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Transference vs Empathy - What's the difference?

transference | empathy |

As nouns the difference between transference and empathy

is that transference is the act of conveying from one place to another; the act of transferring or the fact of being transferred while empathy is the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person.

transference

English

Noun

  • The act of conveying from one place to another; the act of transferring or the fact of being transferred.
  • (psychology) The process by which emotions and desires, originally associated with one person, such as a parent, are unconsciously shifted to another.
  • * '>citation
  • Furthermore, although probably few analysts still believe
    that transference' occurs only in the context of the psycho-
    analytic situation, many hold that this phenomenon pertains
    only to object relationships. I submit, however, that the char-
    acteristic features of '''transference''' can be observed in other
    situations as well, especially in the area of learned skills.6
    Thus, speaking a language with a foreign accent is one of the
    most striking everyday examples of transference. In the tradi-
    tional concept of transference, one person (the analysand)
    behaves toward another (the analyst) as if the latter were
    someone else, previously familiar to him; and the subject is
    usually unaware of the actual manifestations of his own trans-
    ferred behavior. In exactly the same way, persons who speak
    English (or any other language) with a foreign accent treat
    English as if it were their mother tongue; and they are usually
    unaware of the actual manifestations of their transferred be-
    havior. Such persons think of themselves as speaking unac-
    cented English: they cannot hear their own distortions of the
    language when they speak. Only when their accent is pointed
    out to them, or, better, only when they hear their recorded
    voices played back to them, do they recognize their linguistic
    transferences. These are striking parallels not only between
    the stereotyped behavioral acts due to previous habit, but also
    between the necessity for auxiliary channels of information
    outside the person's own self for recognizing the effects of
    these habits. This view of '
    transference
    rests on empirical
    observations concerning the basic human tendency to general-
    ize experiences.?

    Derived terms

    * counter-transference

    See also

    * projection *

    empathy

    English

    Noun

    (wikipedia empathy)
  • the intellectual identification of the thoughts, feelings, or state of another person
  • capacity to understand another person's point of view or the result of such understanding
  • She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too.
  • (parapsychology, science fiction) a paranormal ability to psychically read another person's emotions
  • Usage notes

    Used similarly to sympathy, interchangeably in looser usage. In stricter usage, empathy is stronger and more intimate, meaning that the subject understands and shares an emotion with the object – as in “I feel your pain” – while (term) is weaker and more distant – concern, but not shared emotion: “I care for you”.