This forum uses Thomas Kohut’s recent book, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past (Routledge, 2020), as a springboard for an interdisciplinary discussion of empathy and its role in understanding people in the past and in the present.
In addition to considering some of the central claims Kohut makes in his book about empathy as a way of knowing in history, the four discussants consider the similarities and differences between the role of empathy in knowing and understanding people in history, and in the humanities more generally, and in knowing and understanding people in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. Finally, the discussants consider the prominent role that empathy has come to play in contemporary political and cultural discourse. The forum is of interest to historians and other scholars in the humanities and social sciences who seek to know and understand human beings, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, and those with an interest in the place of empathy in our contemporary world.