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Review: Empathy and Mental Health by Arthur J. Clark
Empathy and Mental Health: An Integral Model for Developing Therapeutic Skills in Counseling and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge 2022 Electronic Version
As a young man, Arthur J. Clark heard Carl Rogers speak and was inspired to devote his life’s work to applying empathy in education, counseling, and talk therapy. This book is the distillation of years of experience and learning, and we, the readers, are enriched and even enlightened in this original synthesis of existing ideas on empathy. It is fully buzz word compliant, diligently calls out the limitations and risks of empathy, and guides the readers in expanding their empathy to make a difference in overcoming suffering and mental illness. It takes a lot of empathy to produce a book on empathy, and empathy is evident in abundance in Clark’s work.
As noted, Clark’s academic background is in education, as was Carl Rogers’, but the reader soon discovers Clarks’ work with empathy to be generously informed by Freud, Ferenczi, and Adlerian psychoanalysis. Thus Clark quotes [Alfred] Adler (1927): “Empathy occurs in the moment one individual speaks with another. It is impossible to understand another individual if it is impossible at the same time to identify oneself with him” (Clark: 20). At this same time this reviewer was enlivened by the application of distinctions to be found in the Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut and the latter’s colleagues Michael Basch and Arnold Goldberg. This brilliant traversal of the practice and conceptual landscape of empathy inspired Clark’s life work, and is on display here.
The book is filled with short segments of transcripts of encounters between counselor/therapist and client. To the point that empathy is much broader than reflecting feeling and meanings, examples are provided of empathic encouragement, empathic being in the here and now (immediacy), empathic silence, empathic self-disclosure, empathic confrontation, empathic reframing, empathic cognitive restricting, empathic interpretation. Clark’s work with empathic reframing, cognitive restructuring, and interpretation are particularly useful (Clark: 105 – 106).
“Empathy” is not so much a substantive as a modifier – a manner of being that applies across a diversity of ways of relating to the other individual. (It is a further question, not addressed by Clark, as to the status of these vignettes. Are they disguised, permissioned, ideal types, some combination thereof? Just curious. In any case, they work well and remind me of M. F. Basch’s vignettes in the latter’s Doing Psychotherapy.)
Clark makes reference to the celebrated video (e.g., widely available on Youtube) of Carl Rogers, interviewing the real-world patient “Gloria” about her relationship with her nine-year-old daughter “Pammy.” Rogers’ empathic listening skillfully turns the focus from Gloria’s presenting dilemma of how much information about sex to share with her inquisitive nine-year-old daughter, Pammy, into a willingness on the part of Gloria’s to call out her own blind spots and conflicts over sex. Rogers’ empathic responsiveness shows the way for Gloria to recapture her own integrity around adult sexuality so that she can provide Pammy with the appropriate sex education the child needs, regardless of the details that may be relevant only to the adults. And Rogers does this in about twenty minutes, not months of therapy.
At this point, it is useful to give Rogers’ definition of empathy (p. 11): “To perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ condition.” Rogers was definite about excluding the perspectives of the practitioner in conceptualizing empathy in his person-centered approach to therapy. In this regard, he stated, “For the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter another’s world without prejudice.”
Clark’s integration of the diversity of approaches to empathy in history, theory, and practice distinguishes subjective, object and interpersonal empathy: “Subjective empathy encompasses a practitioner’s internal capacities of identification, imagination, intuition, embodiment that resonate through treatment interactions with a client and empathically reflect the individual’s experiencing. Objective empathy pertains to the deliberate use of a therapist’s conceptual knowledge and data-informed reasoning in the service of empathically understanding a client in a relational climate. Interpersonal empathy relates to comprehending and conveying an awareness of a client’s phenomenological experiencing and pursuing constructive and purposeful change through the application of a range of interventions” (Clark: xiv).
Clark started out as a school counselor and he gives the example of the student who comes in and says “I hate school!” The reflection is proposed to be something like “You are feeling angry about school.” This demonstrates just how important the tone in which a statement is made can be. This could indeed be an angry statement, which takes “hate” is a literal way. However, it could also be an expression of contempt, disgust, cynicism, resignation, sadness, or even fear (say, since the student is being bullied). The empathy is precisely to acknowledge that the listener is far from certain that he does knows what is going on with the student and to ask for more data. “Sounds like you are struggling with school – can you say more about that?”
Not afraid of controversy or tough topics, Clark’s contribution is thick with quotations from the founding father of psychoanalysis – Adler and Freud and the literature Freud has been reading such as Theodor Lipps, to whom we owe the popularization in Freud’s time of the term “empathy [Einfühlung]. The subsequent generation of ego psychoanalysts is also well represented Ralph Greenson, T. Reik, Jacob Arlow (and Beres).
