International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 13(1): 7–23 (2016)

Published online 11 July 2014 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/aps.1411

Mirror Neurons, Psychoanalysis, and

the Age of Empathy

C. FRED ALFORD

ABSTRACT

A number of psychoanalysts have become excited about mirror neurons, as they are
called by neuroscientists. Mirror neurons have the remarkable property of responding
identically to an action I intend as well as an action you intend. The argument of some
psychoanalysts is that mirror neurons open a new pathway to understanding the
intentions of other. They make possible a new type of empathy, more direct and less
mediated by the typical defenses. One result of such a perspective on psychoanalysis
is the virtual death of the countertransference. If one has direct empathic contact with
another mind, then countertransferential experience is only a barrier, not a guide. The
essay not only looks at the evidence for mirror neurons, which is ambiguous, but also at
what need they might be filling in our contemporary culture. Copyright © 2014 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Key words: mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, countertransference, neuroscience

David Brooks (2011) writes that “we are living in the middle of an ‘empathy
craze’.” The electronic bookshelves of Amazon.com are loaded with over 40
books of recent copyright with titles such as “The Age of Empathy,” “The
Empathy Gap,” “The Empathic Civilization,” and “Teaching Empathy.” Much
of the energy behind this “empathy craze” comes from a neuroscientific theory
that says we have mirror neurons in our brains that enable us to feel what is
in other people’s brains. In other words, we are hard wired to feel empathy
and compassion for others.
Some neuroscientists have been remarkably enthusiastic about mirror
neurons. The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran (2000) stated that “I predict
that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.” As
Marco Iacoboni points out, this is an extraordinarily bold statement, because
virtually every discovery in biology since the discovery of the double helix
structure of DNA in 1953 has rested in some way on that discovery. “Decades
in the future, will everything in neuroscience be seen as coming back to mirror

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 13: 7–23 (2016)

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/aps
8 Alford

neurons?” (Iacoboni, 2008, p. 8) It seems unlikely, but mirror neurons do seem

to have some remarkable properties.
Your actions become my actions. I feel what you do. Somehow understanding the actions
of others does not always require mentalizing. Mirror neurons in your premotor cortex, in
this very pragmatic area, appear to give us an intuitive understanding of the actions of
other people. (Keysers, 2011, p. 19, quoting Vittorio Gallese in lecture)

This is the big discovery: that we do not have to mentalize or think about
other people’s acts in order to understand them. We have mirror neurons in
the premotor cortex, and elsewhere, that give us a direct, pre-conscious
understanding by acting-out at the neuronal level (while suppressing the
muscles involved) the same act we are observing. We can understand without
knowing or thinking, because our neurons assume you are doing what I would
be doing in the same circumstance.
To claim that mentalizing is unnecessary in understanding the other
person is no small claim. Mentalizing is the process that underlies what
philosophers call a “theory of mind.” It is through mentalizing that we come
to understand that others have mental states similar to but different than
our own. I am happy because I got my paper published, but you are sad
because your new job did not work out. To know both, to take both into
account in our relationship, requires a delicate balancing act, in which
self-knowledge must be integrated with knowledge of the other. It involves
perspective taking, in which I imagine what it must be like to experience
the world from your point of view, while holding onto my own.
Developmentally, mentalizing is seen by many psychoanalysts as the result
of secure attachment in infancy and childhood. I cannot understand your
mental state or my own unless someone first understood my mental state
and mirrored it back to me when I was an infant and young child (Bateman
& Fonagy, 2011, pp. 67–80). The conclusion returns to mentalizing as a
developmental ideal.
At first glance, mirror neuron theory is an odd theory on which to base
empathy, for in some ways it is the opposite of mentalizing. Rather than saying
that there are cells that perform the functional equivalent to that old saying
“walk a mile in my shoes” and then you will be able to take my perspective,
the cells say the opposite. “I will understand you by assuming that you walk in
my shoes just as I do.” Mirror neurons work by assuming that you intend what
I would intend in a similar situation. I am the model; your perspective is my
own. Mirror neurons work by assuming that you are the reflection of me.
“We predict the actions of others based on what we would do,” says Keysers
(2011, p. 31). “The discovery of mirror neurons made it clear to me that our
brains are indeed almost magically connected to each other” (Keysers, 2011,
p. 62). Magically connected, but the connection it seems is all one way; I
understand you because you are doing what I would do in that particular
situation. Mirror neurons, it seems, do not mirror your emotions, but mine.

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 13: 7–23 (2016)

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/aps
 Mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and the age of empathy 9

This quality of mirror neurons is generally expressed in terms of intentionality.

