Home » empathy lessons (Page 2)
Category Archives: empathy lessons
Unreliable Parental Empathy in Henry James’ “What Maisie Knew”
Henry James provides a dramatic picture of unreliable and defective parental empathy. What Maisie Knew(1897) begins as a contentious divorce between Beale and Ida Farange is granted by the court. And, lacking the wisdom of Solomon (admittedly a rare quality), so is the custody of the child. The narrative is an inquiry into how the child is cut in half emotionally, and the consequences who she becomes as a person. Maisie is about six years old, and is to spend six months with each parent. As the story begins, each parent wants to take Solomon’s sword and use it on the other partner. Lacking a sword, they use Maisie. Or, expressed slightly differently, the parents are playing “hard ball” and Maisie is the ball.
James’ incomparable empathy with Maisie and his penetrating and astute comprehension of human relations writ large applies empathy in the extended sense as who people are as possibilities, walking in the other’s shoes (after, of course, first taking off one’s own to avoid projection), translating communications between adults and children (and adults and adults) as well as affect-matching and mis-matching (empathy in the narrow sense). James’ work aligns with the concise classic statement “On adult empathy with children” by Christine Olden (1953). When encountering a child, according to Olden, the adult is present to her or his own fate as a child of similar age. The encounter brings up the adult’s issues even if the child does not have such an issue and has other, unrelated issues. The adults expand their empathy by getting in touch with these issues and taking care that they not get in the way of their openness and responsiveness to the child. That, of course, is far from the case with the adults presented in James’ narrative. For example, in encountering Maisie, Mrs Wix (one of the governesses) is present not only to her own fate as a child, but to the fate of her (Mrs Wix’s) child, who was killed in a tragic traffic accident when she was about Maisie’s age. Mrs Wix reaction to her loses, including her own genteel poverty, is to embrace a scrupulous conventional morality that mainly constrains her (Mrs Wix), but which will also eventually impact Maisie. The parents, Beale and Ida, are nursing their grievances and elaborating their hostility to one another, as noted above, using Maisie. The prospective step-parents, Sir Claude and Miss Overmore (Mrs Beale), who eventually emerge, are a definite improvement in empathic responsiveness to Maisie. However, the bar is now set so low that is not saying a lot and the process of de-parenting and re-parenting does not succeed as the narrative ends due to Sir Claude’s unresolved marital status and Maisie’s own painfully acquired knowledge of how to play “hard ball” with the grown-ups.
As James’ novel begins, Maisie’s parents have already spent whatever financial resources they had as the divorce court enjoins Beale (the father) to return the 2500 pounds sterling to his former wife, which money, as noted, seems already to have been spent; Ida (the mother) is living off her looks, by the middle of the story, consorting with exceedingly unattractive rich men (Mr Perrin); Mr Faranago is doing the same with an American “Countess” of Color, who is described as having a mustache and it otherwise painted in terms of an appalling racist stereotype (definitely not James’ best moment). They are doing this for money. As Jems’ novels end, the one person of integrity – and it is narrowly scrupulous morality at that (people who are married should not move in with people to whom they are not married, even if the marriage is emotionally over (though not legally over)) – is Mrs Wix, whose inheritance (we learn towards the end) was stolen by a relative and, as the story of Maisie ends, has some slight hope of getting it back with the guidance of Sir Claude, who has heretofore not been particularly effective at anything except wooing an attractive, supposedly rich lady (Masie’s mother) who turned out not to be so rich and not so attractive if her personality is taken into the account. That noted, let us take a step back.
Children of tender age will repeat what is told them by way of a performance as if reciting a nursery rhyme, not appreciating the ramifications of the statements in the adult world. The reader is given a sample of misbehavior on the part of both parents. At this point, Maisie is six years old (p. 9). Her mother asks her:
‘And did your beastly, papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mamma?’ Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa to be after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother’s appeal, they passed, in her clear, shrill voice, straight to her little innocent lips, ‘He said I was to tell you, from him, she faithfully reported, ‘that your’re a nasty, horrid pig!’ (p. 11)
The way the parents use and, strictly speaking, misuse Maisie to send one another insulting, arguably abusive, messages marks both as loathsome individuals. These parents are easy to hate. The parents are verbally abusive towards one another, and abusive towards Masie in enrolling her in delivering invalidating messages on their behalf to one another. The text is packed with instances of inadequate, substandard parenting. The text is thick with examples of defective empathy, unreliable empathy, and even fiendish empathy. Breakdowns of empathy such as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and communications lost in translation, are so pervasive as to make the text a veritable compendium of what parents ought not to do.
Maisie is reduced to a tool, and indeed even in Henry James’ skillful literary hands is something of a guinea pig in the jungle of parental incompetence and ethical conformity. The saving grace of James’ fictional study is that such scenarios, bordering on and perpetrating emotional abuse, are all too common – in his time and ours. The advantages of a fictional account is that it enables imaginative variations and thought experiments; and one is not going to get sued for slander, which is a risk even if the alleged “slander” is accurate and based on factual evidence.