Clark credits and recruits Ralph Greenson’s distinction of the therapist’s inner working model of the patient and uses it to enrich Rogers’ contribution to empathic understanding. “As empathic understandings evolve through therapeutic exchanges and assessment interactions, a model of an individual emerges that becomes increasingly refined and expansive. In turn, by ways of empathically knowing a client, the framework facilitates sound treatment interventions through the engagement of interpersonal empathy” (Clark: 88). Note that Clark aligns with the view that the countertransference is distorting/pathological as opposed to the total response of the therapist. There are many tips and techniques guiding the therapist diligently to monitor and control the countertransference neurosis.
Since this is not a softball review, I note some issues for productive debate. For example, if Clark had allowed that countertransference included the therapist’s entire reaction to the client, including personal reactions which are not necessarily conflicted or neurotic (on the part of the therapist), then Clark would have been constrained to spend more ink on his own individual responses, empathic and otherwise. Such disclosure, which Clark otherwise separately validates as appropriate in context (and if not this context, then which?), would have enriched a text which otherwise reads like a textbook (and perhaps that was the editorial and marketing guidance).
Also useful is the therapist’s being sensitive to cultural differences and dynamics. In a brief transcript of an interaction between a privileged white school counselor and an African American 8th grader attending the college prep private school (Clark: 42), we are supposed to see objective cross-cultural empathy based on the counselor’s reading of some articles (not specified) on cultural differences.
By all means, read up on cultural differences. However, I just see a rigorous and critical empathy (my term, not Clark’s), plain and simple. The counselor “gets it.” The student is afraid of being seriously injured or even killed by the criminal element in his neighborhood as he waits for the school bus. Is this breakdown of policing in the inner city really in the cultural article? The counselor also “gets it” that the student’s feelings are hurt by being laughed at by his more privileged classmates because his mom is a house cleaner rather than an executive or doctor or lawyer. It is the counselor’s empathic response based on her empathic understanding of the student’s specific fear and hurt feelings that enables the student to deescalate from his problematic acting out. Even though, like most 8th graders, the student would be the last to admit he has been emotionally “touched,” he was. Thus, Clark’s empathy shines through in spite of his style-deadening need to accommodate behavioral protocols, evidence-based everything, and the plodding style of delivery consistent with training in schools of professional social work and psychology.
“Objective empathy” may seem like “jumbo shrimp,” an oxymoron. Nor is it clear how dream work, with which Clark productively engages, falls into the “objective” rubric. Yet it is a highly positive feature that Clark emphasizes and explores in detail the value of dream work.
Let one’s empathy be informed by the context: “Consider, for instance, what are the daily struggles like for a client who meets the diagnostic criteria for a bipolar disorder or attention deficit [. . . .] When giving consideration to such challenges through a framework of empathic understanding, a practitioner calls upon reputable data and a spectrum of work with individuals from diverse backgrounds in order to generate a more inclusive and accurate way of knowing a client” (Clark: 35).
And yet this precisely misses the individual who is superficially described according to labels, but has his own experience of bipolar or attention deficit. Empathy is precisely the anti-essentialist dimension, the dimension that is so pervasive in psychiatry and schools of professional psychology that replace struggling humanity with “You meet criteria for – [insert label].”
While Kohut is properly quoted by Clark as one of the innovators in empathy and Kohut’s concise definition glossing empathy as “vicarious introspection” is acknowledged, Kohut’s other definition of empathy as a method of data gathering about the other individual is overlooked. However, it aligns nicely with Clark’s description of “objective empathy.” Maybe my close reading missed something but why not just say “taking the other person’s perspective” is “objective empathy” as opposed to vicarious introspection (“subjective empathy”)?
The subtitle promises “An integrative model for developing therapeutic skills [. . . ]” Clark substantiates the need for work in critiquing all those training program that model the skill of repeating back to the client words similar to those the client expressed. “In a meta-analysis of direct empathy training, Lam et al. (2011) found that the majority of 29 studies did not clearly conceptualize or define empathy, some did not describe training delivery methods, and almost all of the initiatives failed to present evidence demonstrating individuals’ propensity to behave more empathically after training” (Clark: 140). Clark’s discussion of reframing, cognitive restructuring, and empathic interpretation are relevant and useful in overcoming what amount to a scandal in psychotherapy training.
What Clark is trying to say is this: You think you are being empathic. Think again. A rigorous and critical empathy (my phrase, not Clark’s) is skeptical about its own empathy. That does not mean being dismissive either of one’s own empathy or the struggle of the other person. It means being rigorous and critical. Empathy is made to shine in the refiner’s fire of self-criticism and a radical inquiry into one’s own blind spots.
Clark does not escape unscathed from the behavioral and observation protocol dead end. The reader will seek in vain for self-criticism or inquiry into Clark’s own blind spots – instead the reader is awash in the extensive behavioral, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) attempts, albeit empathically deployed, to capture therapeutic encounters in a behaviorally observable or reportable protocol. Nor I am saying there is anything wrong with that as such. Yet might not the behavioral and observation protocol swamp precisely be the blind spot where the self-deception lives against which Rogers frequently denounces? To gather the honey of self-knowledge and empathic understanding one must risk the stings of distortion and disguise.