Mirror neurons not only react to the actions of others, but act as though they
know what the other intends. Mirror neurons do this because they have a dual
property: they record action, and they silently (in the absence of motor
action in the observer) mirror or mimic that action in such a way as to
demonstrate they “know” what the action intends. They do this through
“simulation,” neuroscientists agree. That is, my mirror neuron cells know what
you intend because of what I would intend in your circumstances. While I will
investigate the substance of this claim, the larger philosophical question is
whether this cell-based knowledge (if there is such a thing) has anything to do
with empathy as we ordinarily understand the term? If truly understanding
another involves an appreciation of the otherness of the other, his or her
difference, his or her unique situation, then mirror cells are not going to be very
helpful. If empathy includes the ability to take a perspective other than one’s
own, an achievement associated with mentalizing, then mirror neurons are not
going to be very helpful. At least not on their own.
Needed are not neurons, but whole people who recognize in others both
similarity and difference. Needed is not a magical connection, but a real one, made
by people, not even smart cells. “While we witness the actions of others, our own
premotor cortex resonates as if it was doing the actions we observe. The mirror
system builds a bridge between the minds of two people and shows us that our
brains are deeply social” (Keysers, 2011, p. 62). Deeply social, or deeply unimagi-
native and self-centered? It takes an imaginative brain, or person, to imagine the
other as like the self in some respects, unlike the self in equally important respects.
Or as another neuroscientist puts it, “Imagine: The only thing separating your
consciousness from another’s might be your skin!” (Ramachandran, 2012, p. 125).
About mirror neurons, V.S. Ramachandran (2012, p. 124) says “I like calling
these cells ‘Gandhi neurons’ because they blur the boundary between self and
others—not just metaphorically, but quite literally, since the neuron can’t tell
the difference.” It is worth considering for a moment Gandhi’s contribution to
civil disobedience, the fulcrum of his philosophy, was what he called satyagraha.
Gandhi preferred the term to passive resistance, and used it to win India’s
independence from Britain.

Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym
for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which
is born of Truth … and gave up the use of the phrase “passive resistance,” in connection with
it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word
“satyagraha” itself or some other equivalent English phrase. (Gandhi, 2006, p. 73)

Clearly satyagraha has little to do with blurring the boundary between self
and other. On the contrary, it sharpens that boundary in the name of the truth
of those who civilly but actively resist unjust authority. One might argue that
Ramachandran is just waxing poetic, but so many claims of this kind are made
about mirror neurons that one wonders.

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10 Alford

There is a reason that the mereological fallacy is a fallacy. The mereological

fallacy mistakes the part for the whole, as though stomachs eat, or brains make
decisions. Rather, people do these things. The mereological fallacy is working
overtime in contemporary neuroscience of the mirror neuron, attributing to a
single cell, or more often a series of cells called a mirror neuron circuit, the
property of a person. One might argue that I am taking an exuberant phrase
out of context. But much of mirror neuron theory is based on that exuberant
phrase. Or rather, it commits the mereological fallacy as we shall see.

WHAT IS EMPATHY?

Empathy is a vicarious emotion, a feeling of what the other individual is feeling.

This is true whether it is the result of emotional contagion among a group of bo-
nobos (a great ape), or the result of a complex exercise of the imagination that
the German romantics called Verstehen (Dilthey, 1883/1988). The concept has
a long tradition in moral philosophy, although the term itself is only about 150
years old.1 What grounds empathy in an older tradition is the fact that both
David Hume and Adam Smith used the term sympathy as virtual synonyms
(Prinz, 2011, p. 212). Smith (1759, II.i) put it this way. “Whatever is the passion
which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous
emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every
attentive spectator.”
Considerable social-psychological research demonstrates that there is little or
no connection between empathy and altruism, or pro-social behavior as it is
called, even when little cost and effort is involved. Empathy is not action
inducing, whereas indignation is.

A meta-analysis shows that empathy is only weakly correlated with prosocial behavior
(Neuberg et al., 1997). More strikingly, the correlation appears only when there is little
cost. If someone has to do something as easy as crossing a street to help someone in need,
they are not especially likely to, and those who are empathetic show no greater tendency
to help in such circumstances than those who are not. (Prinz, 2011, p. 220)

Anger and guilt are far greater motivators than empathy, as is indignation. In
one study, people are asked to make telephone calls on behalf of a charity. Those
who had just delivered (or believed they had delivered) painful electrical shocks
to a confederate of the experimenter made three times as many telephone calls
for charity than those who did not (Prinz, 2011, p. 221).
In psychoanalysis, the weak link between empathy and pro-social behavior
matters little. The empathy generated by mirror neurons serves not to motivate
social action, but to connect patient and analyst in a new more intimate way
than ever before. At least that is the claim.
Finally, is it important to distinguish between empathy and sympathy? In
theory yes, in practice perhaps not. Empathy refers to the understanding and
sharing of a specific emotional state with another person. Seen from the