The examples of Maisie’s parents are why 21st Century divorce judges begin proceedings by issuing a binding court order that the parents are not to speak ill of one another in front of the child nor have the child deliver messages to one another. I do not know the judicial practices in 1897. What I do know is that in 1897 divorce was less common and more scandalous in contrast with today when divorce is common and the scandals are single parent families, fatherless children, and domestic violence against women and children. We also know that the patriarchy was much more severe in times past (nor does that excuse today’s problems). Consider the cases of Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1878) and Effi Briest (Theodor Fontane, 1895), who were prevented from seeing their children by spouses who were aggrieved, wielding ethical cudgels to separate mother and child. Yet even in our own time such legal injunctions are hard to enforce in cases where the parent is bound and determined to create mischief. Anecdotal reports from the trenches indicate that divorce judges are swamped with cases of physical abuse and inevitably give lower priority to bad verbal behavior, which can still be quite destructive to young, still maturing personalities.
Taking care of this child of tender age requires time and effort (all of which cost money) and each parent is eager to send Maisie to the other to inflict this cost on the despised former spouse. The child becomes an extension of the parent, like the narcissistic extension his or her own hand, the very definition of defective empathy, which leaves the child vulnerable to emotional disequilibrium, a kind of empty depression, and breakdowns in the child’s own empathy. The violation of the moral imperative to treat other people as ends in themselves and not mere means aligns with the parents’ retributive attitude, manipulative behavior, and (it must be said) pathological narcissism. Maisie becomes a mere means of the parents to inflict abuse on one other. While lonely and neglected, Maisie makes use of “auxiliary parents” such as an interested and engaged governesses and step parents (all of whom have their own conflicts of interest to maintain a measure of hope and perky positivity in the face of recurring disappointments delivered by the supposed adults in her world. Now in the context of the narrative, the governess, Miss Overbeck, is romantically interested in (and eventually marries) Maisie’s father; but Miss Overbeck also takes a sincere interest in Maisie. If Miss Overbeck is faking her interest in Maisie, it is an academy award winning performance. As in most areas of life, conflicting and overlapping interests are what make James’ narratives so powerful and thought provoking.
The matter almost immediately goes beyond James’ penetrating and engaging narrative. And that is relevance of James for us today. In our own time of fragmented and blended families, who does not know of an example where former spouses are at risk of speaking ill about one another? (It happens to married couples too!) The question is what happens when the affection or hostility are not expressed but nevertheless powerfully present, so to speak, percolating up from beneath the surface. That the emotions are not expressed means that they remain “unthought” as far as thinking using words is concerned. When Maisie’s father tells her, “Your mother hates you,” what does Maisie know about her mother and/or her father? The former spouses routinely refer abusively to their ex-partner in the presence of the child (as James calls her) in devaluing terms (p. 141) – “pig,” “nasty” person, “ass,” and so on.
When another person tells one something, then one has to decide whether to believe it or not. A whole course in critical thinking may be unfolded and inserted here. In particular, the child is motivated to believe the parents, because most decent parents tell the child the truth in age appropriate language, establishing a track record. Still, life events such as divorce, the birth of a sibling, major illness, or death of a family member, introduce incentives and emotional conflicts that distort communications and create parental integrity outages. Even in such examples, and this is the really interesting case, the child is incented to “go along with the program” – that is, what is represented as the truth about the life and family circumstances – because the parent provides meals, clothing, transportation, education, and entertainment, all of which are essential to the child’s well-being and immediate happiness. Still, while the child is constrained to “go along with the program” that does not mean the child always believes the outlandish assertions of the dominating parental authorities. Just because the child goes along with the parent’s fibs does not mean that the child always believes what she is told. You can’t fool all the people all of the time.
For example, at about the same time as James was writing his work, there was a precocious five-year-old – articulate, funny, witty, cute – living in Vienna to whom was born a baby sister. When he asked his parents from where the sister came (he was not quite sure a sister was such a good idea), the parents told him the stork brought it. At that point the boy’s behavior deteriorated, hough the connection and timing was overlooked by the parents, because of their own blind spots. The well-behaved boy threw temper tantrums, developed a phobia which made it difficult to take him out of the house, and regressed to baby-like behavior and talk. His father had a conversation with someone who was innovating in human development (Freud 1909). The coaching was – stop lying to the kid and tell him about from where babies come – tell him about the birds and bees. Recovery was prompt – though there were other challenges in the relationship between his parents.
The point? Children often know that they do not have all the facts and being dependent on their parents for their well-being the children decide it is best to conform. (Key term: conform.) They accept what they are told, subject to their own observations. The boy in question, anonymously known as “Little Hans,” had access to the lake where the storks were living and he saw the storks, but there was a noticeable absence of human babies (Freud 1909). Young scientist! Astutely observant, Hans concluded that his parents account was a fabrication. In short, they were lying to him about from where babies came. Unable to express himself in adult (scientific) language with the counter-example produced by his own observations down by the lake, Hans acted out. His behavior deteriorated. His behavior expressed his disagreement and his suffering, In short, he “knew” his folks were lying to him, rather in the sense that Maisie “knew” matters were not well with the representations offered by the adults in her environment.