Clark’s would be a different work entirely if he explored the college of hard knocks in which he forged the empathic integration. He is trying to make what is largely an artistic practice into a rule-governed scientific algorithm. It is worth a try and the reader must judge the extent to which Clark succeeds. Spending a lifetime preparing articles for peer-reviewed publications in education, psychology, etc., does not generally bring life and vitality to one’s practice, manner of engagement, or writing style. However, Clark’s richness of material, wealth of distinctions related to empathy, and organizing virtually every aspect of empathic research and published references goes a long way towards compensating for Clark’s work not necessarily being a “page turner.” Clark’s writing reminds the reader more of the Diagnostic and Statical Manual (DSM) – Ouch! – more than (for example) of D. W. Winnicot, Christopher Bollas, Arnold Goldberg, Freud, who was an expert stylist (granted much is lost in translation), or even Carl Rogers himself.
Thus, Clark’s integrated approach calls for “a diagnosis [as from the DSM] that represents the lived experience of the individual.” Agree. Clark gives an example where the therapist is interviewing Omar who has low energy, lethargy, lack of motivation, and hopelessness about the future. The diagnosis encapsulates and integrates a lot of Omar’s experience, and, though Clark does not say so, Omar may even be relieved to hear/learn that he (Omar) is not to blame for his disordered emotions (“major depression”); and Omar should stop making a bad situation worse by negative self-talk, verbally “beating himself up” in his own mind. The treatment consists in getting Omar to do precisely what the depressed person is least inclined to do – take action in spite of being unmotivated. If one is waiting to be motivated, absent a miracle, it is going to be a long wait. Maybe the empathic response is precisely saying this to the client, acknowledging how hard it is (and may continue to be for a while) to get into action on one’s own behalf.
This is all well and good. However, narrowly or expansively empathy is defined it is the anti-DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual). The DSM has many uses, especially in aligning terminology such that the community is talking about the same set of criteria when it uses the word “generalized anxiety disorder.” It also has uses in requesting insurance reimbursements. In short, there is nothing wrong with the DSM-5 (2013) or any version – but there is something missing – empathy. In the case of empathy, the recommendation is to relate to the struggling human being who presents himself in therapy, not to a diagnostic label.
Thus, Clark makes the case in his own terms: “From a humanistic perspective with central tenets focusing on respect for the individuality and uniqueness of a person, employing the DSM to categorize clients through a labeling procedure is thought to impede the growth of authentic relationships and empathic understandings of a deeper nature. In this regard, in a human encounter, perceiving a client through categorical frames of reference and symptomatic functioning hinders an attunement with the individual’s lived experiences and personal meanings. Moreover, applying a label to a client possibly influences a practitioner to shape preconceptions that are objectifying and forecloses a mutual and open-minded exploration of the contextual existence of the individual” (Clark: 27).
Though Clark does not say so, almost every major mental illness involves a breakdown of empathy. The patient experience isolation. “No one ‘gets’ me.” “No one understands what I am going through.” This is the case with most mood disorders, thought disorders, as well as those disorders typically described as “disorders of empathy” such as some versions of autism spectrum and anti-social personality disorders.
One matter of editing detail may be noted, a consistent misspelling of the name of celebrated primate researcher, philosopher, and empathy scholar Frans de Waal. There are no “Walls” in de Waal’s name – or in his empathy! We will charge this wordo to the editors who otherwise perform an admirable job.
Returning to a positive register, one of the most important takeaways from engaging with Clark’s work is that short therapy in which empathy is the driving force is powerful and effective. Clark does not specify the elapsed treatment in most cases, but I did not find one that was explicitly called out as being longer than fourteen weeks.
The emphasis is on the use of empathy in relatively brief psychotherapy – which is a powerful and positive approach that pushes back against the assertion that one needs cognitive behavioral therapy for relatively time-constrained encounters. Empathy produces quick results when skillfully applied. It is true that one of the great empathy innovators, Heinz Kohut, had some famous long and multi-year psychoanalyses; but these individuals were significantly more disturbed than Clark’s example of Anna, whose presenting behaviors were largely social awkwardness.
A strong point of Clark’s work is his debunking of the caricature of Rogers definition of empathy (and indeed of empathy itself) as merely reflecting (i.e., repeating) back to the speaker the words that the speaker has said to the listener. There is nothing wrong as such with reflecting what the other person has said, especially if the statement is relevant or well expressed. However, the mere words are pointers to the other person’s experience and are not reducible to the mere words. This is not a mere behavioral skill of reflecting back language, but a “being with” the other in the complexity and depth of the other’s experience as refined in the therapist’s own experience, and that is something one can best learn in years of one’s own dynamic therapy. Additional processing of the other person’s experience is encapsulated by and captured in the other person’s words, but not reducible to the words. The aspects of empathic responsiveness, embodiment, acknowledgement, recognition, encouragement, immediacy, possibility, clarification, and validation of the other’s experience form and inform the empathic response and the reply to the other.