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 13: 7–23 (2016)

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 Mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and the age of empathy 11

perspective of the problem of mirror neurons, empathy does not require

mentalizing. Furthermore, empathy refers to the sharing of a wide variety of
emotional states, including pleasurable ones.
Sympathy refers only to feeling pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.
It does not require that the emotion be shared. It can be achieved by the
perspective taking associated with mentalizing, though it is hard to imagine that
one could sympathize deeply without having felt similar emotions. The usage
guide of The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Soanes & Stevenson, 2004)
explains the difference in terms of the distinction between “sharing” feelings
and “having” feelings of pity or sorrow at someone else’s misfortune. The former
is empathy, the latter sympathy.
Characters in Greek tragedy often beg to be pitied. Sophocles has
Neoptolemus say to Philoctetes, the eponymous protagonist of his play, “I am
in sorrow for your pain” (line 745). It was what every Greek wanted, what every
man could give, what the Greeks called pity (eleos or oiktos). Neoptolemus
appears to be displaying empathy, but in fact the distinction is not crystal clear.
To be in sorrow for Philoctetes’ pain could be interpreted as sympathy. In this
case, as in many cases, the distinction is more theoretical than practical. The
development of the play, in which Neoptolemus shows his care by refusing an
order given by Odysseus to steal Philoctetes’ enchanted bow does not resolve
the question. This is a problem that will not yield readily to definitions.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT MIRROR NEURONS?

The surgeon places an electrode in Smith’s anterior cingulate, a region near the front of
the brain where many of the neurons respond to pain. And sure enough, the doctor is able
to find a neuron that becomes active whenever Smith’s hand is poked with a needle. But
the surgeon is astonished by what he sees next. The same neuron fires just as vigorously
when Smith merely watches another patient being poked. It is as if the neuron (or the
functional circuit of which it is a part) is empathizing with another person. A stranger’s
pain becomes Smith’s pain, almost literally. (Ramachandran, 2012, p. 6)

The question, of course, is whether this is empathy, or mere neurological

reflex, or a mere neurological reflex that will become the foundation of empathy
if familial and cultural conditions are ripe? Empathy is a complex emotion
requiring imagination for the situation of others that may be different from
ourselves. Empathy also requires cultivation, what Germans call Bildung, so that
we feel empathy for those who are unattractive and distant, not just close and
cute. A neurological reflex might provide a foundation, it might be irrelevant,
or it might work against the cultivation of empathy.
Mirror neurons do not, in any case, just code for action. They seem to prefer
action that is intentional and meaningful. A clever experiment demonstrates
this, though one subject to all the limits of the functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI), which is incapable of doing more than isolating an area in
the brain in which mirror neurons are thought to be active. Viewing a hand

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12 Alford

grasping a teacup, and viewing a hand grasping a teacup amidst a table set for tea
with teapot, cookies, and Nutella (a nut and chocolate spread), mirror neurons
fire much more intensely when the situation suggests the intention to drink tea,
not just to grasp the cup (Iacoboni, 2008, p. 76). Mirror neurons, as Iacoboni
sees it, are phenomenological: they are oriented toward intentionality.

To put it in Gallese’s words, “it is as if the other becomes another self.” … Mirror neurons
help us reenact in our brain the intentions of other people, giving us a profound
understanding of their mental states. (Iacoboni, 2008, p. 78)

Mirror neuron theory is bound to the simulation theory of mind. That is, I
know or attribute what you are thinking by putting myself in your place.
Simulation, in turn, is a reflection of intentionality. I simulate what you are
thinking based on my assumptions about your intentions, assumptions (in this
case) which take place at the neuronal level.

“Simulation” – I have used the word numerous times to describe what is going on in the
brain of the observer of others’ actions, and it is widely used in the field, but I am not
entirely happy with it. To me, simulation implies some level of conscious effort, whereas
a great deal of mirror neuron activity most likely reflects an experience-based, pre-
reflective, and automatic form of understanding other minds. The father of phenomenology,
Edmund Husserl, described the phenomenon (without referring to mirror neurons, of
course) as “coupling.” I like this term, though it may be too strong because it implies that
the two individuals become just one entity. (Iacoboni, 2008, pp. 264–265)2

There is something about mirror neurons that leads neuroscientists, as well as

psychoanalysts, to want to make them a medium by which individuals engage in
an experience of unmediated pure communication.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MIRROR NEURONS

