2011

The concept of empathy is ubiquitous in the counseling literature and is featured in every introductory counseling course. The attention to empathy is in part attributed to the emergence of humanism–following psychoanalysis and behaviorism–and the influence of Carl Rogers who emphasized that empathy is a sufficient and necessary condition for psychological change (Rogers, 1959). Although Carl Rogers is the theorist who is typically credited with the concept empathy, a definition of empathy made its entrée into the psychological nomenclature as early as the 16th and 17th centuries in the writings of theorists such as Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Spencer in The Principles of Psychology (Davis, 1983).