Review of Empathy and the historical understanding of the human past.

Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol 39(4), Oct 2022, 350-352; doi:10.1037/pap0000419Reviews the book, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past by Thomas A. Kohut (see record 2020-28431-000). As per the reviewer, Thomas A. Kohut has written a book that he describes as a primer on empathy for historians. The reviewer sees it as the definitive exploration of empathy. Kohut describes empathy as a way to know people “by imagining, thinking, and perhaps even feeling one’s way inside their experience.” The key distinction he makes throughout the book is between the empathic and the external observational positions. For historians, the external position refers to a scholar viewing the past “from his or her own perspective, with all the benefit of hindsight, distance, and scope”. “The historian occupying the internal or empathic position,” notes, “seeks to view historical phenomena from the perspective of the people of the past, to view and understand their world as they themselves viewed and understood it.” According to Kohut, both approaches are necessary, but many historians ignore the empathic approach or execute it poorly, in part because they have received no training in that approach. Though written with historians in mind, it is of equal value for the large majority of readers who are psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: Psychoanalytic Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research