Thus, the one parent says, “Your father is loathsome.” The other parent says, “Your mother is loathsome.” Unlike the story about the stork, both of Maisie’s parents are speaking the truth! Yet even in uttering what is a factually accurate statement, there is a larger integrity outage confounding circumstances for the child. It is the job of the parents to take care of the whole child, and they seem not even to have the idea what is the “whole child” and how to do their job. Yes, of course, the child’s material needs, but also the child’s emotional development, education, and sense of being an effective agent, even if only in age appropriate, childish matters. That is profoundly missing here. In such a context, the factually accurate words are a lie.
In the case of Maisie, what might be called intrusive interruptions – and the pediatrician psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott calls “impingements” – in her childhood tasks of precisely being allowed to be a child of tender age, learning her school lessons, playing with children of a similar age, and holding tea parties with her dolls and stuffed animals – occur as the grown ups treat Maisie like a grown up. Her nursery attendant tells her: “Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been dreadfully put about” (p. 10). This is the paradigm of defective empathy, for it attempts to induce in the child what papa was experiencing, yet does so in way that blames the child – points an accusing finger at her – for the “dreadful” inconvenience papa is suffering because of shared child custody. The child’s job is to learn her school lessons, play with her dolls, have bed time story time and lunch time and bath time, and visit with her peers (of which Maisie seems to have none), not to understand legal custody proceedings.
In general, when confronted with incompetent parenting, the child will (1) try to “fix the parent” so the parent can do her/his job (of taking care of the child), (2) conform, or (3)act out (see Little Hans, above). For example, the child will try to cheer up the depressed mother by putting on a happy smiley face, being perky, winsome, in the face of the mother’s self-invovled funk and indifference. The middle school or pubertal child will quote positive things said by friends about the parent. The child will try to placate the neglectful, abandoning, or angry father by being apologetic, giving agreement, being submissive, promising “I’ll be good!” The child may have no idea what is bothering the grown up – financial challenges, health issues, sexual frustration, or relationship breakdowns that a child of tender age cannot possibly comprehend. The child may act out – if an adolescent, defy social conventions – if a child of tender age, regress and lose toilet skills and wet the bed. The child will experience difficulties – experience sleep and eating disorders or throw temper tantrums. The child has limited skill in expressing her or his feelings verbally and/or understanding parental issues, so the child will invent meaning. “If only I were better at academics, sports, socializing, doing chores, then my mother and/or father would be happy (and be able to take care of me in such a way that I can be happy too).” “If only I had done my chores, my folks would not be getting divorced” – and this after both parents have repeatedly assured the child that she or had nothing to do with the family breakup.
In the narrative, mamma enacts a similar impingement and calls forth a “try to fix her” response in Maisie. Papa has already used the same words:
You’ll never know what I’ve been through about you – never, never, never. I spare you everything, as I always have [….] If you don’t do justice to my forbearing, out of delicacy, to mention, just as a last word, about your stepfather, a little fact or two of a kind that really I should only have to mention to shine myself in comparison and after every calumny like pure gold: if you don’t do me that justice you’ll never do me justice at all.
Maisie’s desire to show what justice she did her had by this time become so intense as to have brought with it an inspiration (p, 161)
In response, Maisie tries to cheer up her mother – tries to “fix” things by acknowledging her mother with the complimentary description of Ida (mamma) provided by The Captain, a prospective romantic interest of mamma with whom Maisie had a conversation. The Captain had paid her (mamma) many credible compliments, saying beautiful, kind things about her, which helped Maisie feel genuine affection for this difficult individual, Maisie’s mamma. Maisie tries to acknowledge her mamma using the Captain’s kind words. It does not work. “Her [Maisie’s] mother gave her one of the looks that slammed the door in her face; never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had Maisie had to take such a stare” (p. 164). James compares the impact on Maisie to a science experiment that goes horribly wrong, producing something disgusting instead of the expected elegant result. The mother then has a temper tantrum. Maisie (who is now estimated to be the age of a middle school student) survives this scene of “madness and desolation,” “ruin and darkness,” and, after mamma’s departure, goes off and smokes cigarettes with Sir Claude.
As noted, Winnicott describes this scene of fear and defective empathy, “…[T]he faulty adaptation to the child, resulting in impingement of the environment so that the individual [the child] must become a reactor to this impingement. The sense of self is lost in this situation and is only regained by a return to isolation” (Winnicott, 1952: 222; italics added). Maisie is definitely isolated, and she suffers greatly because of it. The parent takes the child as his or her confidant as if the child were an adult, “Let me tell you what your father said.” “Let me tell you what your mother did.” Even when the content of the statement is relatively benign, the tone with which it is uttered – and that is the moment of defective empathy – causes the listener to imagine a kind of outrage, boundary violation, or integrity outage. This other must be the very devil!
In the case of What Maisie Knew, both parents are explicitly hostile towards one another and, if not hostile towards Maisie (though that too emerges), at least neglectful and manipulative. Arguably, in making Masie the means of their abuse of one another, the parents are also abusing her. However, what about the case, perhaps more common in our own supposedly psychologically advanced time, where the parent is hostile, but following the court order, the parent does not express it. What happens then? That of course goes beyond James’ narrative, but points to its relevance for our own challenges and struggles.
