Empathy and earned security: reciprocal influences, ruptures, and shifts in the psychotherapeutic process

摘要

Hermann Lotze, German philosopher and logician (1817-1881), in his excerpt below, illustrates evocatively the process by which we perceive our environment, both animate and inanimate. He describes how we pour ourselves into the object in order to be and feel like the object we are contemplating. How we become the mollusc "in the monotonous pleasure of its openings and closings", in order to comprehend, perceive, understand and interpret it, and how during this process, the object inhabits us.