Along with social scientists, psychoanalysts became excited by the “cells that
read minds.” (Blakeslee, 2006). For David Olds (2006), mirror neuron research
“reveals the intense interpenetration of subjective beings who are in personal
contact” (p. 862). Anna Aragno (2008, p. 731) concluded that the analyst’s
empathy “seems to bypass any representational or cognitive/linguistic system
by directly ‘feeling’ into the other’s state and intent.” The single most influential
study of mirror neurons in psychoanalysis remains that of Vittorio Gallese,
Morris Eagle, and Paolo Migone (2007, p. 144) in the Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association. There they state that mirror neurons support the
claim that “body-related experiential knowledge enables a direct grasping of
the sense of the actions performed by others and of the emotions and sensations
they experience.” The result is that the automatic simulation of the other’s
internal experience affords the therapist “a direct non-inferential understanding
[of patient] experience that constitutes the basis of the therapeutic use of the
analyst’s countertransference reactions” (p. 165). Even if this should be true,

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 Mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and the age of empathy 13

mirror neurons cannot and will not reveal the meaning of many of our most
significant actions. For example, if a patient pulls at her blouse, the mirror
neuron system cannot reveal whether she intends to expose her body or
cover it (Vivona, 2009, p. 535). Contrary to headline in Blakeslee’s (2006)
article in The New York Times, the mirror neuron system does not read minds,
only actions.
All actions, the most important actions, take place in a context established
over time, a context which is in many cases cultural as well as interpersonal.
The mirror neuron explanation of the countertransference, or of psychoanalytic
understanding generally, is a homunculi model, positing what is in effect a little
man or woman in the brain, a neuron (or neuronal circuit) with the properties
of a human being with a biography and culture. In the end, a mirror neuron is a
brain cell, or a group of brain cells firing, not a human being. If this is so, if there
is no immediate, unmediated understanding, then we are left to grapple with the
fallibility of our own subjectivity, particularly the way it obscures the subjectivity
of others, especially the analysand (Vivona, 2009, p. 543). We must constantly
work at disentangling the patient’s influence on the countertransference from all
the things we bring to the experience, our baggage as it is sometimes called.
Only sometimes this baggage is itself the key to understanding.
Gallese et al. (2007, p. 151) seem to understand this point.

A’s simulation of B’s behavior is filtered through the former’s past experiences, capacities,
and mental attitudes. In the context of empathic understanding, what is important is that
A’s simulation needs to be sufficiently accurate to generate responses congruent with, or
attuned to, B’s behavior and experiential states.

Mirroring, they suggest, is actually a misleading term, suggesting an identical

response. “Attunement” or “congruent response,” would be more appropriate to
the actual psychological process, involving as it does the active involvement of
A’s (the mother or therapist’s) own mental state (Gallese et al., 2007, p. 152).
This seems sensible, but it raises the question of what makes mirror neurons
important if the real psychological work is being done by the holding and
emotional interpretation of the mother or therapist. At work is a complex
emotional and cognitive act in which simulation, if it exists, seems the least part.
Part of this complex act would seem to involve the analyst’s experience of
the countertransference, often experienced as the patient’s evocation of odd
or ego-alien states in the analyst him or herself, with which the analyst must
reflect and struggle in order to make sense of the communication from the
patient. This is particularly true among post-Kleinians, but it is true for a wide
variety of therapists influenced by object relations. In Grotstein’s (2009, pp. 35–39)
account, many post-Kleinians see the transference–countertransference as a
struggle between the patient, who seeks to draw the analyst into collusion with
roles most likely to stymie the analysis, and the analyst, who will inevitably be
drawn in. To be drawn in or not drawn in is not the question. The question is
whether the analyst is aware of what is happening, participating in the

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14 Alford

countertransference while maintaining a therapeutic stance at the same time.