On a positive note, if the abusive language is not performed, then it is not in the space. In so far as children are designed to conform to the guidance of their parents – even when they do not fully believe or trust them – so much negativity is removed from the space. Well and good – at least there is nothing to present in court when going before the judge. You will never hear me say that it is better to use the abusive language for then one knows where one stands with the other person. There are many other, better, ways of figuring out where one stands with the other such as comparing words and deeds, confronting one’s own introspective empathy, or simply asking the other person or other significant actors in the environment. It is just that the child’s ability to do these things is still developing and may be inadequate to the task (a problem that less skilled adults (and there are many) may also face). The hostility does not appear on the surface, which gives the appearance of a calm and placid body of water; yet a rip tide may lurk beneath the surface, capable of pulling one down.
At this point, it is useful to take a step back and consider how our consciousness is populated with many voices and many actors. An example of an “internal object” (actually more of an agent) would be a conscience that “tells” the person about the rightness of a prospective or accomplished behavior or speech act. The first internal object, the conscience (“superego”) is formed, thanks to the mechanism of identification with the aggression (about which more shortly). The conscience can become a hostile introject along other internal objects such as images of the parents, mentors, and positive complexes such as generosity, compassion, and empathy. The proposal is that the difference between parents who are explicitly assaultive in their speech acts and those who bottle up the hostility, which then leaks out in indirect forms, shows up in the quality of the internal introject. In the first case, the introject is more hostile, harsher but easier to distinguish from the authentic self; in the second case, the introject is more benign, but not necessarily harmless, and yet harder to distinguish from the authentic self.
If one could truly cancel all the hostility – not just try to keep it down – but truly extirpate it, then it would become an idle wheel and not move any part of the behavior or thinking of the agents in question. But would the hostility then exist anymore? It would be unexpressed, because it really and truly were sublimated into a poem or work of art. That is the issue – is there ever such a thing as unexpressed hostility? This is not a problem that Maisie’s parents have – their problem is that they are embracing the hostility, elaborating it, making it their project. The damage (including to the parents) is substantial. In contract, when the hostility is unexpressed, but still lurking beneath the surface, it may not be unexpressed forever. Betrayal oozes at every pore. empathy is active here too, in a kind of regressive mode, and gives off hostile vibes, aggressive vibes, even if one’s words as sweet as honey. “Would you like another piece of cake?” Is spoken with such a tone of venom that one suspects the cake might contain arsenic. The tone is the moment of empathy (or, more precisely, the unempathic moment) in which one gives off a kind of negative affect, a hostile vibe, in spite of one’s sweet or benigh words. In addition, it is just as common for hostility which is not verbally expressed to be displaced or expressed indirectly in behavior and deed. With advance apologies to pet lovers, the boss bullies the employee and the employee goes home and kicks the dog. The hostility is present but displaced.
As Maisie’s papa gets ready to leave for American to attend to the business affairs of his new, rich consort, the princess, further unreliable empathy. He makes an invitation to Maisie to accompany him to America. This is “out of the blue,” without context or assurances as to how Maisie will be taken care of, and the offer is fake. Why fake? Because he really does not want her along, nor does she really want to go, even though she says with enthusiasm and e=repeatedly “I will follow you anywhere.” It is clear the adventure is not going to happen:
She [Maisie] began to be nervous again; it rolled over her that this was their parting, their parting forever, and that he [papa] had brough her there for so many caresses only because it was important such an occasion should look better for him than any other [….]It was exactly as if he had broken out to her: ‘I say, you little donkey, help me to be irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of it. There’s only impropriety enough for one of us; so you must take it all (p 138).
Naturally, the child has to go along with what the parent tells her or him. The parent has the power to provide meals, transportation, shelter and entertainment, though, in this case, none are offered.
The cost and the impact of the lack of integrity and empathy (and adaptation in general) of the parents to the child is the creation of a false self. Maisie pretends to be dumb. The trouble is that faking being dumb risks actually being dumb in a “fake it till you make it” moment. Her formal education is already neglected and in tatters. Now in the context of James’ narrative, Maisie never loses her cognitive acumen, though she gets called invalidating names such as “idiot” and “donkey” by her elders, which must have a damaging impact on her self-esteem.
Here James is the master psychologist ahead of his time, giving the reader an inside case history on the production of what, as noted, D. W. Winnicott came to describe as “the false self.” On background, Winnicott is the pediatrician who became a celebrated psychoanalyst, surviving an analysis with James Strachey, Melanie Klein, who was himself fortified intellectually by one his most famous (indeed infamous) students and colleagues, Masud Kahn. Without going into psychoanalytic politics, let’s just say that Winnicott’s ideas of the transitional object, virtual play space of creativity, and the false self are among the most enduring and time-tested contributions of child analysis.
At risk of over-simplification, the false self is constructed in order to protect the true self, the source of spontaneity, satisfaction, fulfillment, beginning something new (as Hannah Arendt would say), and creativity. The false self is designed to help the individual survive the impingements of caretakers whose empathy is faulty. Here “empathy” is understood in the extensive sense of the parent’s willingness and ability to adapt to the requirements of the maturing child. The child is an end in her- or himself and not an extension of the parent’s narcissism, which narcissism reduces the child to the role of fulfilling the parents’ unmet needs in their own lives. Unhappy the child who must compensate for what is missing in the parents’ own lives. Most children will try to do so, making reparation for another’s incompletenesses, conforming to the felt requirements of the parent. How do you think that is going to work for the child?
