Psychoanalytic Psychology

2001, Vol. 18, No. 4, 684-704

Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation

0736-9735/01/S5.00 DOI: 10.1037//0736-9735.18.4.684

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Empathy's Romantic Dialectic

Self Psychology, Inter subjectivity,
and Imagination
David Klugman, CSW
Upper Nyack, New York

The author views Kohut's conceptualization of psychoanalytic

empathy and its subsequent development by intersubjectivity
theorists as an extension of a larger Romantic epistemological
tradition in which the role of imagination in mental life is both
central and precise. To illuminate this argument, the author
reconsiders Kohut's distinction between the "presence of empathy" and "empathy as a mode of observation." Next is
described the way in which the ambivalence represented by
this distinction is resolved through intersubjectivity theory.
Finally, the author explores several key aspects of the Romantic imagination as a response to Cartesianism in order to evolve
an understanding of empathy as a bilateral procedure mediating self-experience and experience of the other.
In every act of conscious perception, we at once identify our being with that of
the world without us, and yet place ourselves in centra-distinction to that world.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

David Klugman, CSW, independent practice, Nyack, New York.

I express my appreciation to Dr. George Atwood and Dr. Robert Stolorow,
whose close and careful readings of this article helped me to clarify both my feelings
and my thoughts.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David Klugman,
CSW, 104 Lewis Drive, Upper Nyack, New York 10960. Electronic mail may be sent
to Spleeno@aol.com.

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SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND IMAGINATION 685

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I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Wallace Stevens, from 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"

Viewing psychoanalysis contextually can have value for psychoanalytic

theorizing. For instance, acknowledging Freud's fealty to the fundamental
principles of Helmholtzian biology has shed light on the understanding of
his adherence to a strictly dualistic determinism (Yalom, 1980, p. 69)
evident, say, in his explanation of hysterical conversion (Gedo, 1996, p.
36). Similarly, identifying characteristics of the larger, dialogic currents
within which the psychoanalytic conversation is taking place can help to
elucidate the stakes behind certain theoretical positions. I am most interested in the historical current of Romanticism and its theory of
imagination.
Briefly, as Engell (1981) has noted, the idea of imagination did not
begin with the Romantics but was largely a product of early Enlightenment thinking. Its primary function was to replace the medieval concept of
the Great Chain of Beinga concept that was losing ground fast with the
advance of rationalism and the new sciences. As the medieval unities
between the mental and the natural, the human and the divine, began to
cleave,
the creative imagination became a way to unify man's psyche . . . to return by
the pathways of self-consciousness to a state of ... the sublime where senses,
mind, and spirit elevate the world around them even as they elevate themselves.
(Engell, 1981, p. 6)

Ironically, certain aspects of Enlightenment thinking grew into the very

edifice against which Romanticism was, at least in part, a reaction (Tarnas,
1991). The primary objects of this reaction were an ever-increasing
determinism and a mechanistic model of the universe handed down from
Newton and Descartes and later elaborated within the models of empirical
science. Opposing these models as fairly representing the human situation,
Romanticism seized on the idea of imagination as a way to both combat
and bridge the fundamental rifts that the new rationalism was creating. The
pervasive dialog that emerged between these forces is, of course, still
taking place; sometimes overtly, though more often covertly in a variety
of forms. My thesis in this article is that psychoanalysis is not exempt and

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686

KLUGMAN

that the dialog betweenwhat shall I call it?Rationalism and Romanticism is occurring, often heatedly, within its borders.1
One classic, if not altogether accurate way to illustrate the general
stakes of the conflict is to go to the social sciences and cite the fairly
commonplace distinction between (a) Hobbes's view of mankind as a
"war of all against all," in which man's basic nature is aggressive,
destructive, and self-interested and (b) Rousseau's vision of the "noble
savage," in which the systems of government and the institutions of
society are held accountable for man's foibles (Taylor, 1989). In view of
this, one might be tempted to say that there are, generally speaking, two
types of people, and therefore also two types of psychoanalytic theorists:
those who do and do not believe in the basic goodness of human beings.
Although self-ironizing binaries like this one are egregiously oversimple
and distorting, there may be more than a bit of truth to the notion that some
of the earliest conflicts in psychoanalysisbetween, say, Freud and
Ferenczi (Palmer & Meyer, 1995), or Freud and Jung (1965)can be
talked about meaningfully in such terms, where the latter in each case
represents a variation on Romantic tradition. In this article I view Kohut
from within that tradition in order to evaluate the revolutionary impact of
his theory of empathy on psychoanalytic treatment. Although some of the
explicit differences between Freud and Kohut will emerge at various
points (e.g., whereas Freud [1920/1961] posited, a la Hobbes, a basic
sexual and aggressive drive in human nature, Kohut [1977], a la Rousseau,
believed that "driven behavior" is fallout from a more primary mishandling of the child's needs by the selfobjec't milieu), my central task is to
elucidate the way in which Kohut's vision of the empathic analyst,
mediating between self-experience and experience of the other, extends a
Romantic, post-Cartesian paradigm in which the role of imagination is
both central and precise. I begin with a survey of Kohut's theory of
empathy and its intersubjectiv'e reformulations. Next I discuss the various
aspects of Romanticism in which I am interested (primarily via
Coleridge's theory of imagination). Finally, after examining several key
critiques of Romantic epistemology, I conclude with an argument for the
relevance of integrating a Romantically conceived theory of imagination
into our thinking about empathy in psychoanalysis.
1

