EMPATHY AND EMOTION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF DIALOGICAL SELF

THEORY

Thorsten Gieser,
Email: thgieser@uni-koblenz.de
Hubert Hermans, University of Nijmegen
Email: hhermans@psych.ru.nl

H1. ABSTRACT
In this chapter we argue that empathy is an essential aspect of dialogicality and, more
specifically, a process of two dialogical selves in communication. By examining a
psychotherapist’s accounts of his empathic experiences with clients (Margulies, 1989), we show
how he was able to ‘feel into’ the inner landscape of his client and experience it as his own. Our
interpretation of this process starts with an explication of the link between spoken dialogue,
perception and emotion. We delineate how the perceived sound of speech evokes emotion-laden
'sensory landscapes' in the listener. In this context, empathy is facilitated by speech and creates a
cognitive and affective link between client and therapist in a state of 'first-order phenomenology'
(Lambie & Marcel, 2002). We argue, however, that this empathic link does not necessarily result
in a sharing of the same emotion. In this case, the client experienced a 'secondary emotion'
(Greenberg, 2002) while the therapist experienced the 'primary emotion' that was hiding
underneath. We propose that the therapy becomes effective when the therapist can leave his
empathetic state of 'first-order phenomenology' to reach a 'second-order awareness' of the
'primary emotion' that can then be communicated back to the client as his/her 'counter-emotion'.
To conclude the chapter, we leave the case study to explore the implications of a broader
understanding of empathy as a premise for dialogical relationships and for assuming I-positions
in general.

H1.

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Empathy has a long history in psychology and philosophy, and rightly so. It has been described
as a phenomenon in its own right, as an ability, as a state of mind, as an emotional state. But it is
more than that. It is what enables us to transcend our self, to acknowledge and understand other
people as experiencing subjects like ourselves. Ultimately, it is even the attempt to putatively
experience what someone else is experiencing. In this sense, empathy is a fundamental aspect of
human relationships, of two selves in communication. We can see now why empathy is so
important for understanding the dialogical self. Not only does it provide us insights into how a
self can go 'beyond the skin' of the individual; it also tells us something about dialogical
relationships, which rely on our ability to assume exterior positions, to experience them as I-
positions, and to give them a 'voice'.

To illustrate these points we look at empathy in the psychotherapeutic context, where so much
depends on conversations and a developing 'spiral of understanding' between client and therapist.
To start with, we present a brief history of the concept of empathy followed by a first
interpretation in terms of dialogical self theory. We then move on to introduce a case study
drawn from Alfred Margulies' classic work The Empathic Imagination (1989). Our discussion of
the material starts by showing how spoken words, as evocative sounds, can create perceptual and
emotional imaginary landscapes that can be experienced by both client and therapist. What is
more, the therapist might even feel into this landscape as if it were his own, thereby sharing the
client's perceptions and emotions to a degree. We argue that a state of 'first-order
phenomenology' (Lambie & Marcel, 2002), an experience of emotional immersion, is necessary
for empathy to develop and that it is the 'secondary-order awareness' of emotion which
transforms this process of 'feeling-into' into a process of distancing. Both processes, so we
propose, are essential for the therapeutic success. To complicate the matter, we then demonstrate
that a closer look at the emotions involved in our case study reveals that shared perceptions do
not necessary result in the same shared emotion. Through a detailed description of the
empathetic process in terms of dialogical self theory we explicate how different parts of the
therapist's and client's selves, both interior and exterior, relate to each other and to different
levels of emotion, especially 'primary' and 'secondary' emotions (Greenberg, 2002). Distancing
ourselves from the confinement of the case study, we conclude this chapter with an elaboration
on the importance of empathy for dialogicality and the dialogical self in general.

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H1. EMPATHY AS SHARED PERCEPTION
The term empathy is the translation of the German word Einfühlung ('feeling-into'). Titchener
(1909) created the word from the Greek en pathos (‘in suffering/passion’) by analogy with the
word ‘sympathy’ (see Wispé 1986 and 1991 for elaborations on the sympathy/empathy
distinction). The concept of Einfühlung was first used by psychologists within the field of
aesthetics and form perception in the last quarter of the 19th century. They understood that
aesthetic appreciation demands a projection of the self into the object of beauty (Wispé, 1990,
p.18). At the beginning of the 20th century, the concept was transferred from the context of
subject-object relationships to that of subject-subject relationships, i.e., to the question of how
we know others (e.g., Lipps, 1903; 1905). According to Lipps, we can feel into the emotions of
others by seeing shame in the blushing, anger in the clenched fist, or joy in the radiant smile
(Stein, 1964, p.70). It was in this sense that the concept of empathy was subsequently employed
in various psychological sub-fields like personality theory, social psychology, developmental
psychology, and – most importantly for this paper – in psychotherapy (see Duan & Hill, 1996;
Eisenberg & Strayer, 1990 for reviews).

