Abstract: The study deals with several most common dilemmas on empathy. Therapeutic empathy is differentiated from empathy in its widest meaning and is considered a process that evolves in several phases, including a complex interaction between a patient and his therapist, while the main aim is to understand the patient. In this interaction the affective and cognitive elements are equally important, while the skills to use empathy are mostly reduced to the ability to balance the elements successfully. Alone therapeutic empathy is insufficient to achieve the therapeutic aim, but it is still very important to establish a therapeutic relationship with the patient. Empathy should be expressed carefully and gradually, in order to avoid possible side effects. Although understanding of a patient in the absolute sense is impossible, a certain degree of understanding is a conditio sine qua non for successful outcome of psychotherapy, while the accurate-ness of understanding should be checked continuously. Investigations of empathy and its components should clarify numerous insufficiently understood aspects of this phenomenon and help define the ways to reach the aims of therapeutic empathy better.
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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