I use the term Rationalism in this context because of its association to the kind
of methodology against which Romanticism initially emerged (see, e.g., Rosen, 1992).

SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND IMAGINATION 687

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Kohut's Ambivalent Empathy

Kohut (1971, 1977, 1978, 1984) introduced empathy into the center of the
psychoanalytic enterprise and thus transformed the action of the analytic
scene. Even those who consider self psychology to be a one-person model
recognize the paradigm shift that Kohut's contribution represents (Orange,
Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997; A. Ornstein & Ornstein, 1995; P. Ornstein,
1978; Schwaber, 1981). A central feature of this shift is the subjective
participation of the analyst (via empathy, or "vicarious introspection") in
the therapeutic action. A direct route to the patient's inner life, Kohut's
empathic mode obviates the need for strict adherence to metapsychological assumptions, emphasizing instead the patient's subjective, relational
experience (Orange et al., 1997, p. 6). Like many post-classical emendations, however, Kohut's ideas about therapeutic action retain allegiance to
the notion that the height of psychoanalytic work resides in the interpretation. Thus, unfolding in two phases ("understanding" and "explaining";
Kohut, 1984; A. Ornstein & Ornstein, 1985), empathy reaches its pinnacle
in the "explaining" phase, where interpretation acts as a "higher form
empathy" (Kohut, 1981b, p. 532). Although he did famously contradict
himself on several occasions, stating that the mere presence of empathy
was therapeutic in and of itself (Kohut, 1981a, p. 544; Kohut, 1981b, p.
530), it is generally agreed Kohut held firmly to the position that although
"healing comes about through empathy ... an analytic cure can only occur
through interpretation" (Rachman, 1997, p. 346). Along these logical lines
numerous theorists, including Kohut, argue convincingly that the more or
less predictable movement of empathy from "understanding" to "explaining" represents a developmental line of empathy (see, e.g., Bacal, 1985, p.
213), one that parallels the development from archaic to mature selfobject
needs (Kohut, 1984). Kohut's distinction between "understanding" and
"explaining" is thus spared the fate of becoming a dichotomy by faithfully
mirroring a traditional, more or less linear progression toward interpretation (i.e., empathy as "explaining").
Conversely, I believe it may be argued with equal validity that Kohut
struggled to honor both sides of this sometimes troublesome dialectic in
view of what he called the "presence of empathy," up to and including his
last public addressin the middle of which he declared the following:
Empathy ... despite all I have said, empathy per se . . . the presence [italics
added] of empathy ... is a therapeutic action [italics added] in the broadest
sense. That seems to contradict everything I have said so far, and I wish I could

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just simply by-pass it. But since it is true, and I know it is true, and I've evidence
for its being true, I must mention it. (Kohut, 1981b, p. 530)

Although one interpretation of this statement could be that by "therapeutic

action" Kohut was referring to the healing effect of empathy during the
"understanding" phase, I believe that such a reading would dismiss the
struggle that this sentence signifies. In fact, once one empathizes with the
manner of his rhetoric in this passage, I think one may fairly reconsider
Kohut's larger, overarching distinction (between the "presence of empathy," on one hand, and empathy as an "observational mode" with an
"understanding" and "explaining" phase on the other) as an embodiment
of his ambivalence about his own discovery.
This ambivalence is best reflected in Kohut's concerns regarding the
misuse and disuse of empathy. Although hints of these can be found in
many forms throughout his work, Kohut's basic admonition was, like so
many aspects of his theory, Janus-faced: On one side he warned of
infantile animism (Kohut, 1971, p. 300), sentimentality, and mysticism
(Kohut, 198la, p. 544), whereas on the other he expressed concern about
those who refuse or, however subtly, resist the use of empathy as an
observational mode. The first and, for Kohut, more severe of these (i.e.,
settling on the side of the "presence of empathy" as being sufficient in
itself) he referred to as sentimentalism or subjectivism. The latter he
attributed to a morality-based reaction formation against fear of faulty
empathy, a fear whose roots lay foremost in an overly sober, objectivist
perspective (i.e., those who settle on the side of empathy as being at best
a risky, that is "unscientific" data gathering tool; Kohut, 1971, pp. 300307; 1977, pp. 302-306).
Embedded in these concerns, a philosophical issue rests at the heart
of Kohut's theory, an issue that was active in his descriptions of empathy
from the start. Caught in the "old and familiar" conundrum of objectivism
(i.e., how to account for subjectivity), Kohut's earliest definition of empathy was operational, encouraging us to "speak of physical [italics added]
phenomenon when the essential ingredient of our observational methods
includes the senses, [and] of psychological [italics added] phenomena
when the essential ingredient of our observation is introspection and
empathy" (Kohut, 1978, p. 206). This operational strategy provided Kohut
with a way to renegotiate the dichotomy between the subjective, psychological "inside," and the objective, physical "outside" of perception and
experience without having to resolve the problem in the form of either a
subjectivism that might lead to sentimentality and mysticism, or a material