The definitions employed to date describe empathy in various related ways that may be
translated as sympathizing with someone, feeling with/for someone, responding to someone,
understanding, participating, being sensitive to someone, or taking the role of the other. Carl
Rogers, one of the advocates of empathy in inter-personal relationships, defines it in terms of:

“Entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at
home in it. It involves being sensitive ... to the changing felt meanings which flow in
this other person... It means temporarily living in his/her life ... It means frequently
checking with him/her as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the
responses you receive... To be with another in this way means that for the time being
you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter another
world without prejudice.” (1975, p. 4, my emphases)

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More recently, empathy has been understood as a complex multidimensional phenomenon that
includes both cognitive and affective components and control systems, and that varies in degree
with personality factors, relational factors and situational context (see e.g., Vreeke & van der
Mark, 2003 or Preston & de Waal, 2002 for recent elaborations). It is not our intention here,
however, to analyse empathy in all of its aspects in any detail. Following in Carl Rogers'
footsteps, our concern is rather with an interpretation of empathy as a mode of shared perception
and emotion.

H1. EMPATHY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF DIALOGICAL SELF THEORY

We assume that empathy is both a dialogical and a self-related phenomenon. A dialogical
perspective is needed in order to understand the relationship between people as involved in a
process of cognitive and affective interchange. A self-perspective is required to understand how
dialogical processes between people are intimately related with dialogical processes within the
selves of the participants. Therefore, “dialogical self theories” in which the notion of self and
dialogue are conceptually combined, are useful to analyze how people involved in empathetic
communication establish meaningful relationships not only between each other but also between
different aspects of their multifaceted selves. In their first inception of Dialogical Self Theory,
Hermans, Kempen, & Van Loon (1992) criticized the assumption that the self is organized
around one centre or core. Rather than conceptualizing the self as organized from a centralized
headquarter, they proposed a (partly) decentralized self that is extended to the world with the
social other as not purely outside but also inside the self. Instead of considering the self as a
centralized agent with a unifying view on the world, the authors conceived the self in terms of a
dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous ‘I-positions’ that are organized in an imaginal
landscape. In this conception, the I is always bound to particular positions in time and space but
has the possibility to move from one position to the other in accordance with changes in situation
and time. In this process of positioning and repositioning, the I fluctuates among different and
even opposed positions, and has the capacity to imaginatively endow each position with a voice
so that dialogical relations between positions can develop that renew and innovate positions
involved. Such dialogical relationships are contrasted with monological relationship in which
one or a few positions are dominant in the self, with the result that other positions are silenced or
suppressed or otherwise not allowed to speak from their own specific point of view.

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In order to understand empathy from the perspective of dialogical self theory, it is necessary to
make a distinction between two kinds of I-positions (a) internal ones that refer to personal and
social aspects of the self (e.g., I as a professional, I as a perfectionist, I as vulnerable) and (b)
external positions that refer to people or aspects of the environment that are felt as belonging to
the self (e.g., my father, my colleague, my friends, my house). In other words, I-positions are not
only aspects of the self that are located “inside the skin” but also aspects that are, in the sense of
James (1890), constituents of the self as extended to the world. An empathetic person has the
capacity to understand the internal and external positions of the other and of oneself in their
differences, addressivity, responsiveness, and power dynamics. A person who is empathetic is
building up a new landscape in his own self in which both the internal and external positions of
the other are constructed and reconstructed in their mutual dynamic relationships, as if he is the
other. When empathy develops, the internal and external position repertoire of the other becomes
increasingly familiar to the empathic person both in its content and organization. Empathy
becomes really dialogical when the empathic person is able to respond to the other by
developing a new space in his extended self in which the position repertoire of the other is
interiorized and reconstructed, but also able to address the other in such a way that the position
repertoire of the other receives a new developmental and integrative impulse. As part of this
process the empathetic person develops a feeling for the power dynamics in the position
repertoire and gains insight in the organization of the repertoire in which some positions are
dominated or even suppressed by other ones. As a result of the addressivity, responsiveness, and
insight in the power dynamics on the part of the empathetic person, the other feels not only
understood but also liberated and renewed.

