I am thinking a lot about empathy these days -- defensively, I might add -- because my wife, Anne, keeps accusing me of lacking this quality in relation to her. Of course, I readily agree. I sympathize with her pain but stop short of empathizing with it. My saying this infuriates her even more, and she is the kind of person who has no shyness about retaliating. I explain that what feeble mechanism I might have for empathy is nullified when I'm attacked: I cannot identify with a person who wishes to cut me to ribbons. That is my imaginative limitation.

At what point, I wonder, did the word empathy begin to displace sympathy? Empathy isn't even in my 1971 Oxford English Dictionary. This may reflect the more reserved character of the British; one assumes the rage for empathy began on this side of the Atlantic. (See Bill Clinton's 'I feel your pain.') The most recent edition of the American Heritage Dictionary tells us that while sympathy 'denotes the act or capacity for sharing in the sorrows or troubles of another,' empathy 'is a vicarious identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives.'

To me, sympathy suggests a humane concern for others' positions or plights, based partly on a generalized ethic of compassion for all living things. Empathy conveys, to my mind, a more sticky, ghoulish shadowing that stems from the arrogant delusion that one can actually take on, or fuse with, another person's feelings.

It is possible that my wife wants to recapture that sense of romantic communion, usually strongest during the infatuation phase, when lovers' hearts are said to beat as one. But I can't help suspecting she got this empathy bug after a session with her therapist, Larry.

Since then, as a result of our frequent bickering and my wife's conviction that her therapist is a marvelous person, we have entered into couples counseling with Larry. To my surprise, he is a marvelous person. Wise, reasonable, scrupulously even-handed, and empathic -- perhaps to a fault. Sometimes, when he commiserates about the pressures we are operating under -- raising a 3-year-old with health problems while juggling our careers -- I begin to wonder about this warm compassion, the depth of which, it seems to me, ought to be reserved for Romanian coal miners, not yuppies like us.