Maisie’s authentic self takes shelter, hides, behind the false one and preserves the hope of someday being able to be expressed and have a satisfying life of her own, but in the meantime Maisie is able to get the secondary gain of frustrating her parents is using her to hurt one another. Maisie acquires the “know how” required to survive by manipulating the manipulators. The cost is enormous, but it protects one from the impingements of the powerful, malevolent forces in the unempathic environment:
The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents, corresponded with a great date in her small, still life [….] She [Maisie] had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self, or, in other word, of concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was because she had been employed to make it so. Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure altogether new. When therefore, as she grew older, her parents in turn, in her presence, announced that she had grown shockingly dull, it was not from any real contraction of her little stream of life. She spoiled their fun, but she practically added to her own (p. 13; see also p. 54 on “the effect of harmless vacancy”; see also p. 117 on deep “imbecility”).
The child lives into – and unwittingly lives up to – the devaluing description and expectations made of her. Maisie makes the best of a bad situation and has fun spoiling the fun of other (which “fun” seems to be the mutual insults of and gossip about the parents). But the cost is substantial. James’ calls out a masochistic moment here in which, as the proverb goes, one cuts off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Caught in the cross fire, in an attempt to find a way between the rock and the hard place, Maisie consults a potential ally. Miss Overmore (the governess initially employed by her mother, but who eventually marries her father) has conflicts of interest of her own but in this moment functions as an honest broker. Maisie’s mother tells her to tell her father that he is a liar and Maisie, who is maturing, asks her governess if she should do so:
‘Am I to tell him?’ the child [Maisie] went on. It was then that her companion [Miss Overmore] addressed her in the unmistakable language of a pair of eyes deep dark-grey. ‘I can’t say No,’ they replied as distinctly as possible; ‘I can’t say No, because I’m afraid of your mamma, don’t you see? Yet how can I say Yes after your papa has been so kind to me, talking to me so long the other day, smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at me the tie we met him in the Park, the time when, rejoicing at the sight of us [….]The wonder now lived again, lived in the recollection of what papa had said to Miss Overmore: ‘I’ve only to look at you see that your’re a person to whom I can appeal to help me save my daughter.’ Maisie’s ignorance of what she was to be saved from didn’t diminish the pleasure of the thought that Miss Overmore was saving her. It seemed to make them cling together (p. 15).
What Maisie does is she keeps quiet. She isolates – plays dumb. All the worse, the mother initially prevents Miss Overmore from accompanying Maisie when the rotation to the father’s turn to take care of her occurs. The child is afraid of being abandoned – not taken care of – not provided for. Miss Overmore is taking caring of Maisie educationally and emotionally. Miss Overmore is banished (at least at this point). The child is “invisible”: “Maisie had a greater sense than ever in her life before of not being personally noticed (p. 107).
As the novel progresses, mamma is stricken with a dreaded but unspecified disease and her life is limited by illness even as she consorts with men who have money. As noted, Papa is bound for America. Sir Claude (who has not been properly introduced here but is a kind person who marries Maisie’s mother and genuinely likes Maisie) ping pongs between England and Paris as Sir Clause learns of a letter in which Papa (Mr Beale) deserts Mrs Beale (Miss Overmore, now Sir Claude’s lover). “You do what you want – and so will I” type of arrangement. Sir Claude is still married to mama (Ida Farange), and in the gilded age that is the scandal. Sir Claude cannot live with a woman married to someone else (according to the standard conventions of the time). There is something indecent about Sir Claude taking up with Miss Overmore while still technically married to Ida. Key term: indecent.
The novel itself has an unthought, regarding the conventions circa 1897 about adult sex outside of marriage and within marriage with other partners. Sir Claude’s is a person who does not speak unkindly of anyone. He is kind, albeit a chain smoker, which is perhaps a way of binding his underlying anxiety. He is happy to have been given permission to do what he wants by his wife (Ida, Masie’s mother) provided she gets similar permission to consort with whoever she wishes. Without a formal divorce, this leaves Sir Claude compromised in terms of conventional moral standards (which were much stronger in such matters in 1897 than in 2024).
We fast forward though Maisie’s lessons in cynicism, playing “hard ball,” the integrity outages of her parents and step parents, and instruction from another of her governesses, Miss Wix, in a rigorous sense of conventional morals. As the story ends (spoiler alert!), Maisie practices a kind of hardball. “I will give up Mrs Wix if you will give up Miss Overmore – and we will go off together to Paris,” Maisie proposes to Sir Claude. Both governesses are to be thrown “under the bus,” which does have a certain narrative symmetry and symbolizes Maisie’s gorwing up.
Thus, Maisie tries to seduce Sir Claude, who, as noted, is the handsome if ineffective 2nd husband of her mamma. “Everyone loves Sir Claude,” everyone except his wife (Maisie’s mama). After marrying mamma, Sir Claude falls in love with Miss Overmore (who has since married Papa). Maisie proposes that she will give up Miss Wix if Sir Claude gives up Miss Overmore. That is the “seduction.” There is a certain amount of back-and-forth negotiation, but it is clear this is never seriously considered by Sir Claude. He would be willing to be in Maisie’s life, but is committed to living near Miss Overmore (Mrs Beale) in France (who are notoriously loose regarding marriage boundaries) so Sir Claude and Miss Overmore can continue their romance. Maisie (as directed by the author, James) takes the moral high road, and returns to England with her strict governess Miss Wix to a life of genteel poverty and “moral sense,” which means conformity to conventional moral behavior.