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SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND IMAGINATION 689

objectivism that might lead "to a mechanistic and lifeless conception of

psychological life" (Kohut, 1971, p. 301; see also, Kohut, 1978, pp.
205-206).
Generally speaking, Kohut's desire to renegotiate this dualism reflects the heart of his challenge to drive psychology, namely that "pathogenic conflicts in the object-instinctual realm . . . are not the primary cause
of psychopathology but its result" (Kohut, 1984, p. 53).2 This challenge
begins with Kohut's reformulation of the infant's most basic needs, about
which he asserted that "it is not the child's wish for food that is the primal
psychological configuration [but the child's] need for a food-giving selfobject. . .. The child needs empathically modulated food-giving [italics
added], not food" (Kohut, 1977, p. 81). Here the idea that hunger and love
(Freud's [1930/1964] first dual drive configuration) do not oppose one
another, but rather are importantly linked, transforms our vision of conflict
from being something that is innate to something that occurs in consequence of empathic failure. Indeed, for Kohut, the child's self-experience
is only cohesive to the extent that this link between inner need and outer
environmental response has been accomplished.
From this vantage point, Kohut's renegotiated dualism affirms that
although "it is not [the mother's] empathy that satisfies her child's selfobject needs [but rather] her actions, her responses to the child," it is
simultaneously true that if these actions are not guided by "correct and
accurate empathy," they will not "achieve their end properly" (Kohut,
198la, p. 543). In other words, if it were empathy alone that satisfied the
child's selfobject needs, one would be led into a mystical and sentimental
account through which the empathic soul of the mother moved, as it were,
through the ether to satisfy its target. On the other hand, if it were her
actions alone that satisfied those needs (regardless of the quality and
manner of those actions), one would wind up with a purely mechanical
account unable to support the data of depth psychology. Of course this
analogy does not resolve the problem of dualism but rather subverts it by
building an empathic bridge over which the infant's need travels to meet
the mother's recognition; a bridge that spans the territory of an ethical
utilitarianism rooted in Kohut's deeply held conviction that "the idea itself
of an inner life of man ... is unthinkable without our ability to know via
vicarious introspection ... what the inner life of man is" (Kohut, 1977, p.
2
Kohut, of course, was not the only, or even the first psychoanalytic theorist to
make these kinds of observations (for a good survey see Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983).

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690

KLUGMAN

306). Like a good astronomer, then, the analyst's "total attitude" should be
characterized by a commitment to observe the planets that he or she can
see, while leaving room in his or her mind for "unseen planets" that may
be influencing their course (Kohut, 1978, p. 206).
In view of these considerations it might be suggested that in addition
to the "leading" and "trailing" edge of self psychology (Miller, 1985), the
"sharp edge" of Kohut's contribution requires one to mediate and make
links between two positions: between the "seen" physical and the "unseen" psychical, between the experienced affect and the reflected interpretation, between empathy as a mode of observation and empathy as a
mode of presence. Within this paradigm the analyst can no longer remain
content to be a detached observer of the radiant, affective flux of therapeutic action; yet must she or he also be careful not to fall into the clutches
of illusion whereby shadows displace substance and intuition defeats
reason. Thus risking the inevitable caricatures of the merely sympathetic,
and even mystical-minded self psychologist, Kohut qualified but never
refuted the value of the presence of empathyaware that by classical
standards his position would be judged as a "cleverly disguised first step
toward nonscientific forms of psychotherapy which provide cure through
love and cure through suggestion" (Kohut, 1977, p. 304). Indeed, one may
view Kohut's persistent qualification of empathy as an observational mode
as a defense against this very misunderstanding (that such defensive
qualifications are still deemed necessary by Kohut's most ardent followers
is recently evident, for example, in P. Ornstein, 1998, pp. 3-4).
The Intersubjective Solution
Perhaps the many forms of Kohut's undying ambivalence represent a
necessary residue of caution by virtue of which the phobia of animism
defends against illusion, whereas concern about the unscientific nature of
empathy guards against the arrogance of intuition. Accordingly this ambivalence ever encourages us to move beyond the banks of understanding
toward the reflective promontories of interpretation. As such, discretion
may indeed be the better part of analysis. And yet, would not a theory that
could curtail the ambivalence within which we must exercise discretion be
preferred? I believe that intersubjectivity is such a theory (Orange et al.,
1997; Stolorow & Atwood, 1992; Stolorow, Atwood, & Brandchaft, 1994;
Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987), a main provision of which is the
acknowledgment of how wrongheaded it is to posit "a dichotomy between
insight through interpretation and affective bonding with the analyst"

