An Intersubjective Mentalization-Based Primer: Empathy as Competence
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : October 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 366
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98292
- ISBN 13 : 9781032774930
- ISBN 10 : 1032774932
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This book explores how Affect Resonance Training (ART), as developed by the Viennese psychotherapist Johann Steinberger, offers students and trainees in psychosocial professions the opportunity to develop competence in empathy, allowing them to better understand themselves and others.
Based on concepts of empathy, resonance and mentalization, this innovative mode of teaching offers effective tools and training for empathetic understanding. This book presents clear instructions for its application in the classroom, summarizing several years of intensive institutional practice. The book also outlines the program’s rich theoretical background and documents its empirical effectiveness.
With clear instruction on the use of ART and clinical insights on how increased empathy is effective in therapeutic settings, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and others across the psychosocial professions.
Reviews and Endorsements
In Empathy as Competence, Johann Steinberger, rooting his work in intersubjectivity, resonance, and mentalization theory, understands and portrays empathy not just as a talent, but as a skill. Equally important, Steinberger presents the method he has devised to teach this crucial skill. The practice of empathy, in other words, does not necessarily require that the student of empathy already be gifted in this respect, which means that Steinberger’s method, Affect Resonance Therapy, can be very widely taught. In taking this step, and doing the research to establish it, Steinberger broadens the empirical demonstration of psychoanalytic conceptualizations in a way that serves as a model for all such work, and simultaneously offers not only mental health professionals, but all healthcare workers, and even practitioners in other fields, such as education, a means of meaningfully contextualizing the understanding of persons.
Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., William Alanson White Institute, New York, US
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Historical roots and development of infant observation
3. Introduction to Mentalization
4. The Development of the Relational Tradition in Psychoanalysis
5. Empathy - Affect - Understanding
6. Affect-Reflective Competencies - Developing Empathy Training –Evaluation
7. ART II – Observation, Didactics, Mentalization
8. ART III – Supervision in the Group
9. Methodological Approach
10. Evaluation of Observation Reports
11. Conclusion
About the Author(s)
Johann Steinberger is a Founding Faculty Member of the academy for Affect Resonance Therapy (A.R.T.) Vienna, Austria, teaches, consults, and offers study groups for health care workers (nursing stuff, psychotherapists, psychologists, teachers, pedagogues and medical professionals). He works in private practice and at the Forensic Outpatient Clinic Vienna, Austria.
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