H1. THE CASE EXAMPLE: A NIGHTMARE

The case example used here is drawn from Alfred Margulies’ classic work The Empathic
Imagination (1989). In this book, Margulies presents a phenomenological account of empathy in
his everyday clinical practice. One of his examples deals with the nightmare of a client:

“My son and I were going to a park, just for a walk. We were separated – no, he ran
ahead and I started to go up into town, ..., and I started to go up the road between two

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 buildings. There was a feedmill [sic] and a bridge or a walkway connecting two
buildings and there were men hanging from the walkway and grabbing people as
they walked that way. And my son was ahead of me and I went another way and I
got to the park. And there was this row of doors, and I kept opening the door to see if
my son was there and he wasn't – and I was absolutely terrified and then I woke up.
And I kept thinking something had happened to him and he wasn't there. And I
thought I wasn't there and if he cried out I wouldn't be there.
The other part of the dream that stands out is the road that was around the
feed mill – it was full of ruts and like covered with shit and very slippery and
difficult to walk on. And I remember looking down at it and I was surprised and I
just kept walking...” (Margulies, 1989, p. 55)

At this point, the client begins to associate and leaves the immediacy of her dream and Margulies
brings her back, asking her to describe the scene further:

“It was surprising to me. It was sort of ... the thing was, it was slippery and full of
ruts. And I didn't want to fall down. It was like I thought I wouldn't get out – but I
did. I remember there being a building and the road coming down out of the building
and down the hill and when I was on the hill, that's when I realized what it was. It
was full of ruts, and not soft, but hard and I was sinking into it and I was sliding over
it, afraid I'd fall... There wasn't a smell. It was sort of like coming upon it and being
surprised and when I realized what it was, but rather than being caught up, I had to
get where I was going, I had to get to the park. Being more scared kept me from
being bogged down.” (Margulies, 1989, p. 55)

As the client describes this dream in more detail, Margulies has an unexpected empathic
experience:

“Throughout this narrative I had been forming another impression that was like a
deja vu to me. I had experienced it before, though it felt strange and uncanny to me,
a compound sensory image that she had once described with vivid and distressing

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 affect. The mental representation I had was strong with a slippery feeling, a tactile
and kinesthetic sensation that was not part of her original description of the event or
even how I recalled it as told by her, but that now seemed integral. I hesitated to
comment, wondering if this image were my projection onto her dream... Awkwardly
I decided to go with my hunch, 'I am not sure of its relevance, but it reminds me of
the scene you once described of being a little girl and watching the pigs being
slaughtered – I don't know if it's the slippery part of the image that seems a part of it,
though you hadn't described it that way.'
'It's funny,' she reflected, 'That was sort of blood and guts, and slippery. There was a
barn there – a red barn. Its [sic] like when you hang a pig up after you slaughter it;
it's like those men hanging in the dream ... just suspended there.'...
'Like slaughtered pigs?' I say.
'Yeah, the way they were suspended. The feed mill in the dream was old and painted
red too. Last night I went outside in the garden to plant holly hocks... they were
blossoming. My neighbour grew them.'
I think holly hocks, ham hocks. 'The neighbour who had the pig slaughter?'
'Yes!' she laughs, 'I also remember once sliding down her walkway during a light
snow and I ran right into her husband and knocked him down.' He was the one who
slaughtered the pigs.” (Margulies, 1989, p. 56)

This session ended and Margulies took up some of its loose threads later on. Together with his
client, he explored the role of violent men in her life and tried to reconnect compartmentalized
episodes of violence that she had witnessed and dreamt of.

H1. DISCUSSION
Now, to make explicit the empathetic processes involved in this case a model of the self is
needed that is capable of showing the organisation of positions and the dynamics of positioning
on which empathy relies. In Dialogical Self Theory one of the best models is that of the Personal
Position Repertoire (PPR) (see Hermans, 2001), a matrix of external and internal positions that
makes up one's 'society of the self'. By describing and interpreting empathy in terms of a PPR we
are able to access complex patterns of dialogical relationships and follow the dynamics of

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movement between positions; not only within one self (the client or the therapist) but also
between selves. What we mean by that will become clear shortly.