A rumor of empathy is no rumor in the case of Clark’s work – empathy lives in his contribution to integrating the diverse and varied aspects of empathy.
Edwin Rutsch interviews the author Arthur J. Clark:
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle (Reviewed)
Read the review as published in abbreviated form in the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context: Click here
The short review: the title, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir (Sherry Turkle New York: Penguin Press, 2021, 357 pp.) reveals that empathy lives, comes forth, in empathy’s breakdowns and failings. Empathy often emerges in clarifying a lack of empathy. This work might have been entitled, less elegantly, “The Lack of Empathy Diaries.” I found the book to be compellingly written, even a page-turner at times, highly recommended. But, caution, this is not a “soft ball” review.
As Tolstoy famously noted, all happy families are alike. What Tolstoy did not note was that many happy families are also unhappy ones. Figure that one out! Sherry’s answer to Tolstoy is her memoir about the breakthroughs and breakdowns of empathy in her family of origin and subsequent life.
Families have secrets, and one was imposed on the young Sherry. Sherry’s mother married Charles Zimmerman, which became her last name as Charles was the biological father. Within a noticeably short time, mom discovered a compelling reason to divorce Charles. The revelation of his “experiments” on the young Sherry form a suspenseful core to the narrative, more about this shortly.
Do not misunderstand me. Sherry Turkle’s mom (Harriet), Aunt Mildred, grand parents, and the extended Jewish family, growing up between Brooklyn and Rockaway, NY, were empathic enough. They were generous in their genteel poverty. They gloried in flirting with communism and emphasizing, in the USA, it is a federal offense to open anyone else’s mail. Privacy is one of the foundations of empathy – and democracy. Sherry’s folks talked back to the black and white TV, and struggled economically in the lower middle class, getting dressed up for Sabbath on High Holidays and shaking hands with the neighbors on the steps of the synagogue as if they could afford the seats, which they could not, then discretely disappearing.
Mom gets rid of Charles and within a year marries Milton Turkle, which becomes Sherry’s name at home and the name preferred by her Mom for purposes of forming a family. There’s some weirdness with this guy, too, which eventually emerges; but he is willing and a younger brother and sister show up apace.
In our own age of blended families, trial marriages, and common divorce, many readers are, like, “What’s the issue?” The issue is that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, even as the sexual revolution and first feminist wave were exploding on the scene, in many communities divorce was stigmatizing. Key term: stigma. Don’t talk about it. It is your dark secret. The rule for Sherry of tender age was “you are really a Turkle at home and at the local deli; but at school you are a Zimmerman.” Once again, while that may be a concern, what’s the big deal? The issue is: Sherry, you are not allowed to talk about it. It is a secret. Magical thinking thrives. To young Sherry’s mind, she is wondering if it comes out will she perhaps no longer be a part of the family – abandoned, expelled, exiled.
Even Sherry’s siblings do not find out about the “name of the father” (a Lacanian allusion) until adulthood. A well kept secret indeed. Your books from school, Sherry, which have “Zimmerman” written in them, must be kept in a special locked cupboard. How shall I put it delicately? Such grown up values and personal politics – and craziness – could get a kid of tender age off her game. This could get one confused or even a tad neurotic.
The details of how all these dynamics get worked out make for a page turner. Fast forward. Sherry finds a way to escape from this craziness through education. Sherry is smart. Very smart. Her traditionally inclined elders tell her, “Read!” They won’t let her do chores. “Read!” Reading is a practice that expands one’s empathy. This being the early 1960s, her folks make sure she does not learn how to type. No way she is going to the typing pool to become some professor’s typist. She is going to be the professor! This, too, is the kind of empathy on the part of her family unit, who recognized who she was, even amidst the impingements and perpetrations.
Speaking personally, I felt a special kinship with this young person, because something similar happened to me. I escaped from a difficult family situation through education, though all the details are different – and I had to do a bunch of chores, too!
The path is winding and labyrinthine; but that’s what happened. Sherry gets a good scholarship to Radcliffe (women were not yet allowed to register at Harvard). She meets and is mentored by celebrity sociologist David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd) and other less famous but equally inspiring teachers.
Turkle gets a grant to undertake a social psychological inquiry into the community of French psychoanalysis, an ethnographic study not of an indigenous tribe in Borneo, but a kind of tribe nonetheless in the vicinity of Paris, France. The notorious “bad boy” Jacques Lacan is disrupting all matters psychoanalytic. His innovations consist in fomenting rebellion in psychoanalytic thinking and in the community. “The name of the father” (Lacan’s idea about Oedipus) resonates with Turkle personally. Lacan speaks truth to [psychoanalytic] power, resulting in one schism after another in the structure of psychoanalytic institutes and societies.
