Mutual Affect Therapy and the Emergence of Transformational Empathy

Abstract

The early founders of humanistic psychology made clear the priority of empathy in effective psychotherapy. In the past decade, an understanding of emotional communication has been enhanced by research in neurobiology and brought to popular attention by those writing under the banner of “emotional intelligence.” This article presents a novel approach to empathy in which the therapist searches for a memory-evoking affect sufficiently similar to that of the client to experience that shared affect more fully and vividly. Clients receiving such empathy using this mutual affect approach appear to experience a deeper level of validation and emotional clarification. Referred to as Mutual Affect Therapy, this approach is put in the context of the literature on empathy and illustrated by two examples in the author’s experience.