Focusing on the here and now in the therapeutic process is key to its success,
analyzing the complex process as it is happening. Other analytic traditions
place less therapeutic (curative) emphasis on the countertransference, but it is
important in most, even in psychoanalytically informed counseling (Jacobs,
2006, p. 146).
The mechanism of the countertransference, as with the transference, is
projective identification, through which the patient induces the analyst to feel
the patient’s own unbearable feeling states. In this sense, projective identification
is both a communication and an aggressive act of evacuation, attempting to force
unbearable feelings on the analyst (Grotstein, 2009, pp. 38–39; Jacobs, 2006,
p. 109). As with the countertransference, different schools of psychoanalysis inter-
pret projective identification differently. For some, the goal is for the analyst to
contain the projection, metabolizing it as it were, and so allowing it to be
reintrojected by the patient in a more coherent, less threatening form. From this
perspective, analysis is a series of projections and metabolized reintrojections
(Grotstein, 2009, p. 307). There are other views.
Few views are as extreme as that of Gallese et al. (2007, p. 150), who hold
that because no mechanism has been discovered to explain the operation of
projective identification, the countertransference is now no better understood
than it was in 1926, when Helene Deutsch suggested it might be explained in
terms of “occult processes” (Deutsch, 1926/1973; Gallese et al., 2007, p. 150).
Since the discovery of mirror neurons, the countertransference is best
understood as a disturbance in the field. Because mirror neurons convey in a
relatively straightforward way the emotional experiences of another, odd oralien
ego alien states should be presumed to originate in the analyst’s own history and
experience, rather than being interpreted as signs that the patient is attempting
to communicate unspeakable experiences (Gallese et al., 2007, p. 150).
To be sure, some identification with the patient is both necessary and
desirable, but this no longer occurs within the struggle that characterizes
the transference–countertransference. Thanks to mirror neurons, which
communicate intentions, and not deep psychological states or unconscious
fantasies, it is a far milder encounter than imagined by Freud (Quinodoz,
2005, pp. 70-72), Grotstein (2009), or Thomas Ogden (1977). As Gallese
et al. (2007, p. 165) conclude, “the analyst comes to understand the patient’s
mind through reflection on a range of personal, affectively tinged experiences,
including partial identifications (i.e., putting him- or herself in the shoes of
the patient).”
In the end it is not just a question of evidence, about which more in a
moment. It is a question of what the hypothesis of mirror neurons adds to
familiar explanations of human action given by Shakespeare, poets, and
novelists throughout the ages, all of which have involved mentalizing. Nor
is this a peculiarity of the literary tradition. When we feel another’s pain
or loss as friend, lover, spouse, or parent, mentalizing almost always guides

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 Mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and the age of empathy 15

empathy, which is to say no more than that we are directed by our

understanding of the situation of the other person. Not the total situation,
which is perhaps impossible, but more than the simple action intention that
can be conveyed by mirror neurons, such as reaching for a cup of tea.
Ironically, one of the experiences of others that one would expect mirror neurons
to empathize with most, pain, does not seem to be conveyed by mirror neurons at
all. Rather, it seems to involve the interaction of those regions of the brain
necessary for perspective taking (Decety & Hodges, 2009; Decety & Jackson,
2006; Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2006).3 There can be no reasonable
objection to biological reduction when it adds to our understanding and capability,
but the hypothetical positing of cells capable of intentionality adds little or
nothing to our theory or practice.
First it will pay to look at the evidence for mirror neurons possessing the
quality of intentionality. Then I will speculate about why some psychoanalysts,
among others, have become so excited about them.

HOW SLENDER THE EVIDENCE

Before continuing, it is worth considering a recent and authoritative review of

the status of research on mirror neurons, “What we know currently about mirror
neurons” (Kilner & Lemon, 2013). One thing we currently know is that “the
activity of mirror neurons cannot yet be unambiguously detected using
neuroimaging techniques.” Of the 800 PubMed studies reviewed, the authors
focused only on the 25 that actually studied mirror neurons, not the presumptive
evidence of mirror neurons. These 25 studies were all done on macaque
monkeys, which had electrodes implanted into neurons in their brains, a
practice ethically impossible with humans. Imaging studies with humans are
currently limited to the size of a voxel (a combination of volume and pixel),
which contains about 5.5 million neurons. The authors conclude that fMRI
studies confirm a broad overlap between cortical areas active in humans during
action observation and areas where mirror neurons have been reported in
macaque monkeys. What is not clear is whether imaging techniques are
sufficiently precise to say more. This, however, has not held back research using
neural imaging or claims based on this research.
In fact, since Gallese et al. published their article in 2007, mirror neurons in
humans have been located in the brains of 21 patients being surgically treated
for intractable epilepsy. The patients had been implanted with intracranial
electrodes to identify the foci of seizure activity, and the researchers were
allowed, with patient consent, to piggyback their research using these same
electrodes (Mukamel, Ekstrom, Kaplan, Iacoboni, & Fried, 2010).
Though the existence of mirror neurons in humans has been established, the
significance of these neurons remains in question.4 The most fundamental
objection is an alternative hypothesis positing a simpler cell: mirror neurons
are cells that are good at associative learning. They are not “intentional.” From

