expression of what the analyst is really feeling” (145).

To be fair, real empathy, even the sometimes blunt and frank variety, can be found in our society, although many people might not identify it as empathy. People are often grateful, perhaps years later, after a parent, teacher, coach or friend has challenged them or given them tough love. In the novel The Art of Fielding (2012), Chad Harbach describes why a teenager who had dropped out of school returned to class after being confronted by a coach:

The coach hadn’t left him alone; hadn’t assumed that he knew what he was doing. Instead he bothered to get in Schwartz’s face, to tell him exactly what he thought of him, in the most forceful way he knew how. Nobody else—relatives, teachers, friends—had ever done such a thing for Schwartz, before or since (104).

This reminds me of something one of my instructors said during my analytic training: “You will be listening to your patients in a way no one has ever listened to them before.” So, I am reassured somewhat by the fact that psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be a great help in this increasingly narcissistic society that seems to be thriving on pseudo-empathy.

What still nags at me is the possibility that the expectations that pseudo-empathy might create will lead to shorter and shorter treatments, especially when the inevitable disappointments and ruptures happen. Of course, there have always been highly narcissistic

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patients for whom even a good-enough analyst is a disappointment—the analyst has to be perfect. Many patients over the years have measured their analysts against clinicians in movies and on television, including Dr. Berger in “Ordinary People” and Dr. Melfi in “The Sopranos,” and asked, “Why aren’t you like them?”

But I’m also looking at pseudo-empathy along with phenomena in our society like shrinking attention spans and disembodied ways of communicating, such as texting, that I fear might make pseudo-empathy look that much more inviting. Will fewer patients have the tolerance and commitment for long-term treatment—and I’m thinking of two years, not 10 or 15—when a truly empathic analyst doesn’t gratify the need for something that feels good right now? Will the patient, analyst and treatment survive what is probably inevitable in every analysis or therapy—an empathic failure by the analyst?

In the early stages of working with a patient, an analyst lays the foundation that can help a patient feel a true empathic presence. For example, as the work unfolds, the analyst who realizes that a patient needs a self-object or mirroring is in a position to provide empathy that has been missing. For example, the analyst who recognizes that a patient perceives her as a withholding parent, and interprets that dynamic to the patient, is being empathic.

One answer to my title question, I think, is to try to get a sense in the early stages of treatment of what expectations pseudoempathy might have raised in a patient. The analyst is likely to have an opportunity at some point to explore with a patient what it’s like to not be understood or to be disappointed, simply because there’s no pseudo-empathy in the room.

Ultimately, the patient might need to hear from her analyst: “Yes, I’ve disappointed you. That’s because I’m real.”

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