The empathic moment for Maisie is, who is she as a possibility? This is an aspect of empathy that is sometimes overlooked in the conversations about affect matching, projection, and communications lost in translations – who is the person as a possibility. For example, I meet someone is who struggling with alcohol abuse or, in this case, with quasi-abusive, neglectful parents. That is not who the person is authentically as a possibility. The abuser of alcohol is the possibility of overcoming that she is drinking because of unresolved trauma, low self-esteem, or other specific issue, which when surfaced and worked through allow the person to write the great American novel, join Doctors without Borders, or start a family.
So, once again, who is Maisie as a possibility? First of all, she is a survivor of being “caught in the cross fire” of a nasty divorce and being raised in its shadow. Anyone proposing to give Maisie a good listening might find themselves responding to her empathically saying, “You may usefully know yourself as a survivor.” By the end of the narrative, as Maisie goes off with her governess, Miss Wix, it far from clear that is the case. So while Maise learns a lot about cynicism, hardball, interpersonal invalidation, perpetrations, and emotional intrigue, she does not yet know herself as a survivor.
Using James’ other female figures as a foil for who is Maisie as a possibility, maybe she becomes a kind of Kate Croy (as in James’ Wings of a Dove) scheming to get married to get someone else’s fortune upon their passing away. Maybe Maisie becomes Maggie (as in The Golden Bowl), sacrificing herself to the happiness of others and simultaneously validating the appearances of conventional morality. Or perhaps she becomes a Miss Overmore, a governess educating other people’s children in French grammar and romantic intrigues with the master of the house. Alternatively, Maisie becomes a governess such as Mrs Wix, not mourning the loss of a daughter, but the loss of her own possibility of satisfaction by means of a scrupulous morality, a reaction formation to the loose standards of her own parents and step parents. As the narrative concludes, the latter is the probable almost certain future. A sad ending indeed.
There are many moments of affect matching (and mismatching) in James. There are many moments of communications lost in translation. These are empathy lessons in the sense that if one “cleans up” the miscommunication (restore understanding, then empathy emerges between the communicants. There are many examples of projection in – the parents especially are projecting their hostility onto one another and indeed everyone in the environment. Withdraw the project and authentically be with the other person and empathy comes forth. This does not happen to the parents, but the step parents (with whom Maisie is prospectively “re-parented”) move in that direction. Does Maisie become Kate Croy, Maggie (albeit without all the money), or even a version of her own mamma, seeking her fortune (literally) in association with a series of men of varying degrees of unattractiveness The opportunities for women are appallingly limited. Maisie’s education has been neglected as she has been shunted back and forth between parents. Even when she is de-parented from her biological ones, and Sir Claude and Miss Overmore (Mrs Beale) come together and propose to take care of her, the promise of educational lectures is short-circuited by lack of a revenue model. They can afford some lectures targeting working class folks at the equivalent of the public library, but university level preparation (which, at that time, requires Greek and Latin) seems a high bar. The disappointing, even demoralizing (in the sense of inspiring a righteous indignation), results are a reduction to absurdity of the constraints of standard morality. There is no need for James explicitly to have intended such a message, but it is not hard to find it in him, consistent with an agenda that treats women as full human beings, social actors, and agents with full political and financial rights (which was definitely not the case in James’ Gilded Age).
James’ novels often end on a conventional note, even if his embrace of convention is a reduction to absurdity of convention. When Maisie sees her parents nasty divorce, relatively rare in 1896 as compared with our own time, and the musical chairs of changing partners with Sir Claude and Miss Overbeck (Mrs Beale), is it any wonder that Maisie embraces conventional morality and partners with Mrs Wix, a standard governess who has lost a daughter that would be about Maisie’s age? As noted above, when Mrs Wix is in the presence of Maisie, she (Mres Wix) is in the presence of her lost daughter, which presents an obstacle to her being with – that is, empathizing with – Maisie. Instead Mrs Wix goes to morality (not inconsistent with empathy, just different than it) and her advocacy with “moral sense.” At this point, James’ incomparable empathy gives way to crafting a writerly conclusion, which engages and reduces conventional morality to absurdity.
Much ink has been spilt on whether James’ endings are endorsed by him. Happy endings are rare in the real world, and if one considers death to be unhappy, then they never occur. Never. However, endings where the protagonists act conventionally are realistic in the sense that people often conform to conventional moral standards – which is why it is called “convention.”
A deeper level of integrity coincides with doing what is conventional in James’ Wings of a Dove. Maggie returns to her unfaithful husband, Prince Amerigo, doing what is superficially conventionally requires. The arguably “deeper” integrity of Maggie’s self-sacrifice for the happiness of the poor couple (the husband and his original love interest) is hard to understand under the draconian laws of the patriarchy, by which the unfaithful husband has control of Maggie’s financial fortune. Maggie decides to “fund” his unfaithfulness to her in a magnanimous gesture of self-sacrifice (but does she really have a choice?) based on the romantic notion that his love for his prospective bride from their days of mutual impoverishment was the “real thing.” There is no way that life has to look, and it will turn out the way that it turns out.