At the start of the therapy we can assume that Margulies introduced his client as a new external
position in his (PPR). This new position is still quite 'hollow': with a face, a name, perhaps a few
snap judgements about her general appearance but without an awareness of her life history, her
character traits, her significant others or the power dynamics that govern her relationships.
During the course of the next therapeutic sessions, he gradually elaborated her one position into a
full set of internal and external positions (a full external PPR). And here we go beyond the
original formulation of the PPR as conceived nearly a decade ago. Other people are rarely
present in the PPR as one solidified external position; they are usually present as complex
patterns of their internal and external positions as we know them. Simplified, yes, we relate to
others from an internal position to an external position. But more realistically, this external
position is made up of many facets and constitutes a whole PPR within ours. In Margulies's case,
he heard more and more about her life, more and more people were introduced to him, and the
client became invested with personal, individual traits and stories. For example, the client told
him about her career, the family finances, her marriage, her son, her father’s obsession with
hunting, her fascination for violent men, and so on. These narratives not only introduced
‘significant others’ as external positions to the therapist, but also gave insights into her internal
positions (e.g., the mother, wife, the anxious, etc.), together with their relationships and power
dynamics in her life.

At the same time, something else is going on. Within the PPR of the therapist, the newly formed
positions of his client are simultaneously linked not only within the network of the client’s other
positions but also with the past experiences of the therapist himself. In Margulies’ own words:

“As I become engaged with the inner life of another, I experience a growing sense of
familiarity with a built-up internal landscape. Oftentimes this is not so conscious to
me. I enter a private world constructed from associations and images stimulated by
my patient and drawn from my own personal past experience.” (1989, p. 53).

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Thus we learn more about the process by which positions are created. As soon as they 'enter the
stage' (to use a metaphor Hermans, 2001, used in describing the PPR), positions are exposed to
the 'pulling power' of already established positions that resonate with them in some way. There
must be 'recognition', in some sense, of the other in me, that draws the new position towards the
old. It is as if the established positions gaze at a simulacrum appearing and tentatively probe into
it, trying to discern whether this simulacrum is a mirror of themselves or a new external position
in its own right. From the quote above we may conclude that the more 'associations' one finds the
greater the pull and recognition.

But before we elaborate on the importance of this pull and recognition of positions for empathy
let us briefly explore why and how positions can appear as simulacrums, especially in the
therapeutic context. It is important to remember here that narratives, especially in the therapeutic
context, are not simply descriptive reports but re-lived experiences (see Jackson, 1996). Put
differently, “stories are lived before they are told” (MacIntyre, 1984, p.212). The words of
narratives bring to life once again the sensual experiences of a more or less distant past: the sight
of the son running away from her, a slippery road full of ruts and covered in excrements, the
feeling of her sinking into and sliding over the ruts, the marvellous absence of any smell in this
situation. These words re-create, in both telling client and listening therapist, the world of the
'dreamscape', and with each new sentence, with each new piece of sensory information, this
dreamscape becomes more real and experience-able. But it is not only the words of the story told
that enrich the dreamscape. The remembered sensual experiences themselves open up a whole
world of other emotions and memories, as so pointedly remarked by Marcel Proust who once lost
himself in memories when he tasted a madeleine:

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after
the things are broken and scattered, ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a
long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid
the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop
of their essence, the vast structure of recollection” (2006, p. 210)

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Likewise, the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000, p. 409) argued that “words gather their meaning
from the relational properties of the world itself. Every word is a compressed and compacted
history”. Margulies remembered a particular instance in his work that illustrates this point
clearly:

“As I gain greater familiarity with the world of the other, I then have a Proustian
echo of recollection. With one patient, for example, I recall a farm in my mind’s eye,
the fields, the roads, the old lady who fed the patient/me ginger snaps and bananas –
all experiences I have lived empathically through her. I do not recall in my own life
whether I have ever even had ginger snaps and bananas together, but I can almost
taste them on my mind’s tongue. Moreover, I sometimes recollect such empathic
sensations more readily than does the patient from whom I have learned them!”
(1989, p. 54)

These recollections are again more than re-lived sensual experiences; they are filled with
emotional experiences as well. According to Antonio Damasio (1999), each perceived (social
and natural) environmental stimuli becomes associated with particular body signals (the
emotion) and are thereby ‘marked’ with positive (e.g., happiness or pride) or negative values
(e.g., fear or disgust); values that make us either approach or retreat from the stimulus. Emotions
are hence understood only in their relationship between individuals and the world they live in
and perceive. To 'speak' about a past experience evokes the same relationships that became
associated with the emotions in the first place.