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16 Alford

this perspective, mirror neurons are sensorimotor association cells that do not
code for intention, but simply learn through association. This is what one would
expect a cell to do. They do not help action understanding. They learn to
associate an action with an unacted upon response, as though they were doing
the action. They are not “intentional.” They lack “action understanding”
(Hickok, 2008, pp. 1240–1241; Hickok & Hauser, 2010).
What is this “action understanding” that mirror neurons lack according to
Hickok, Hauser, and others? “Action understanding … has been evolving, but
at its core is the idea that self-generated actions have an inherent semantics
and that observing the same action in others affords access to this action
semantics” (Hickok, 2008, p. 1231). With the term “action understanding,”
neuroscientists such as Iacoboni mean that even though mirror neurons are part
of the brain’s motor system, they seem to respond not to specific movements but
to specific goals or intentions (Thomas, 2012). In action understanding, I, or
rather my mirror neurons, understand not your isolated action, but its intended
goal. To critics such as Hickok it only appears as though there is such an
intentional logic because while the range of meanings associated with any
specific action is large in the real world for humans, and perhaps even for
macaque monkeys, the actual tests are structured so that a very limited range
of action outcomes is possible, such as reaching for a teacup or not. What appear
to be tests of action understanding are actually tests of associative learning.
Mirror neurons are interesting in that they can perform two functions at once,
observing an action and associating it with one’s own suppressed motor action.
No more than this is needed to explain all we observe with mirror neurons once
we understand the highly artificial conditions under which they are studied.
The second argument against mirror neurons is not necessarily more
powerful, but it is somehow more disturbing, and applies to the more subtle
properties of mirror neurons: that mirror neurons are not free of personal and
cultural bias. They exist, but they are not vehicles of unmediated perception.
Using whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record cortical activity
of human subjects while they watched a series of videos of an actor making a
movement recorded from different viewpoints, Kilner, Marchant, and Frith
(2006) demonstrated that cortical response to action observation is modulated
by the relationship between the observer and the actor. They conclude that this
modulation reflects a mechanism that filters information into the “mirror system
… allowing only the actions of the most socially relevant person to pass”
(p. 147). Recent evidence confirms such bias, as when a partner invokes a larger
mirror neuron activation than when a third party performs it. Such filtering is
not, evidently, just a matter of attention. Rather, it is the observer’s assumptions
concerning the identity of the other person that modulates the activation of the
mirror neuron system (Keestra, 2012, p. 236).
The key point is that mirror neurons are not isolated from the rest of the
brain’s information processing system. They are not in direct contact with
anything but the brain itself. Only the actions of socially relevant people pass

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 Mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and the age of empathy 17

the mechanism that filters information into the mirror neuron system, or at least
this mechanism allows the socially relevant to pass through more easily. This
explains why it is easy to feel empathy for someone in one’s in-group, and
relatively easy for many people to ignore the suffering of outsiders. Fortunately,
this filter can be rendered more porous through education, including mass
media. It can also be rendered more impermeable by propaganda and ideology,
which is why our mirror neurons can be blind toward the suffering of neighbors
if they happen to be of another race or ethnicity.
One would have thought the proponents of mirror neurons would have
devoted more time and attention to explaining how it is that humans are
thoroughly capable of ignoring the suffering of people just like them even when
they live next door, around the block, or down the street. The answer is ideol-
ogy, propaganda, culture, tradition, and prejudice. Mirror neurons work within
the framework of these cognitive states; they do not bypass them. One only
has to look at history or current events to know this.
For those who prefer experiments to history, consider the study by Gutsell
and Inzlicht (2010, p. 841), whose research with 37 White participants,
including 13 women, led them to conclude that “a spontaneous and implicit
simulation of others’ action states may be limited to close others and, without
active effort, may not be available for outgroups.” The outgroups with which
they confronted the White participants were South Asians, Blacks, and East
Asians videotaped performing everyday actions, while the participants were
fitted with an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap. The research was conducted
at the University of Toronto.
More general philosophical considerations support these conclusions. In her
recent book, Braintrust, the neurologist and philosopher Patricia Churchland
(2011) points out that intentions are understood in a more cognitively complex
fashion than is possible for a single cell.

A neuron, though computationally complex, is just a neuron. It is not an intelligent

homunculus. If a neural network represents something complex, such as the intention to
insult, it must have the right input and be in the right place in the neural circuitry to
do that. (Churchland, 2011, p. 142)

The studies considered immediately above reflect Churchland’s insight. The

input of mirror neurons is mediated by the rest of the brain, not in the sense that
the individual reflects upon the empathic experience he or she has just directly
experienced via his or her mirror neuron system, but rather in the sense that the
quality of the empathic experience itself is mediated by the experiences of an
entire brain, what is sometimes called an embodied person.
In fact, this is exactly what one would expect. Why a theory of immediate,
unmediated access to the minds of others, albeit tamed access (analysts
interested in mirror neurons seem relatively uninterested in the wilder territories
of the unconscious mind) has come to be influential in psychoanalysis, and in
the wider intellectual world, is what requires explanation.

