The word empathy has firmly entered our everyday vocabulary. Many people who are not related to the psi environment use it quite actively and, in most cases, it seems to be appropriate. Empathy can be understood very broadly, like Martin Buber: “to slide your feeling inside the dynamic structure of an object, a pillar, or a crystal, or a branch of a tree, or even an animal or a person, and, as they say, trace it from the inside.” In this sense, we experience it when we are captivated by a film or music, when the driver of a car becomes his own car, and the rider becomes one with the horse, intuitively feeling it. Sometimes it even feels as if we are reading another person’s thoughts, so accurately can we understand them through empathy. Understood so broadly, empathy is a neutral ability that we can use in a variety of ways: to better understand and become closer to a person or to help, and to hurt him where it hurts most. Empathy is not unique to humans, but is there something specifically human about it? In our brain (as in the brains of many animals) there are mirror neurons, they are so named because they fire not only when we ourselves perform a certain action, but and when we see how another performs it, while we ourselves do nothing, or when we see emotional manifestations of others. Research on mirror neurons is ongoing, and there is much more unknown than understood, but their connection to empathy seems well-founded. At the bodily level, it becomes clear that when we encounter the suffering of another person, we literally experience their suffering as our own. It affects us from the inside. In a certain sense, we are born to be able to feel into the Other. At the emotional level, something more appears: I see the suffering of the Other, I feel my own suffering within myself. It becomes consonant with some of my experiences and can cause some emotional reactions in me that are not related to the suffering that I see at the moment. Through this, it’s as if I’m experiencing myself not only in the present moment, here and now, but also touching my past self. It can be sad, it can be experienced as something debilitating, or cause fear. At the same time, I can feel something towards the one whose suffering I am observing right now. It can be experienced as unbearable, Gabrielle Wittkop accurately described this experience in the story “The Sleep of Reason”: “When pity torments me unbearably, what can I do but throw stones at those who caused it?” If suffering is bearable, I can feel warmth towards the Other, even joy that we have something in common, tenderness - we become close, and I can experience this as something good, while at the same time feeling suffering. On the intimate level, I am faced with the fact that the suffering I feel is about me. It has a direct relation to me, it is in some sense mine. Can I take it as my own? Can I open up to this as a part of myself? How does that make me in my eyes right now? Here I am left alone with myself: I see myself and how I am affected by what is happening. And I can be very uncomfortable with exactly how it affects me, how I react, what I feel and experience. It’s as if I stand opposite myself and empathically feel into myself, I am the Other for myself. And, as above in relation to the Other, I can experience intimacy with myself - as something good, and myself as valuable to myself. Paradoxically, through the fact that I allowed myself to be influenced by the Other, I can touch myself very deeply. At the same time, it turns out that the more closely we look at this process, the more we see that it goes deep into us, so deep that The other with his suffering seems to disappear. All that remains is me, standing opposite myself. My focus on myself does not allow me to see the Other. What happens next depends very much on/2684