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SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND IMAGINATION 691

(Stolorow, 1994, p. 11) in the first place. Alternatively, by bringing into

focus at all times "both the individual's world of inner experience and its
embeddedness with other such worlds" (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 18),
intersubjectivity theory integrates the terms of Kohut's dichotomy and
thus smoothes the edge of his ambivalence by introducing the concept of
an intersubjective field to which both parties not only contribute but
actually cocreate. In this model, "understanding" and "explaining" become not linear stages in a method toward cure, but dialectically inseparable events that punctuate the ongoing flow of mutuality.
Conceptualizing mutuality this way tends to dissolve rigid demarcations that separate, say, the "presence of empathy" from "empathy as
observation," or "affective bonding" from "insight," thus rendering the old
dichotomy between empathy and interpretation less useful clinically.
Consequently, empathic immersionor, more accurately for the intersubjectivist, "empathic-introspection" (Orange et al., 1997, pp. 43-44)
always implicates two subjectivities, intersubjectively engaged, such that
"[e]very transference interpretation that successfully illuminates for the
patient his unconscious past simultaneously crystallizes an elusive
present" (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 60). In other words, any genuinely
effective interpretation presupposes and embodies a corresponding measure of attunement to the patient's affective experience, which experience
is inevitably (though not entirely) coconstructed in the session. Here the
analyst's embeddedness does not make it incumbent on him or her to be
empathic (sentimentalism), but rather to be ever at the ready to acknowledge, analyze, and understand the various impacts that occur within the
intersubjective field. Likewise it is not the girdle of scientific objectivism,
or metapsychology, that guards against the mine fields of mysticism, but
the analyst's ongoing recognition of his or her subjective participation in
the work.
It has been suggested (Shane & Shane, 1994) that this move from the
empathic field to the intersubjective (or inter-affective) field, accelerates
the paradigm shift that Kohut had begun by attempting to overcome
remnants of "isolated mind" thinking (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992) still
evident in Kohut's original contributions. This overcoming is accomplished by repeated emphasis on the fact that psychoanalysis always
involves two subjectivities who mutually regulate (however unequally) the
interaction, yet while regulating themselves at the same time. Accordingly
this self- and mutual regulation is a way of monitoringwithout dichotomizingthe very edge that Kohut suggested we must walk with our
patients: between empathy as a mode of being present and empathy as a

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692

KLUGMAN

mode of observation. As such, intersubjectivity theory implies a systems

view in which "self- and interactive regulation are simultaneous, complementary, and optimally in dynamic balance" (Beebe & Lachman, 1998,
p. 509).
That this dynamic balance is more explicit in Kohut's praxis than in
his theory is well illustrated by the following example. Trying to observe
the psychological experience of a very tall person, Kohut (1978) said that
"without introspection and empathy ... his size remains simply a physical
attribute" (p. 207). Rather, it is only when we
think ourselves into his place, only when, by vicarious introspection, we begin
to feel his unusual size as if it were our own and thus revive inner experiences
in which we had been unusual or conspicuous, only then do we begin to
appreciate the meaning that the unusual size may have for this person, and only
then have we observed a psychological fact. (Kohut, 1978, pp. 207-208)

In this seminal passage Kohut affirmed the presence of the analyst's

subjectivity in the act of empathy by way of a dialectic between selfexperience and experience of the other. Focusing on his experience of the
patient, Kohut felt the other's size "as if it were his own while concomitantly admitting into the field of his empathic inquiry the need for
self-experience, recalling memories in which he "had been unusual or
conspicuous." Considered this way, empathy is a bilateral procedure that
necessarily includes the analyst's subjectivity in the act of imagining how
a patient feels, thinks, and so forth. Accordingly, the dynamic balance on
which empathy depends involves (a) grasping the patient's experience as
if it were one's own and then (b) measuring that experience againsts one's
own subjective history. A central theme I now elucidate is that a vision of
the empathic analyst mediating between self-experience and experience of
the other in this way extends a Romantic, post-Cartesian paradigm in
which the role of imagination is both central and precise.
First let me define Cartesianism as any working model in which the
basic elements of human relatedness comprise an irreducible duality
between subjective experience and an objective, external world. Next let
me define post-Cartesianism as any working model that resists a view of
relatedness as the bumping together of isolated variables, privileging
instead the position that subject and world are coextensive, interdependent, and interpenetrating. Although these definitions may unfairly represent Descartes (for whom all substances were united under God), atomism
and duality nevertheless characterize significant aspects of the Cartesian
legacy against which Romanticism struggled. In what follows, I focus on
this struggle as it was articulated in the writing of Samuel Taylor

SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTTVITY, AND IMAGINATION 693

Coleridge (1835, 1848/1951, 1961, 1912/1969, 1973, 1980, 1817/1983,

1825/1993, 1995).