Two consequences arise from the above: First, when the client’s dialogical self within the PPR of
the therapist crystallizes, it does so with certain emotional values attached. Her emotional
reactions are either being verbally expressed; being expressed by changes in tone of spoken
words; or being visible in facial expressions, gestures and body posture (see Ekman, 1999).
Second, when we follow Damasio’s hypothesis, listening to the client’s emotional accounts (and
watching her bodily emotional expressions) create an emotional response in the therapist as well.
In this context, Ingold (2000, p. 21) argued: “To show something to somebody is to cause it to be
seen or otherwise experienced”. Analogously, to tell somebody something is to cause it to be

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heard or otherwise experienced. As almost every perception is accompanied by emotion, to draw
attention to something is not only a statement of what it is but also of how it is. It is a statement
not just of a word but also of a relationship between narrator, the words and the world that they
denote. To follow someone’s pointing finger, or words in this case, is therefore to become
involved in a relationship, or, in other words, to feel into a relationship.

The therapist feels into the client’s relationships by attending to her in a sympathetic mode in
order to establish rapport. He is therefore likely to respond to her emotional expression with a
similar one, perhaps accompanied by a compassionate feeling. When hearing about something
the therapist is also familiar with (e.g., having a son, problems in a relationship), his past
emotional reactions will become associated, too. Margulies remarks:

“It is not merely my reaching into resonant experience from my own life (for
example, that I have, parallel to the patient, fond boyhood memories of eating
cookies and feeling happy and secure). It is more: I now have memories
empathically derived and elaborated into a relatively coherent form from someone
else’s experience... I reach deep down into my internalized inscape of the other.”
(1989, pp. 54-55).

The emotions felt now establish a link to the client such that both focus their attention on the
same aspects of her inner landscape, sensually as well as emotionally. Margulies was dwelling in
his client’s inner landscape, which he built up in his own PPR. But not merely as an observer. He
perceived this landscape from the client’s position, hence as a déjà vu. In terms of the dialogical
self, this means that one of his inner positions (e.g., his feeling of strangeness) related to the
external positions of the client (e.g., her son who disappeared). However, these external positions
should normally be related to the client self positions, not to the therapist self positions. Two
things must have happened. First, the boundaries between client self positions and therapist self
positions must have loosened so that her positions can be experienced as belonging to the sphere
of the therapist self positions. Second, the client self positions must have been silenced in order
for the therapist to have a first-person experience of the dream and not simply an observation of
what the client is doing in the dream story.

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How is it possible that the therapist experiences the memories of his client as his own in these
moments? We have already mentioned two aspects of the answer. First, the telling of the client’s
narratives has created an emotional link between the emotional values the client attached to the
characters of her stories and the emotional response of the therapist that arose while he listened
to her. Second, in the empathic moment the client’s narratives evoked a detailed, meaningful,
inner landscape both in herself and the therapist. We shall finally point to a last answer to this
question by bringing in an analogy with the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s concept of
duplicité, that is the phenomenon of 'touching and being touched'.

When we shake hands, for example, we can either feel our hand shaking another person’s hand
or our hand being shaken by somebody else. We can voluntarily switch our focus of attention to
either feeling, knowing that the other feeling is never out of reach. Similarly, we can use our
right hand to touch, for instance, a table, with our left hand being passive. Again, we always
know that the passive hand can become active if we wished so. On the basis of these
realisations, a ‘transfer of sense’ can take place which allows us to perceive the hand of another
person in a similar way as we perceive our own passive hand. We are able to feel into the
experience of another person’s hand because of its similarity to our own hand. We have
experienced our hands as both perceiving subject and perceived object (often with one hand
being part of the background of the active hand that is in our focus of attention). As we
experience the other’s hand as object in the same background, we may experience the other’s
passive hand then like we experience our own passive hand (see Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 223
and 225).

We argue that a similar bodily logic is at work when we empathize through speaking and
listening. Whenever we speak, we simultaneously hear our voice. We may be so involved in our
speaking that we merely hear our voice while in other instances we may actively listen to what
we are saying. Our voice can hence be understood either in our ‘hearing background’ or
‘listening focus’ (Ingold, 2000). Whenever we have a conversation, we hear our own voice and
the voice of the other. Moreover, in a friendly conversation we also tend to adjust our use of
words or phrases, pronunciation and intonation to our fellow conversant. This enables us to feel

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into the experience of another person's voice because of its similarity to our own voice. What
further contributes to this empathy is that, in the course of a conversation, we experience a
continual switching of attentional focus, between our voice either in the background or in focus
and the other's voice either in the background (e.g., when both of us speak simultaneously) or in
focus. In either case, our voices become linked in one experiential Gestalt and hence we may feel
into another person’s narratives as if they were our own.

