A lot of what Jaime's going through is to do with an emergence from this psychic retreat. Jaime's identity as something distinct from Cersei will be a struggling realization across the rest of his life. However, Jaime is a little better adapted to emerging from this psychic retreat, finding his own agency, his own self-control. He's also less narcissistic than Cersei. Jaime is very much capable of empathy. Why? We don't really know what makes him different to Cersei, but, somewhere growing up, he probably got better care, containment, and empathy from others than she got. Perhaps that's because he is the male heir and golden child of the family. Perhaps because going out and becoming a squire gave him other figures to look up to, such as the likes of Arthur Dayne. Cersei, on the other hand, was more isolated and shoved aside, left to jealously desire to see herself as Jaime.
Cersei wants to be Jaime. We've seen how she considers herself a man's spirit, just cursed with a woman's body. We've seen how she was born first. She's the eldest, yet gets passed over in place of Jaime. How Jaime gets all the attention, and training, and influence, that she wants. She, in her own body, seems unable to win any of it from her father. So, she merges her sense of identity with Jaime's. When you are ignored and made to feel either non-existent or worthless by your father, where next to you sits a twin brother that, as far as you interpret it, is treated like a golden, perfect male heir, it is unsurprising you might lean into that twin unity and try to see Jaime as part of you. She thinks: “He is seen as perfect because he's part of me, and therefore I'm perfect too. It's just this female body that isn't.” And her dynamic with Jaime plays into this. Out of the two of them, she is very much in charge. He lets her operate as his brain, to the point they can merge even more.
And so she lives a life trying to carry on her father's work after he dies, without ever being properly taught by him or understanding his flaws. Being Jaime, and trying to control Jaime, often in a level of partly unacknowledged rivalry against her father. And if, at any point, she falls short, she blames it on this woman's body that she was made to hate, and that she believes isn't truly her. It is clear she becomes completely trapped by this worldview and view of herself. And, on this point, the contrast to her twin: whereas Jaime slowly starts to recognize how much agency he has over who he wants to be, Cersei instead squeezes herself smaller and smaller into an image that increasingly fails to line up with the world around her, and ultimately catapults her towards tragedy.
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