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Aspects of Imagination in Coleridge

For Coleridge the sting of Cartesianism was soul-stealing, and so he made
it his business either to oppose or revise those philosophic and scientific
models that were rooted in the dualism of Descartes. Importantly, this was
not an antiscientific program for Coleridgewho remained throughout his
life deeply interested in and profoundly influenced by the science of his
time (see Holmes, 1989, 1999; Wylie, 1989). Rather this impulse was
motivated by Coleridge's desire to counteract the passive, mechanistic
models of the mind that relied on Cartesian dualism. His intention was to
wake the human spirit from what he sometimes called the "lethargy of
custom" (Coleridge, 1817/1983, II, p. 7). One central hub around which
this lifelong mission turned was Descartes's famous formulation: cogito
ergo sum (i.e., "I think therefore I am"). The implication of this axiom in
which Coleridge was most interested is the way in which a thinking
subject is ultimately and inexorably pitted against an independently existing object world. Although his preoccupation with the resulting dualism
between the mental and the physical took on many forms throughout his
life (e.g., see Coleridge, 1961, n. 3159; 1817/1983, I, pp. 232-294;
1825/1993, p. 139; 1995,1, p. 349), a judgment he returned to again and
again was that from within Descartes's system one cannot appreciate the
basic processes that are unconsciously involved in putting together a world
of distinct objects. Evidence of this failing was signaled, for example, by
Descartes's inference of the independent existence of objects from the
appearance of their externality (or what Coleridge called "outness"see
Bar-field, 1971, pp. 59-68). Indeed Descartes's cardinal error lay, according to Coleridge, in his attempt to demonstrate that the experience of
"outness" (i.e., the appearance of the externality of things) inevitably leads
one to consider the idea of the existence of "things without us" as a
conclusion of judgment (Barfield, 1971, p. 65; see also, Coleridge, 1817/
1983, I, p. 259); that is as something once established, never questioned.
In turn we are confronted with the classic dichotomy between mind and
nature which is the hallmark of Cartesian epistemology.
Coleridge's opposition to this dichotomy and to its establishment as
dogma is what I am most interested in here; for it is the psychological
dimension of this fundamental rift between mind and nature that
Coleridge's theory of imagination sets out to refute. In other words, for

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Coleridge even the "deadest Nature we can conceive is already a Nature

of our making" (Richards, 1934, p. 164), which is to say "there is a life and
death of the world, dependent on what we make of it" (Cavell, 1988, p.
68). According to Coleridge, just what "we make of it" depends on the role
one assigns to imagination in one's perception and "creation" of the world.
Imagination and Fancy
One way to understand the role imagination plays in one's "creation" of
the world is to consider Coleridge's (1817/1983,1, pp. 304-305) famous
distinction between imagination and fancy. From the Greek phantasia
(phantasie, fantasy), fancy for Coleridge denotes the mechanical free play
of the mind in relation to objects, images, and recollections; it is the mode
of wit, comedy, and chimera. Imagination, on the other hand, from the
Latin imaginatio, attains privileged status in his system owing to its stress
on sensuous activity and the mind in the act of organizing perception
itself; it is the mode of subtlety and genius. Whereas fancy was called by
Coleridge (1817/1983, I, p. 305) an "aggregative" power that "must
receive all its materials ready made from the law of association," imagination actually creates new images (of self and world) by virtue of its
power to organize sensuous experience and achieve formulations that the
senses alone (i.e., without the aid of imagination) could never accomplish.
Thus Coleridge viewed fancy as being inferior "in kind" to the power of
imagination, which does not have to take its materials ready-made from
the law of association but can actually create new images, new worlds, and
new experiencefrom the depths of elemental sensation to the heights of
poetic symbolism. Whereas fancy must operate within the limits of an
already represented (and thus divided) object world, imagination presents
the phenomenal world without reference to something else, save sensuous
experience (i.e., in its most basic mode one might say that imagination
functions to interpret or represent sensuous experience and thus present
the phenomenal world).
A further distinction made by Coleridge between primary and secondary imagination is illuminating here. Not unlike what neurobiology
calls a "printing" (Schore, 1994, pp. 75-76, 466-468), primary imagination generates an affective copy (or template) of nature derived from sense
impressions (see Engell in Coleridge, 1817/1983, I, p. xci). From this it
follows that primary imagination precedes fancy for the obvious reason
that "the primary imagination must perceive and create in itself the
associable before any association can occur" (Engell, 1981, p. 343). Hence

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SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND IMAGINATION 695