However, the thus created sensory and emotional bond does not lead the client and the therapist
to have identical emotions. If we recall, the client said she felt “afraid” and “scared” for her son.
We can also infer from her statements about the slippery road surface - full of excrements, and
the fact that she was trying to avoid falling into this mess – that she felt disgusted. Now
Margulies, on the other hand, did not share her concern for the son but instead felt something
“strange” and “uncanny” in connection with a “tactile” and “kinaesthetic” feeling of slippery-
ness. It seems like Margulies was – sensorily – in the narrated dreamscape, together with her, but
the world opened up to him through these sensations was different from hers. For her, the feeling
of being disgusted by the slippery road surface was a compound sensory and emotional image
linked up with being scared for her son. For him, the tactile and kinesthetic feeling of slippery-
ness was linked with a feeling of slippery-ness from another episode of the client's life, namely
her memory of a pig slaughter scene. It was the inconsistency or discrepancy between his and her
experience of the relevance of this perception (of slippery-ness and what it meant) that led to his
strange and uncanny feeling.

Margulies mentions that his client once told him about the “blood, squealing and slaughter” of
this memory with “vivid and distressing affect”. We could describe this original affect as the
client's primary emotion (Greenberg, 2002), the initial response to a concrete stimulus situation.
In her dream, the slippery surface and the red barn are drawn from this original experience and
should have brought up the primary emotion once again. Yet it was obscured by a new
situational secondary emotion of being scared (for her son). According to Greenberg (2002),
secondary emotions often cover a deeper emotion which a person might be afraid to
acknowledge. Consequently, the client focused her attention on the feeling for her son rather than
the distressing memory of slaughter and violence.

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In a way, Margulies expected unconsciously for the primary emotion to come up in the client and
his empathetic bond to her loosened when he realised that his and her experience of the scene
differed (he suddenly had a “strange” and “uncanny” feeling). Listening to her story, he re-lived
the dream with her in a state of what Lambie and Marcel (2002) call first-order phenomenology.
In this state, one lives the emotion without being aware of the fact that one has an emotion or
what nature this emotion is. Margulies' sudden feeling triggered his attention which led to a
second-order awareness (Lambie & Marcel, ibid[?].) of the emotions that he and his client
shared empathetically a moment ago. As we have previously argued, when Margulies
empathetically relived the story of his client (in a state of first-order phenomenology) he
experienced her external positions as his own while the boundaries between his and her PPR
must have become highly permeable. Second-order awareness, then, re-establishes the
boundaries between their PPRs, introduces some distance between the therapist's and the client's
positions, and thereby leads to a renewed acknowledgement of the client's interior positions by
the therapist. From Margulies' perspective, we could say that the distance between the reflective I
and my emotion generates a perceived distance between I and You. Awareness of the shared
emotion, then, breaks the empathetic link and re-introduces the distinction between me and the
other which was meaningless a moment ago. It opens up a 'space for dialogue' that enables the
recognition of multi-perspectivity, multi-positionality, as well as positional history and context
(see Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010).

Yet the question remains how the therapist could empathetically share his client's perceptions
and emotions in a state of first-order phenomenology and then suddenly have a different
perceptual and emotional experience in their shared narrated dreamscape. We suggest the answer
to this question lies in the fact that the client's PPR in the therapist's PPR developed primarily
through listening to her stories. But whereas the client's own PPR in her dialogical self is
intimately linked with her positional histories and contexts, the therapist creates a client's PPR in
his dialogical self that relates to other positions in the client's stories and his personal positional
histories and contexts. In other words, his own perceptions, memories and conceived meanings
influence his experience of her inner landscape. Yet because Margulies acquires only a
condensed version of her positional histories through the stories, in some respects his experience

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of her PPR may be more condensed or focused than hers. Silencing his own histories, he focuses
on her without being easily distracted by associations that would lead her away from the current
experience. Hence he might have a strong 'tactile' and 'kinesthetic' experience of the slippery
surface that she did not have. Her PPR was far too diversified to pay attention to such a small
detail. Furthermore, her secondary emotion led her to focus her attention on the son rather than
on the situation which might have led to recognize her primary emotion linked to the slaughter
memory.