Turkle intellectually dances around the hypocrisy, hidden in plain view, but ultimately calls it out: challenging authority is encouraged as long as the challenge is not directed at the charismatic leader, Lacan, himself. This is happening shortly after the students and workers form alliance in Paris May 1968, disrupting the values and authority of traditional bourgeois society. A Rashomon story indeed.
Turkle’s working knowledge of the French language makes rapid advances. Turkle, whose own psychoanalysis is performed by more conventional American analysts in the vicinity of Boston (see the book for further details), is befriended by Lacan. This is because Lacan wants her to write nice things about him. He is didactic, non enigmatic amid his enigmatic ciphers. Jacques is nice to her. I am telling you – you can’t make this stuff up. Turkle is perhaps the only – how shall I put it delicately – attractive woman academic that he does not try to seduce.
Lacan “gets it” – even amid his own flawed empathy – you don’t mess with this one. Yet Lacan’s trip to Boston – Harvard and MIT – ends in disaster. This has nothing – okay, little – to do with Turkle – though her colleagues are snarky. The reason? Simple: Lacan can’t stop being Lacan. Turkle’s long and deep history of having to live with the “Zimmerman / Turkle” name of the father lie, hidden in plain view, leaves Turkle vulnerable in matters of the heart. She meets and is swept off her feet by Seymour Papert, named-chair professor at MIT, an innovator in computing technology and child psychology, the collaborator with Marvin Minsky, and author of Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. Seymour ends up being easy to dislike in spite of his authentic personal charm, near manic enthusiasm, interestingness, and cognitive pyrotechnics.
Warning signs include the surprising ways Sherry have to find out about his grown up daughter and second wife, who is actually the first one. Sherry is vulnerable to being lied to. The final straw is Seymour’s cohabitating with a woman in Paris over the summer, by this time married to Sherry. Game over; likewise, the marriage. To everyone’s credit, they remain friends. Sherry’s academic career features penetrating and innovative inquiries into how smart phone, networked devices, and screens – especially screens – affect our attention and conversations.
Turkle’s research methods are powerful: she talks to people, notes what they say, and tries to understand their relationships with one another and with evocative objects, the latter not exactly Winnicott’s transitional objects, but perhaps close enough for purposes of a short review. The reader can imagine her technology mesmerized colleagues at MIT not being thrilled by her critique of the less than humanizing aspects of all these interruptions, eruptions, and corruptions of and to our attention and ability to be fully present with other human beings.
After a struggle, finding a diplomatic way of speaking truth to power, Turkle gets her tenured professorship, reversing an initial denial (something that rarely happens). The denouement is complete. The finalè is at hand.
Sherry hires a private detective and reestablishes contact with her biological father, Charles. His “experiments” on Sherry that caused her mother to end the marriage, indeed flee from it, turn out to be an extreme version of the “blank face” attachment exercises pioneered by Mary Main, Mary Ainsworth and colleagues, based on John Bowlby’s attachment theory. The key word here is: extreme.
I speculate that Charles was apparently also influenced by Harry Harlow’s “love studies” with rhesus monkeys, subjecting them to extreme maternal deprivation (and this is not in Turkle). It didn’t do the monkeys a lot of good, taking down their capacity to love, attachment, much less the ability to be empathic (a term noticeably missing from Harlow), leaving them, autistic, like emotional hulks, preferring clinging to surrogate cloth mothers to food. Not pretty.
In short, Sherry’s mother comes home unexpectedly to find Sherry (of tender age) crying her eyes out in distress, all alone, with Charles in the next room. Charles offers mom co-authorship of the article to be published, confirming that he really doesn’t get it. Game over; likewise, the marriage.
On a personal note, I was engaged by Turkle’s account of her time at the University of Chicago. Scene change. She is sitting there in lecture room Social Science 122, which I myself frequented. Bruno Bettelheim comes in, puts a straight back chair in the middle of the low stage, and delivers a stimulating lecture without notes, debating controversial questions with students, who were practicing speaking truth to power. It is a tad like batting practice – the student throws a fast ball, the Professor gives it a good whack. Whether the reply was a home run or a foul ball continues to be debated. I was in the same lecture, same Professor B, about two years later. Likewise with Professors Victor Turner, David Grene, and Saul Bellow of the Committee on Social Thought.
On a personal note, my own mentors were Paul Ricoeur (Philosophy and Divinity) and Stephen Toulmin, who joined the Committee and Philosophy shortly after Turkle returned to MIT. Full discourse: my dissertation on Empathy and Interpretation was in the philosophy department, but most of my friends were studying with the Committee, who organized the best parties. I never took Bellow’s class on the novel – my loss – because it was reported that he said it rotted his mind to read student term papers; and I took that to mean he did not read them. But perhaps Bellow actually read them, making the sacrifice. We will never know for certain.