Coleridge's primary imagination is not what most people refer to when

they use the word imagination, but is closer to something more basic, like
"being" or "I am-ness" (Coleridge's concept of the secondary imagination,
as I discuss later, is closer to the colloquial, and yet their interplay is what
makes his system useful and persuasive). This is partly so because the
primary imagination is usually "taken for granted ... just as a sense of
balance is taken for granted and not mentioned while we are walking"
(Engell, 1981, p. 344), which also explains why Coleridge referred to
primary imagination as "the necessary Imagination"distinct from both
fancy (which it precedes) and secondary imagination (which is its creative
complement).
For instance, individuals all see a mountain in more or less the same
wayaccording to certain a priori mental categories such as space,
magnitude, contour, and so forth. Indeed, these common qualities render
the declarative, "Look at that mountain," comprehensible. This is the
primary imagination at work: It takes up the available material at hand and
re-presents or copies it. Importantly, the idea that primary imagination
produces a copy is not intended to call up a passive model in which the
"isolated mind" receives an impression. Rather, psychoanalytically speaking, something like the elemental and involuntary action of identification
is intended, in the sense of it being the "first way in which the ego picks
out an object" (Freud, 1917/1957a, p. 241) and thereby produces a sense
of sameness, linking self-experience to world-experience (or experience of
the other). Conversely, as I elaborate later, the secondary imagination
starts to work on this identification or sense of sameness from the angle of
differencewhat Coleridge called "centra-distinction" (Barfield, 1971, p.
65), or what contemporary developmentalists might call differentiation.
As such, primary imagination does not produce anything original in the
artistic sense, but is rather aboriginal (i.e., primary, necessary, "given").
Secondary imagination, on the other hand, is used by the artist to produce
an imitation of nature, that is, a creative alternative to what is "given" (or
copied or "printed") by virtue of primary imagination. For instance, as I
linger with my perception of the mountain, which is snow-capped, I see a
hooded monk riding through the forest, whereas my friend, viewing the
same scene, envisions a breast that will never yield a single drop of milk.
This is the secondary imagination at work: It generates an imitation of
what the primary imagination has provided. In Coleridge's (1817/1983,1)
own language: "the primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the ... prime
Agent of all human perception ... [whereas] the secondary [imagination]
I consider as an echo of the former. ... It dissolves, diffuses, and

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dissipates, in order to re-create [what is 'given' by virtue of the necessary

action of primary imagination]" (p. 304).
My interest in these distinctions centers on the way in which
Coleridge's conception of primary and secondary imagination may illuminate the field of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis. For example, it
may be useful to conceptualize the analyst's task in terms of her or his
ability to grasp the patient's affective copying of reality via primary
imagination. Instead of space, magnitude, and contour presenting mountains, this activity may present a felt sense of the patient's early care to
form a relational pattern or configuration. Like the mountain, this relational configuration and the world that it attends may feel to the patient
unalterable and givena faithful copy of the only real world. Yet like the
mountain it too may be re-created, this time through an intersubjectively
constrained analysis of its derivation, form, and functionin a manner
that resembles the activity of the secondary imagination. That is, this sort
of mutually informed analysis "dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates" the
magnitude and force of the affective copy in order to re-create the basic
organization of the patient's primary perceptions. Reflecting the means of
artistic creation, this process might aptly be called the poetry of psychoanalysis, whereby patient and analyst cocreate alternatives to what was
formerly "given" (i.e., felt to be unalterable).
It is in this way that the Romantic imagination transforms the
subjective universe: uniting sense and thing, thought and feeling, precisely
because its activity both penetrates and precedes the perception and
experience of their division. So conceived, imagination may be especially
suited for that process of elevation whereby the subtlest stirrings of
impulse, feeling, and sensation are given sublime form through (psychoanalytic) dialog. Coleridge's "conversation poems" are supreme illustrations of this procedure, wherein states of dejection, loneliness, and feelings
of abandonment are dialogically engaged. The kind of self-reflective mode
we find in Shakespeare's characters, for instance"who will themselves
to change upon self-overhearing and thus prophesy the psychoanalytic
situation in which patients are compelled to overhear themselves in the
context of their transference to the analyst" (Bloom, 1994, p. 365)may
be found in poems such as "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" (Coleridge,
1912/1969, pp. 178-181). Indeed, Coleridge's activity in his early poetry
can be viewed as an illustration of his later theory, according to which the
secondary imagination is put to work on his "given" statesmuch like I
am suggesting analyst and patient go to work on the "given" states of the
latterin order to bring about renewal through forms of understanding.