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18 Alford

WHY THE EXCITEMENT OVER MIRROR NEURONS AMONG THE

GENERAL PUBLIC?

We have seen why some psychoanalysts are excited about mirror neurons.
They promise direct, unmediated access and understanding of the patient’s
experience. Is the excitement among the intellectual public similar? No, but it
is related. The relationship stems from the idea that humans are connected to
each other in an intimate way that bypasses the seemingly broken promises of
God and Enlightened reason. In the absence of these sources of authority among
broad swathes of the intellectual public, mirror neurons signify a common
ground for empathy, independent of all the cultural differences that seem to
divide us. In other words, applied cognitive neuroscience has found an alternative
to cultural relativism.

Neuroscience’s project of bringing to light the natural, bare substrate of human faculties, no
longer contaminated by cultural and linguistic differences and resistant to the pressures of
society and political regimes, seems to offer solid ground, and a safe anchor against the return
of many of the traumas of the twentieth century: neuroscience appears to promote a message
of universal brotherhood (as we all share the same neurobiological structures of which all
cultural differences are just superficial variants) and, with its emphasis on our natural,
hardwired inclination to moral life and empathy, seems to provide a firmer basis for a newly
possible ethics. (Meloni, 2012, p. 37)

In a world in which no one believes in meta-narratives, as they are called, “at

least the body initially appears to provide a firm foundation on which to
reconstruct a reliable sense of self in the modern world” (Shilling, 2003, p. 2).
The “somatic society,” Bryan Turner (1992, p. 12) has called this view.
My view is a little different. The somatic society is a society without
imagination, one that has lost access to myths or narratives that help populate
rich inner worlds. Not just religious myths, but Freudian myths are a good
example. To call them myths is not to say they are false. It is to say that they
are rich and variegated stories about humanity’s place in the world and the inner
angels and demons that drive us all.
Freud’s metapsychology, his story of the origin of civilization in Moses and
Monotheism (1939), and the perpetuity of Civilization and its Discontents
(1930), constitute the core of his mythic structure, but it could be elaborated.
The stories and characters of cognitive neuroscience, such as mirror neurons,
are also a myth. Not because they are false; their truth or falsity is not at issue
for the moment. The stories and characters of cognitive neuroscience are mythic
in the sense that they tell us about the meaning of human life. Mirror
neurons, for example, tell us that we are not isolated humans beings, but deeply
implicated in one another’s psychic and physical lives.
Unlike the other myths, the characters of cognitive neuroscience are not
anthropomorphic; they no longer have human qualities. Gallese et al. (2007,
p. 144) cite the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in support of their

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Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/aps
 Mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and the age of empathy 19

claim that mirror neurons “generate a peculiar quality of familiarity with other
individuals.” This, they say, is supported by and resembles Merleau-Ponty’s
statement in The Phenomenology of Perception that “it is as if the other person’s
intention inhabited my body and mine his” (Gallese et al., 2007, p. 144, quoting
Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2002, p. 215). Forget for a moment that simulation only
works one way (in Gallese’s model, mirror neurons simulate the other’s
intention; there have been no studies of reciprocity). Hardly alone in this regard
Aragno (2008), and Gallese et al. (2007), write about mirror neurons as though
they were equivalent to the person, not a cell, or cluster of cells. It makes sense
to say that a man is immature, or prefers older women, because he never resolved
his Oedipus complex. We know what in the world this (simplistic) explanation
refers to. It does not make the same sense to say that this person is empathetic
because his mirror neurons are firing.
In fact, this last statement is incorrect. It may soon make perfect sense to
explain empathy in terms of the activity of mirror neurons. But if so, then
something will have been lost. A world will have been lost, one that explains
human action in terms that art, literature, and drama have found useful for
centuries. Consider, for example, Hamlet, or Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s Long
Day’s Journey into Night, both of whom may be said to suffer from Oedipal
conflict. Edmund’s sister, Mary seems to suffer from the female version,
sometimes called the Electra complex, but not by Freud, who was not fond of
the term.5 My point, of course, is not whether literary characters actually suffered
from the Oedipus complex. The question makes no sense. My point is that the
Oedipus complex is a story about human motivation sufficiently rich to
stimulate discussion about good literature, and with it the meaning of life. Not
only among psychoanalysts, but among the reading public. Will mirror neurons
be able to do the same?
A neuroeconomist named Paul Zak described his work on the neurobiology
of trust this way. A brain scan, he says, “lets me embrace words like ‘morality’
or ‘love’ or ‘compassion’ in a non-squishy way. These are real things” (Brown,
2012). Zak is not writing specifically about mirror neurons, but the point is
the same. Something disconcerting, an alienation from our own nature, is
going on if emotions such as morality, love, compassion, attachment, care,
empathy, and concern have to be confirmed by brain imaging in order to be
considered real. Have not poets, artists, and everyday people painted, written,
talked, made music, kissed, and made love for millennia in a way that not
only assumes these emotions exist, but called them into being through
their actions?