One thing we do know for sure is that empathy is no rumor in the work of Sherry Turkle. Empathy lives in her contribution.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy: Top Ten Trends for 2022
A new year and a new virus variant? Being cynical and resigned is easy, and the empathy training is to drive out cynicism and resignation – then empathy naturally comes forth. If given half a chance, people want to be empathic. The prediction is that with a rigorous and critical empathy (and getting a very high percent of the population vaccinated), we are equal to the challenge.
Setting priorities is an art, not a science. It is clear that empathy is a priority, not a mere psychological mechanism, a practice and a way of being in the world, creating a safe space of openness, acceptance and toleration. In the face of a contagion of Omicron, we need a contagion of empathy. Empathy is contagious. This is one you want to give to someone else, especially someone who seems to need some – all the while being clear to set firm boundaries against bullying, delusional thinking, and compassion fatigue. Keep in mind this list is a top ten “count down,” so if you want to know what is #1, fast forward to the bottom.
Here are my choices and predictions for the top ten trends in empathy for the year 2022.
(10) Delays in the empathy supply chain continue to thwart the expansion of empathy in the community.
This does not refer to the distribution of cat food or toilet paper. Empathy is available. There is enough empathy to go around, but the empathy is poorly distributed due to politics, in the pejorative sense. For example, most medical doctors are empathic and they become MDs because they want to make a difference in relieving human suffering. But the corporate transformation of American medicine means they are given onerous “capitation” quotas – they must see thirty patients a day. The coaching and push back is based in empathy: It is a breach of professional ethics not to give a given patient the time and attention s/he deserves, and there is only time to see twenty two patients a day.
(9) Republicans and Democrats will start conducting Empathy Circles where they get together and listen to one another and respond empathically.
And if you believe this, I have a famous bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you. Yet the key to expanding empathy is to drive out cynicism and resignation. Be open to the possibility: On a more realistic note, the responsibility of leadership, whether in the political or corporate jungle, requires teaching critical thinking. Critical thinking includes skills to analyze conflicting articles in the press, chasing down media reports to their sources and assessing the sources for reliability. Most importantly, critical thinking includes temporarily taking the opponent’s point of view, which is a version of cognitive empathy. One does this not to agree with the opponent, but to have a productive disagreement. Empathy brings workability to political, business, and personal relations. It is like oil to reduce friction and produce results that benefit the entire community. (Edwin Rutsch and The Culture of Empathy are going to like that one!).
(8) Being empathic is hard within the Patriarchy. This does not go away.
The dystopia of Patriarchy (systematic unspoken sexism) crushes the empathy and compassion out of all of us. This is an issue because: in the face of so much gender violence (the vast majority of which is men perpetrating boundary violations against women), can we find or recover a shred of our humanity? I do not need to say “shared humanity,” because “unshared humanity” is not humanity.
It gets worse: the company formerly known as Facebook re-launches as Meta and the Metaverse, a virtual reality world. A quote from the New York Times (12/30/2021): “But as she waited, another player’s avatar approached hers. The stranger then simulated groping and ejaculating onto her avatar, Ms. Siggens said. Shocked, she asked the player, whose avatar appeared male, to stop.” He shrugged as if to say: ‘I don’t know what to tell you. It’s the metaverse — I’ll do what I want,’” said Ms. Siggens, a 29-year-old Toronto resident. “Then he walked away.”” (I do not want to give Metaverse its own trend.) [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/technology/metaverse-harassment-assaults.html] A specific proposal includes: establish a Desmond Tutu style Truth and Reconciliation commission in the Metaverse where perpetrators can tell the survivors what they did and ask forgiveness. Another proposal: establish empathy circles in the Metaverse (Edwin Rutsch and The Culture of Empathy are going to like this one too!).
Recall that instead of a civil war, South Africa and the late Desmond Tutu innovated a Truth and Reconciliation program for the perpetrators of apartheid to tell the truth about what they did to the victims and to ask forgiveness. The survivors then got to say if and/or what they could see there to forgive. That would be a practical, albeit utopian response. I am no fan of forgiveness, which I consider overrated. But I bought Tutu’s book based on the title, No Future Without Forgiveness. How can there be? It both requires empathy and expands empathy. Empathy is both the cause and the effect. I hasten to add that it does not mean being nice; it means establishing firm boundaries. It does not even mean going in with a forgiving attitude, but actually striving for actual truth and reconciliation tribunals, seeing if the truth on the part of the perpetrator(s) can show forth some shred of humanity and maybe, just maybe, highly unlikely though it is, point to a future of cooperation, communication, and community in which both parties flourish. I am not looking for moral equivalence, clever slogans, or easy answers here, I am looking for expanded empathy!