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SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTTV1TY, AND IMAGINATION 697

Effacing the notion of a dichotomy between affect and cognition, this

transfiguration of feeling into thought through dialog illuminates the "cash
value" of Romantic truth: that we may reimagine and not merely reenact;
re-create rather than repeat thematic patterns of perception and self-inworld organization.
Revisiting the old subject-object dichotomy with all of this in mind,
I think we are now in a position to appreciate why Coleridge considered
the appearance of externality less substantively than Descartes, that is, as
a recurring experience rather than as a final revelation of the way things
really are. In fact, Coleridge went so far as to suggest that the experience
of a world of independent objects unconsciously presupposes the subjective, I-am position (see, Coleridge, 1817/1983,1, p. 260).3 Consequently,
we can say that Coleridge gleaned a covert "I am-ness" lurking a priori to
Descartes's famous declaration, from which a Coleridgean revision might
be rendered as "I am, therefore I think, therefore I am," or more radically
as "I am, therefore the world." Coleridge's effort to make this covert "I
am-ness" explicit characterizes generally his effort to subvert the fundamental atomism that dominated the philosophical and scientific models of
his era. One startling result of his subversion is that the appearance of the
existence of "things without us" reveals itself to be "not only coherent but
identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate selfconsciousness" (Coleridge, 1817/1983, I, p. 260). This realization, far
from lulling us to sleep in simple narcissism, or "pathetic fallacy," rouses
us from what was "essentially a sleeping relation with phenomena into a
waking one" (Barfield, 1971, p. 66). It was into this wakefulness that
Coleridge ever sought to stir himself, as well as his contemporaries.
Imagination and Empathy
Although these considerations may seem remote from the action of empathy in psychoanalysis, they are in fact germane, for what this wakefulness brings to our attention is the experience of a particular and inexorable
connectiveness between the perceiver and that which is perceived, a unity
which is for the most part an unconscious one, though it need not remain
so (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 204). Indeed it is part of the task of depth
psychology to make this connection conscious, such that we might view
3
In the same way that fancy presupposes primary imagination (as discussed
earlier).

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the latter as a method for exploring and illuminating the unconsciousness

of self-consciousness. Whereas the Romantic's awareness of this inexorable connectiveness was directed primarily toward the experience of
nature, the psychoanalyst's focus is appropriately aimed toward the experience of the patient, an experience that is "united" by the phenomenon
of empathy, through which imagination acts to reveal the interdependence
and interpenetration of interacting subjective worlds. In other words, the
seeing into nature that characterizes the Romantic orientation becomes a
seeing into the experience of the other within a psychoanalytic frame.4
In sum, then, what Coleridge's subversion helps to clarify is how the
experience of Cartesian duality is intermediate rather than final or conclusive; a reification of a particular state of being in which the sense of self
is insulated from the always already interpenetrating surround of one's
own and other worlds. In a word, the reification of the experience of
self-consciousness as alienation. The fact that up until recently Cartesianism as such was so pervasively reflected in analytic theories of developmentwherein a merged self must separate from its surround in order
to establish its autonomyindicates the profound and lasting influence of
this model and may also be a sign of the unconscious presence of trauma
in our theories. Conversely, recent developmental schemas (Lyons-Ruth,
1991) that stress attachment-individuation rather than separation-individuation support the primacy of the inexorable connectiveness between
self and other, as do those developmental theories in which the sense of
agency or being is not endogenous, but rather depends on the recognition
of the (m)other (Rustin, 1997; Sander, 1995).
The Rationalist Critique
It would be, perhaps, remiss of me not to mention the long history of
criticism that characterizes the Romantic position described herein as a
strategic denial of duality, separateness, and thus as a denial of vicissitude
en masse. Indeed, it has often been the case that critics have accused
Romantics of wanting to have their cake and eat it too, of wanting to enjoy
the interactive productivity of subject and object (self and other, serf and
world) without suffering their vicissitudes. Although this indictment has a
4

In this context, one may be tempted to interpret Wordsworth's famous lines

"with . . . the deep power of joy I we see into the life of things" (Brett & Jones, 1991,
p. 114)as an important gloss on the effect of affect on perception in relational
experiencethat is, "with the deep power of joy I we see into the life of [others]."

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SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTTvTTY, AND IMAGINATION 699