CONCLUSION

Mirror neurons may initially seem to render the boundary between patient and
analyst more permeable. In fact, they render it less permeable, more secure. The
countertransference, while still operative, has been reduced to little more than

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20 Alford

empathy. Intrusive, ego-alien experiences imposing themselves upon the

analyst, bringing with them speechless communication from the patient, no
longer exist. Such experiences, should they occur, are no longer communications,
but simply disturbances in the analyst’s experience of him or herself. Empathy
flows more freely, but it is of a more toned down variety, in which the non-verbal
communication of unutterable and unbearable psychic states is evidently ruled out
of bounds. It is ironic that this is accomplished by means of an account of mirror
neurons, which were (and still largely are) best understood in terms of how they
code for non-verbal action. It is the consequence of requiring a neural rather than
narrative mechanism of explanation.
To be sure, analysis still cures by a type of holding and interpretation.

We want to emphasize that under these circumstances, when the patient internalizes the
therapist’s responses, what is internalized is not simply a representational replica of the
patient’s own behavior, but already a transformation of that behavior. (Gallese et al.,
2007, p. 162)

However, the context of this remark, in which they refer to Rogerian

therapy, as well as the value of being understood as itself of primary therapeutic
benefit, suggests Gallese et al. (2007) simply do not conceive of therapy as a process
involving the primordial struggles with which Freud, Grotstein, and Ogden,
among many others were and are concerned, struggles into which the therapist
is invariably drawn into the inner world of the patient. In order to conceive of
therapy in these terms, one requires narrative and metaphor more richly populated
with human characters than stories about neural mechanisms can supply.
Thinking through the problems posed by mirror neurons for psychoanalysis
leads logically to a renewed emphasis on the development of mentalizing. Mirror
neurons suggest we know others automatically by modeling them on ourselves.
A developmental approach to mentalizing, frequently based on attachment
theory (Bowlby, 1983), suggests that we learn how to negotiate the complex
relationship between what we are feeling, and what others are feeling, by having
someone, an attachment figure, who feeds back our feelings to us (Bateman &
Fonagy, 2011, pp. 67–80). It is really the opposite of mirror neuron theory.
In early childhood one does not even know one’s own mind unless another
has mirrored our feelings back to us. Not at the neuronal level, but at the level
of a self still learning what it is to have one’s own feelings, that they can be
distinct from another’s (usually mother’s) feelings, and that the distance can be
negotiated. The so-called magic of mirror neurons could misdirect us from this
hard work, as though it was easy, even automatic, to understand the intentions
of others. Not only is it hard work to understand others, but it is even harder work
to bring up children who feel sufficiently attached, held, and understood that they
can learn how they feel by the reaction of another, and so become able to
appreciate others’ feelings (Wallin, 2009). There are no magic cells to take the
place of this hard work. It is hard work in childhood. It is harder work still in
therapy, where people go when this hard work fails the first time around.

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 Mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and the age of empathy 21

NOTES

1 The English word was coined in 1909 by the psychologist Edward B.

Titchener in an attempt to translate the German word “Einfühlungsvermögen.”
It was, however, Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) who transformed empathy from
a concept of philosophical aesthetics into a central category of philosophy
and the human sciences (Stueber, 2013).
2 The “coupling” citation is from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, para. 44. The
German is das Paarung.
3 “Adopting the perspective of another person to imagine his or her … pain …
was associated with specific increase in the posterior cingulate and precuneus,
as well as in the right temporo-parietal junction. These areas are reliably
involved in distinguishing the perspective of the self from that of others in a
variety of tasks involving actions and emotions” (Decety & Jackson, 2006, p. 56)
4 The mirror neurons in humans were not found in the human homologue of
the monkey brain, most likely because mirror neurons are widely distributed
throughout the brain, and also because the area of the monkey brain studied
(the ventral premotor cortex and the inferior parietal lobe), are areas in
which epilepsy rarely occurs in humans.
5 The Electra Complex is generally attributed to Carl Jung (1970).

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mentalhelp.net/poc/view_index.php?idx=119&d=1&w=9&e=29433

C. Fred Alford
Professor of Government and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
calford@umd.edu

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