(7) Along the same lines as (8), the so-called “incel” (“involuntary celibate”) gets empathy, backs away from the ledge, gets in touch with his inner jerk and stops being one. (What the heck is an “incel”?)
Now I hasten to add that as soon as a person, whether incel, Don Juan, or one of the Muppets, picks up a weapon, a date rape drug, or proposes to act like the incel and mass killer Elliott Roger, that is no longer a matter for empathy, but for law enforcement. (For more on what is an incel – this is genuinely new – see the blog post and book review: The Holocaust of Sex: The Right to Sex by A. Srinivasan (reviewed) (https://bit.ly/3EACv7W).
After incarcerating or canceling or cognitive behavioral theraputizing the incel, let us try engaging him with – empathy. Key term: empathy. Let us take a walk in his shoes. Knowing full well that the incel is like a ticking bomb, let us engage with one prior to his picking up a weapon. I cut to the chase. It is not just sexual frustration, though to be sure, that is a variable. There is also a power dynamic in play. This individual has no – or extremely limited – power in the face of the opposite sex. He is trying to force an outcome.
Here we invoke Hannah Arendt’s slim treatise On Violence. Power down, violence up. Whenever you see an individual (or government authority) get violent, you can be sure the individual (or institution) has lost power. The water cannon, warrior cops, and automatic weapons show up. The incel embraces his own frustration like Harlow’s deprived Macaque monkeys embraced their cloth surrogate mother, even though it lacked the nipple of the wire-framed one.[3] Now I do not want to make light of anyone’s suffering and incels are definitely suffering. Yet it is tempting to enjoy a lighter moment. The incel’s dystopian life points to his utopia, which consists in two words: “Get laid.” I would add: this applies to consenting adults, and don’t hurt yourself!
(6) Burned out MDs, teachers, flight attendants dealing with delusional angry unvaccinated and sick people don’t get no empathy – how does empathy make a difference?
Set boundaries with and against bullies. At least initially, establishing boundaries is not about having empathy for the bully; it is about being firm about damage control and containing the bullying. Ultimately the bully benefits even as the community is protected from his perpetrations; but more in the manner of a three year old child, who, having a tempter tantrum, benefits from being given a time-out in such a way that he cannot hurt himself or others.
Without empathy, people lose the feeling being alive. They tend to “act out”—misbehave—in an attempt to regain the feeling of vitality that they have lost. Absent an empathic environment, people lose the feeling that life has meaning. When people lose the feeling of meaning, vitality, aliveness, dignity, things “go off the rails.” Sometime pain and suffering seem better than emptiness and meaninglessness, but not by much. People then can behave in self-defeating ways in a misguided attempt to awaken a sense of aliveness.
People act out in self-defeating ways in order to get back a sense of emotional stability, wholeness and well-being—and, of course, acting out in self-defeating way does not work. Things get even worse. One requires expanded empathy. Pause for breath, take a deep one, hold it in briefly while counting to four, exhale, listen, speak from possibility.
(5) Nursing schools and schools of professional psychology and medical schools begin offering classes in empathy.
Yes, it is a scandal you cannot take a course entitled “Empathy Dynamics” or “Empathy: Concepts and Techniques” in any of these schools. I know, because I checked the catalogs [Q3 2021]. I even got hired once or twice to fill in because they could not get anyone else to do it. You may say, “Well, every course we have teaches empathy” and in a sense, it does – or at least ought to. But that is mainly wishful thinking – if you don’t practice empathy, you don’t get it right or wrong – and if you don’t get it wrong, at least occasionally, you don’t expand the skill.
(4) Combine empathy with critical thinking – the result is a rigorous and critical empathy.
I got this distinction – a rigorous and critical empathy – from Xavier Remy, who I hereby acknowledge. What does that mean? You think you are being empathic – think again. It may be empathy or it may be narcissism or rational compassion or pity or self-congratulations or a whole host of things related to empathy, but not empathy. How do you tell? Empathy tells you what the other person is experiencing – be open to their experience, understand the possibility – take a walk in their shoes – acknowledge the shared humanity. Empathy tells what the other person is experiencing – critical thinking tells you what to do about it.
(3) Empathy builds a bridge over the digital divide and encounters resistance to empathy online and in-person.
With the pandemic of 2020, many in person services such as psychotherapy, life coaching, empathy consulting, and others went online. When the provider is having a conversation, then an online session is often good enough – and is definitely better than ending up in the hospital on a ventilator.
As the pandemic wanes and virus variants (hopefully) actually become more like a bad case of the flu (which indeed kills the most vulnerable), the issue becomes when to stay online, meet in person (with fully vaccinated clients), and how to tell the difference?