complex history at least as long as Positivism itself, its gist is that

Romanticism, in any form, is a regressive effort to reestablish lost unity.
Philosophically the Romantic is accused of attempting to mend the objectivist rift between mind and nature (Wilber, 1995), whereas from a
psychoanalytic perspective this criticism is mirrored by developmental
theories rooted in the paradigm of primary narcissism (Freud, 19147
1957b), which posit that the ego takes form only reluctantly (Freud,
1911/1958) by differentiating from the primal narcissistic matrix. In both
instances, the Romantic (or read, respectively, the neurotic) individual
clings to an infantile, prerational omnipotence that is developmentally
aberrant, scientifically unsound, philosophically confused, and sometimes
morally depraved. In other words Romanticism in either case is viewed as
a regressive reaction against the "bad news" of Enlightenment, which bad
news is, developmentally speaking, separateness. This regressive reaction,
so the Rationalist argument goes, threatens to forfeit all of the most
important gains attributed to the ego's hard won differentiation from
nature (or again, developmentally speaking, read "mother" nature).
From this critical vantage point the prioritizing of subjectivityto
the extent that it represents an organic unity intended to displace the
Cartesian priority of the phenomenal world (i.e., things as they exist
without us)is viewed as a naive, or worse, a cowardly retreat from the
hard existential facts of human life. For example, literary critics such as
Paul de Man (1962, 1969; Lentricchia, 1980, pp. 282-317) maintain that
the Romantic "priority of the subject... is 'illusionary,' and ... can only
arise when the subject 'in fact' borrows from the outside a temporal
stability which it lacks within itself (p. 292). Ruskin's (1902) "pathetic
fallacy" makes a similar claim. And once again parallels to psychoanalytic
models of development can be made (Freud, 1914/1957b; Mahler, Pine, &
Bergman, 1975; Pine, 1979), according to which mother functions as the
original source of this "borrowed" and therefore "illusionary" sense of
stability, which illusion must be shed in order for development to proceed
along its normal, healthy course. In the event, the Romantic is charged
with acting in "bad faith" (Sartre, 1956/1994) by pretending to possess "a
determinate nature that he can hold responsible for who he is" (Atwood,
1994, p. 171).
These allegations are, of course, improperly alleged. There is no
denial of vicissitude in the Romantic assertion of a prior unity sustained by
the imagination; on the contrary, imagination is the embodiment of vicissitude. Indeed, Coleridge's existential formulation: "Being . . . is posterior
to Existence" (Coleridge, 1973, n. 3593), may itself be viewed as a

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precursor of Sartre's (1956/1994) "existence precedes essence" (p. 630)

which axiom forms the basis for the latter's theory of bad faith (pp.
47-70). Once "awakened" to self-consciousness, however, Coleridge held
it to be the task of the imagination to assert (indeed, to discover) the
"priority of the subject," not as a denial of the existence of things without
usas if imagination could conquer chaos and control othernessbut on
the more humble, phenomenological basis that being is coextensive with
perception.

Conclusion
Indictments against Romanticism such as the "pathetic fallacy" will undoubtedly continue as its various dialogs with Rationalism evolve. Indeed
the differences between these schools of thought may be more profitably
struggled with than finally settled. My argument in this article is that
Kohut's insistence on the centrality of empathy can be viewed within the
context of that struggle. How better to understand his ambivalence and his
persistent need to anticipate the argument that self psychology is a "cowardly attempt to ... deny man's drive-nature" (Kohut, 1977, p. xviii) and
that its emphasis on empathy is likewise a "replacement of the scientific
mode of thought by a quasi-religious or mystical approach" (Kohut, 1977,
p. 304)? Within this broader historical context I believe Kohut's voice is
one in a long line of thinkers to oppose reductionism, while rigorously
defending his opposition against charges of recreancy and regression.
Similarly Coleridge's anti-Cartesian formulations do not reflect a denial of
the experience of alienation, but rather resistance to its enshrinement as the
core truth of human life. Instead his efforts reflect a deeply held conviction
that once we have awakened to the alienating aspects of self-consciousness (traumatic or otherwise), it is the task of imagination to assertor,
again, to discoverthe priority of our subjectivity.
My central theme is that this discovery of personal subjectivity
through imagination is akin to the action of empathy in the analytic setting,
through which the analyst may discover the subjectivity of the patient. In
this respect, Kohut's recognition of the role of empathy in the analytic
process parallels the Romantic recognition of the role of imagination in
perception and experienceneither of which is meant as a denial of the
vicissitudes of separateness, uncertainty, or existential despair, but rather
constitute responses to these, responses intended to wash away the numbing "film of familiarity ... in consequence [of which]... we have eyes yet

SELF PSYCHOLOGY, INTERSUBJECTTVITY, AND IMAGINATION 701

see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand"
(Coleridge, 1817/1983, II, p. 7).

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Summary
In this article I have attempted to illustrate three things: (a) the way in
which an intersubjective theory of empathy is presaged in Kohut's theory
by virtue of his recognition of the ambivalence between the "presence of
empathy" and "empathy as a mode of observation"; (b) the notion that this
ambivalence finds resolution in the theory of intersubjectivity, which asks
us to consider that affective bonding and interpretation are not two faces
of a dichotomy, nor are they linear stages in a method toward cure, but
rather represent dialectically inseparable events that punctuate the ongoing
flow of mutuality; and (c) the notion that imagination provides us with an
epistemological modality through which we may render the alterity of the
patient as Other, while grasping concomitantly the inescapable involvements and inevitable impacts of our own subjectivity. One advantage of
viewing empathy this wayas a bilateral procedure enabled by imaginationis that it further obviates the need for isolated variables (e.g., the
analyst's mind perceives the patient's state), privileging instead the process through which self-experience and experience of the other are assimilated, and thus also through which minds and states are ever linked to
worlds.
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