Empathetic Identification

Empathetic identification with another is the result of the performance of this experiment in imagination: one imagines oneself in another's place to discover how one finds being there, & infers that this is how the other finds it. The identification is corrigible because it is an inference, one whose correctness depends on the 'fit' between one's feeling responses & the other's. Four problems surrounding the concept of empathetic identification are dissolved. It is shown that one can identify with others, for it is done when understanding works of art in which there are characters; & one must be able to identify to conceive oneself as a person. Empathetic identification turns out to be an essential ingredient in our knowledge of the subjective side of other persons &, hence, oneself. AA.