The disturbing trend that I see amongst (some) behavioral health professionals is that online “better than nothing” becomes “better than anything.” Going online is very convenient, and since, as the saying goes, inertia is the most powerful force in the universe, providers prefer to stay home rather than risk being vulnerable in creating a space of acceptance and tolerance in being personally present physically. The latter is a definition of empathy in the expanded sense – being fully present with the other person – in person and unmediated by a screen.
Now when I call out this conflict of interest, generally based in financial and time considerations (and time is money), most providers acknowledge that the commitment is not to online versus in-person, but rather to client service, delivering empathy, and making a positive difference for the client.
Clients whose mental status is “remote” even in-person in a physical, shared space present a challenge to the therapist’s empathy and are not initially a good choice to work with remotely online. However, after a warming up period the empathic relatedness migrates quite well to the online environment.
“Better than nothing” versus “better than anything” is a choice that needs to be declined: both online and in-person physical therapy coexist and help clients flourish using empathy to bridge the digital divide.
(2) Empathy and climate change. Empathy is oxygen for the soul – individually and in community.
In a year when the lead off comedy is about the destruction of the Earth by a killer comet – and a metaphor for global warming – empathy is oxygen for the soul. This is supposed to be funny (think of the film Dr Strangelove (1964)), in both cases, featuring an arrogant clueless President, played by Meryl Streep (instead of Peter Sellers). Empathy builds ever expanding inclusive communities – empathy is oxygen for the soul – and the planet.
“Beggar thy neighbor politics, economics, and behavior do not work.” They did not work in the Great Depression of 1929 – they did not work in the Great Recession of 2008. Do not take a bad situation and make it worse. Take a pandemic – now fist fights break out on airplanes, hospital emergency rooms, and retail stores. Hmmm.
It is a common place that empathy is oxygen for soul. If the human psyche does not get empathy, it suffocates in stress and suffering. Climate change makes the metaphor actual. If we do not drown as the Greenland and Antarctic ice fields slide en masse into the oceans, we are surely doomed to suffocate as the levels of carbon dioxide and heat overwhelm temperate habitats. Most people are naturally empathic and they an expanding appreciation of empathy suffuses the community.
The problem is that this eventuality does not live like an actual possibility for most people, who cannot imagine such an outcome – for example, just as in December 2019 no one could envision the 2020 pandemic. The bridge between the gridlocked present and a seemingly impossible-to-imagine future is empathy. The empathic moment is an act of imagination. That is the interesting thing about empathy. It may seem like a dream; but the dream lives. It is inclusive. Lots more work needs to be on this connection. For purposes of this list of tasks, this “shout out” will have to suffice. For specific actionable recommendations, see David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, now streaming on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393
And, [drum roll] the number one empathy trend for 2022 is: –
(1) There is enough empathy to go around – people get vaccinated, boosted, and – get this – people get what seems like a version of the common cold – the pandemic “ends,” not with a bang but a whimper.
This relates to issues with the empathy supply chain, but deserves to be called out on its own. Granted, it does not seem that way. It seems that the world is experiencing a scarcity of empathy – and no one is saying the world is a sufficiently empathic place. Consider an analogy. You know how we can feed everyone on the planet? Thanks to agribusiness, “miracle” seeds, and green revolution, enough food is produced so that people do not have to go hungry? Yet people are starving. They are starving in Yemen, Africa, Asia – they are starving in Chicago, too.
Why? Politics in the pejorative sense of the word: bad behavior on the part of people, aggression, withholding, and violence. The food is badly distributed. Now apply the same idea to empathy.
There is enough empathy to go around – but it is badly distributed due to bad behavior, politics and interpersonal political in the pejorative sense. The one-minute empathy training? Drive out the aggression, bullying, shaming, integrity outages, and so on, and empathy naturally comes forth. (For further particulars, see the video cited in the References.) People are naturally empathic, and the empathy expands if one gives them space to let it expand.
Empathy is not a mere psychological mechanism (though it is that too), but is an enlarged concern for the other person – one’s fellow human being on the road of life. Empathy has been criticized for working better with one’s own family than with strangers – but these critics do not know my family – okay, joke – but, even if accurate, the solution to lack of empathy for strangers is expanded empathy. Be inclusive. Be welcoming. Expand the community of inclusiveness. All of this is consistent with people with underlying medical conditions needing to take extra precautions. In that sense, people who get vaccinated, boosted, and mask up, are doing it to keep their neighbors from getting sick. And, so, out our concern for others – our fellow humans – we get vaccinated, boosted, masked-up, and the pandemic ends – but – aaahhh, cooh! – the common cold continues to live on.
References / Notes
[1] Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13(12), 673–685. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0047884
“The One-Minute Empathy Training” [https://youtu.be/747OiV-GTx4: May I introduce myself? Here is a short introduction to who i am and my commitment to empathy, including a one-minute empathy training. Total run time: about five minutes. Further data: See http://www.LouAgosta.com]
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