So it was a differing sensory perception (together with its emotional tone) that made Margulies
feel something 'strange' and 'uncanny', which – in turn – let him recognize that there are actually
two I-positions in the narrated dreamscape: he is only accompanying his client there; it is not his
dreamscape. Nevertheless, he recognized something important that she did not. Once he realized
this, his task was to make her perceive what he had perceived; in other words, to make her
perceive her dreamscape from a different I-position: not her as in I-am-scared-for-my-son, but
her as in I-am distressed- by-this-slaughter-imagery. In this way, she could acknowledge that she
was present as two I-positions in her dream and then start a dialogical relationship between her
two positions. Thereby she might access the message the primary emotion holds for her (about
the role of violence and violent men in her life).

As we see at the end of the dialogue presented in the first part of this chapter, the reflective
process triggered by the therapist (as a 'promoter-position' in the self of the client, so to say) led
her to explore various aspects of her primary emotion which eventually result in her laughing.
We may interpret that as the start of a 'counter emotion', a helpful response to an initial emotion
(Hermans & Hermans-Konopka 2010), developing which might have a positive influence on her
ongoing therapy and a repositioning of herself in her PPR.

H1. CONCLUSION
We may ask, what purpose has empathy then for the therapeutic process as a whole? Margulies’
answer to this question is that it starts a ‘spiral of understanding’ where client and therapist
sensually explore the now shared inner landscape and thereby uncover more and more
meaningful aspects in the client’s life history.

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 “In an edge-of-consciousness way I entered my patient’s separate experiences, which
then remained in my mind with their own intense sensory traces, ready to come to
life. Despite the ultimate unknowability of the other, there was a coherence of world
view that I could approximate from within my own distinctive world view.
Moreover, this coherence extended into the shadows of her inscape, into its dormant
possibilities. That is to say, the inscape of this other person had its heretofore
unelaborated absence-in-presence that became articulated in my own mental
representation of her experience. It was through the empathic dialectic that I then
brought into consciousness my experience of her inscape, which was then affirmed
in her connecting to my connections, pushing the spiral of understanding further. We
explored reflected inscapes together, me blind and imagining, her frightened and
recoiling (1989, p. 57, my emphasis in bold print).

The last sentence highlights that these moments of shared experience are not only empathic in
nature. They are but moments, accompanied by other moments where the therapist only guides
the client through her inscape, or has to distance himself even more from her in order to reflect
on what he was told. The psychotherapeutic process described in this chapter is therefore a
dynamic process of distancing and feeling into, of emotional reflection and emotional
immersion. But we would also like to take it a step further and argue that empathy, broadly
conceived, is more than a complex psychological phenomenon; it is the ontological basis of
dialogue and dialogical relationships as such. Too often we tend to narrow down the notion of
dialogue to an interplay of words (see Gieser, 2008 for an alternative embodied approach). Yet
this case study has shown that what makes dialogue possible in the first place is an ability to feel
into someone else's positions, perceptually and emotionally. The 'spiral of (cognitive)
understanding', that is the dialectic aspect of dialogicality, does not only rely on the recognition
of distance between positions, a fundamental distinction between I and Thou alone. Dialogue
needs also the merging of positions, the overcoming of distance. Without empathy we would not
know how to assume another position - internal or external – and thus would not be able to
'connect to connections', as Margulies put it.

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That the latter point is essential to the dialogical self has most recently been pointed out by
Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010, p. 29) who described the dialogicality of emotion as
follows:

“We assume that an emotion is dialogical when it meets a real, remembered,

imagined or anticipated position in the other or the self and is influenced, renewed,
understood, consoled or, in the broadest sense, influenced by that position in a way
that the emotion, and the self more in general, is developing to some higher level of
integration”.

The key word here is “integration”. To integrate means to open oneself, to allow oneself to be
affected and touched (the Latin tangere in 'integration'), to affect and touch others, and to draw
this experience together to form a whole that is an extension of the self, a dialogical self. If we
thus speak of dialogicality we mean this continuous movement between positions, of feeling into
and distancing, alongside the static turn-taking points of a dialogue. As we have seen, just to
listen to someone draws us into their world and them into ours. A dialogue is not only a
linguistic phenomenon; it is a perceptual and emotional basis for empathy.

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