This chapter investigates the question: Should therapists be like a mirror and ‘opaque’ to their patients, or should they be empathetic, build trust, and establish a personal relationship? The starting point is a critique of the Freudian conception of transference, countertransference, and affectivity. Next, the chapter addresses Martin Buber’s thesis on relationships in his famous essay I and Thou, and attempts to clarify the ambiguous concept of empathy as both ontological and psychological. Finally, the chapter examines how empathy, unlike sympathy, pity, or compassion, can serve as the foundation of a therapeutic relationship, and the objections concerning the limitations of this approach are addressed.

Do nonrepresentational habits display intentionality, in the sense of aiming at, pointing to, or targeting some specific objects? I will here tackle this question from the resources of Dewey's pragmatism, and more precisely from his theory of habits and his functionalist theory of meaning. Meaning, for Dewey, is a normative phenomenon, only occurring in social and linguistic practices. The fact that utterances and thoughts can be about states of affairs does not require a specific mental property of pointing to or targeting for to be explained. Similarly, if behavior and habits can be described as being directed toward objects, this directedness is nothing before or beside the way our actions are normatively framed and organized in certain forms of organism–environment transactions, such as inquiry.