Another part of clinical education, as I see it, is refinement of sensitivity. Now, training does bring that out because you are supposed to be more perceptive in what you are seeing and you learn more careful and more clever responses, but that is only part of it. There is something else, having to do with the refinement of the imagination of feeling.
The imagination of feeling, not just feeling. The imagination of feeling has to do with imagining the feeling in the other person or in the condition. One of the great complaints in personal relationships is that you are not imagining where I am. We say “You are not feeling where I am,” but the point is that you cannot imagine it! So part of clinical education is the development of, or the working on, the imagination of feeling.
There is a distinction here somewhere and I do not know quite what it is, but it seems to me you cannot truly empathize or feel into without some imagination of what it feels like, or what the imagination of the other person is. Or even falling in love with your imagination of the other person’s imagination. Being really caught by that imagination, then your feeling will flow with that.
— Clinical Education, On Melancholy & Depression