In a different context and narrative, Lambert Strether (The Ambassadors) honors his word in the most superficial sense, returning to America presumably to acknowledge that, though Chad returns to Woollett, he (Strether) tried to convince him not to do so, requiring the engagement of other ambassadors, and forgoing his (Strether’s) own possibility of happiness with Marie, which would have required him explicitly to break his word and not return. Thus, doing the conventionally “right thing” is the wrong thing from the perspective of a personally satisfying outcome.
In the background is the pervasive issue of what is the revenue model? Who has the money? Kate Croy and Merton Denscher are engaging in a confidence scheme to get Milly Theale’s fortune (she has a fatal disease). Denscher is belatedly overcome with integrity (and Kate’s refusal to have sex with him to confirm the shady deal), not conventional conformity, but actual remorse. It cancels his affection for Kate, who poverty previously prevented him from marrying. Unless one thinks Milly’s bequest is a “guilt trip” designed to punish Denscher (which it might be, but probably not), and not a genuine gift to someone Milly loved, a case can be made that the non-conforming thing to do would be to “take the money and run (to the bank).” Here the layers of ambiguity and uncertainty really do send the participants (and readers) spinning (Pippin 2000: 66), and no reason exists to believe an unambiguous “right answer” is available. In the Golden Bowl, Maggie has the money, until she doesn’t, and that makes all the difference.
That Maisie turns out with standard level neuroses, acting out an Oedipus complex, even if cynical and seductive in a way conventionally appropriate for women of the Gilded Age, and not psychotic, is a tribute to the secure attachment she experienced from her early nurse, Moddle, all of which must have occurred prior to the beginning of the narrative.
Bibliography
S. Freud. Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 10:1-150
Henry James. (1897). What Maisie Knew. New York, Penguin Classics, 2007.
Christine Olden. (1952). On adult empathy with children. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 8: 111–126.
Robert Pippin. (2000). Henry James and Modern Moral Live. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Winnicott, D. W. (1952). Psychoses and child care. In D. W. Winnicott (1958).
Collected Papers. London: Tavistock Publications.
Juneteenth: Beloved in the Context of Radical Empathy
For those who may require background on this new federal holiday, June 19th – Juneteenth – it was the date in 1865 that US Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in Texas some two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution definitively established this enshrining of freedom as the law of the land and, in addition, the 14th Amendment extended human rights to all people, especially formerly enslaved ones. This blog post is not so much a book review of Beloved as a further inquiry into the themes of survival, transformation, liberty, trauma – and empathy. (By is a slightly updated version of an article that was published on June 27, 2023.)
“Beloved” is the name of a person. Toni Morrison builds on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person, who escaped with her two children even while pregnant with a third, succeeding in reaching freedom across the Ohio River in 1854. However, shortly thereafter, slave catchers (“bounty hunters”) arrived with the local sheriff under the so-called fugitive slave act to return Margaret and her children to slavery. Rather than submit to re-enslavement, Margaret tried to kill the children, also planning then to kill herself. She succeeded in killing one, before being overpowered. The historical Margaret received support from the abolitionist movement, even becoming a cause celebre. The historical Margaret is named Sethe in the novel. The story grabs the reader by the throat – at first relatively gently but with steadily increasing compression – and then rips the reader’s guts out. The story is complex, powerful, and not for the faint of heart.
The risks to the reader’s emotional equilibrium of engaging with such a text should not be underestimated. G. H. Hartman is not intentionally describing the challenge encountered by the reader of Beloved in his widely-noted “Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” but he might have been:
“The more we try to animate books, the more they reveal their resemblance to the dead who are made to address us in epitaphs or whom we address in thought or dream. Every time we read we are in danger of waking the dead, whose return can be ghoulish as well as comforting. It is, in any case, always the reader who is alive and the book that is dead, and must be resurrected by the reader” (Hartman 1995: 548).
Waking the dead indeed! Though technically Morrison’s work has a gothic aspect – it is a ghost story – yet it is neither ghoulish nor sensational, and treats supernatural events rather the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez does – as a magical or miraculous realism. Credible deniability or redescription of the returned ghost as a slave who escaped from years-long sexual incarceration is maintained for a hundred pages (though ultimately just allowed to fade away). Morrison takes Margaret/Sethe’s narrative in a different direction than the historical facts, though the infanticide remains a central issue along with how to recover the self after searing trauma and supernatural events beyond trauma. The murdered infant had the single word “Beloved” chiseled on her tombstone, and even then the mother had to compensate the stone mason with non-consensual sex. An explanation will be both too much and too little; but the minimal empathic response is to try to say something that will advance the conversation in the direction of closure, the integration of unclaimed experience (to use Cathy Carruth’s incisive phrase), and recovery from trauma. Let us take a step back.
Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. What is that? “Conversational implicature” is an indirect speech act that suggests an idea or thought, even though the thought is not literally expressed. Conversational implicature lets the empathy in – and out – to be expressed. Such implicature expands the power and provocation of communication precisely by not saying something explicitly but hinting at what happened. The information is incomplete and the reader is challenged to feel her/his way forward using the available micro-expressions, clues, and hints. Instead of saying “she was raped and the house was haunted by a ghost,” one must gather the implications. One reads: “Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (Morrison 1987: 5–6). Note the advice above about “not for the faint of heart.”
