Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.
Interpretation
Empathy involves understanding and sharing the feelings of others.
This quote by Heinz Kohut emphasizes the importance of empathy in human relationships. It suggests that true understanding arises when one can not only comprehend but also emotionally connect with the experiences and feelings of another person, allowing for deeper connections and more compassionate interactions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation on emotional intelligence.
If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true - that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound.
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
Feeling we have to be constantly updated about the lives of our friends and that everything we say has to be out there leads to frustration, anger and jealousy much more than it leads to anything else.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Marriage...is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.
Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over? Because, if it is to spite her, I should think - but you know best - that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think - but you know best - she was not worth gaining over.
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