In one session, we were recounting a disagreement we had had the night before. As it happened, about sex. We had been going through a dry spell, mostly because of my wife's preoccupation with our baby daughter and mistrust of my capacity to empathize with her. Now she said she was getting ready to consider doing it again, and I replied, like an idiot, something to the effect that I'll believe it when I see it.

Larry offered an alternative script, giving us the lines that, in his view, we might more profitably have spoken. I was to compliment her on making this overture to an advance, and if I still needed to express skepticism, she was to show that she understood my feeling 'vulnerable' because I'd been starved for sexual affection. Larry then asked what I thought would happen if Anne had replied that way. Feeling the old obligation to speak the truth in therapy, I took a deep breath and said that his suggestions had nothing to do with life as it is lived; that he was trying to indoctrinate us to talk the new, totalitarian Empathy Speak.

'Are you really against empathy?' he asked, somewhat incredulously.

'I am, yes -- '

'You see?' Anne said. 'You see what I have to put up with?'

I went on to say that I was for sympathy, that old-fashioned term. The people I admire most, like two friends of mine, both in their 70s, operate out of a moral code older than empathy that acknowledges that the gap between two souls can never be entirely bridged. Nor should it. I thought of my old professor, Lionel Trilling, who questioned D.H. Lawrence's hunger for total honesty by saying: 'Why should two people have no secrets from each other?' On the other hand, there is much in the present culture that promotes an exaggerated or false empathy, like the figure of the talk show host, the Great Listener -- Oprah or Geraldo -- whom I consider dangerous.

As you might imagine, this did not go over well. I saw that my attempts to explain myself were perceived as inappropriately 'academic,' therefore cold, removed from emotions and the business at hand. (Interesting that therapy today has that anti-intellectual edge. This is no place to start thinking.)