The identification principle has strong ties with the idea of literature deepening our capacity for empathy, a popular claim over the last few decades. Empathy has become a byword for literary achievement, touted as a literary aim; it’s a literary virtue in and of itself. Empathy via emotional identification is, mostly, the way empathy in collective culture is imagined, discussed, and prioritised. This is evident in charity campaigns; and we see it perhaps nowhere more clearly than in discussion of literature as creating empathy or making readers more empathic, in which what is being invoked is a sense of emotional (rather than circumstantial) identification, often with someone in an entirely different context to my own, where the idea is I realise they are ‘a me, as well’. (This is from Neil Gaiman, who writes, thanks to literature, ‘You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well’.) While the recognition I mentioned at the end of the last chapter is a jolt of emotional understanding, say of an emotion or atmosphere or felt reality, which may or may not be mediated through a person or character and is inescapably bound up with the movements of language, empathy-as-emotional-identification is identification with a person or character through the manipulation of emotion. Emotion here serves as a prompt and stimulus to empathic feeling, rather than something perceived as cognitively significant in itself, worth exploring on its own terms.