Empathy: From Mind Reading to the Reading of a Distant Text

In the psychoanalytic literature empathy is commonly discussed as a form of “mind reading”, which is deeply associated with the capacity to mirror the other’s mental state. In this paper, I propose an alternative perspective on empathy as the process of reading a distant text. This perspective is illustrated through a Talmudic story and by weaving a thread between Bakhtin, Bion and Lacan. The paper concludes by pointing to the danger of empathy as a hidden form of projective identification that provides the reader with a false sense of control rather than with negative capability for otherness.