The reader does a double-take. What just happened? Then a causal conversation resumes in the story about getting a different house as the reader tries to integrate what just happened into a semi-coherent narrative. Yet why should a narrative of incomprehensibly inhumane events make more sense than the events themselves? No good reason – except that humans inevitably try to make sense of the incomprehensible.“Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (1987: 6). One of the effects is to get the reader to think about the network of implications in which are expressed the puzzles and provocations of what really matters at a fundamental level. (For more on conversational implicature see Levinson 1983: 9 –165.)
In a bold statement of the obvious, this reviewer agrees with the Nobel Committee, who awarded Morrison the Novel Prize in 1988 for this work. This review accepts the high literary qualities of the work and proposes to look at three things. These include: (1) how the traumatic violence, pain, suffering, inhumanity, drama, heroics, and compassion of the of the events depicted (consider this all one set), interact with trauma and are transformed into moral trauma; (2) how the text itself exemplifies empathy between the characters, bringing empathy forth and making it present for the reader’s apprehension; (3) the encounter of the reader with the trauma of the text transform and/or limit the practice of empathizing itself from standard empathy to radical empathy.
So far as I know, no one has brought Morrison’s work into connection with the action of the Jewish Zealots at Masada (73 CE). The latter, it may be recalled, committed what was in effect mass suicide rather than be sold into slavery after being militarily defeated and about-to-be-taken-prisoner by the Roman army. The 960 Zealots drew lots to kill one another and their wives and children, since suicide technically was against the Jewish religion.
On further background, after the fall of Jerusalem as the Emperor Titus put down the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 73 CE, a group of Jewish Zealots escaped to a nearly impregnable fortress at Masada on the top of a steep mountain. (Note Masada was a television miniseries starring Peter O’Toole (Sagal 1981).) Nevertheless, Roman engineers built a ramp and siege tower and eventually succeeding in breaching the walls. The next day the Roman soldiers entered the citadel and found the defenders and their wives and children all dead at their own hands. Josephus, the Jewish historian, reported that he received a detailed account of the siege from two Jewish women who survived by hiding in the vast drain/cistern – in effect, tunnels – that served as the fortress’ source of water.
The example of the Jewish resistance at Masada provides a template for those facing enslavement, but it does not solve the dilemma that killing one’s family and then committing suicide is a leap into the abyss at the bottom of which may lie oblivion or the molten center of the earth’s core, a version of Dante’s Inferno. So all the necessary disclaimers apply. This reviewer does not claim to second guess the tough, indeed impossible, decisions that those in extreme situations have to make. One is up against all the debates and the arguments about suicide.
Here is the casuistical consideration – when life is reduced from being a human being to being a slave who is treated as a beast of burden and whose orifices are routinely penetrated for the homo- and heteroerotic pleasure of the master, then one is faced with tough choices. No one is saying what the Zealots did was right – and two wrongs do not make a right – but it is also not obvious that what they did was wrong in the way killing an innocent person is wrong, who might otherwise have a life going about their business gardening, baking bread, or fishing. This is the rock and the hard place, the devil and deep blue sea, the frying pan or the fire, the Trolley Car dilemma (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). This is Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, who after the unsuccessful attempt in June 1944 to assassinate Hitler (of which Rommel apparently had knowledge but took no action), was allowed by the Nazi authorities to take the cyanide pill. This is Colonel George Armstrong Custer with one bullet left surrounded by angry Dakota warriors who would like to slow cook him over hot coals. Nor as far as I know is the bloody case of Margaret Garner ever in the vast body of criticism brought into connection with the suicides of Cicero and Seneca (and other Roman Stoics) in the face of mad perpetrations of the psychopathic Emperor Nero. This is a decision that no one should have to make; a decision that no one can make; and yet a decision that the individual in the dilemma has to make, for doing nothing is also a decision. In short, this is moral trauma.
A short Ted Talk on trauma theory is appropriate. Beloved is so dense with trauma that a sharp critical knife is needed to cut through it. In addition to standard trauma and complex trauma, Beloved points to a special kind of trauma, namely, moral trauma or as it sometimes also called moral injury, that has not been much recognized (though it is receiving increasing attention in the context of war veterans (e.g. Shay 2014)). “Moral trauma (injury)” is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), any edition, of the American Psychiatric Association, nor is it even clear that it belongs there, since the DSM is not a moral treatise. Without pretending to do justice to the vast details and research, “trauma” is variously conceived as an event that threatens the person’s life and limb, making the individual feel he or she is going to die or be gravely injured (which would include rape). The blue roadside signs here in the USA that guide the ambulance to the “Trauma Center” (emergency department that has staff on call at all times), suggest an urgent emergency, in this case usually but not always, a physical injury.
Cathy Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience, “unclaimed experience.”The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not experience it as something the person experienced. The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization. At the risk of oversimplification, Caruth’s work aligns with that of Bessel van der Kolk (2014). Van der Kolk emphasizes an account that redescribes in neuro-cognitive terms a traumatic event that gets registered in the body – burned into the neurons, so to speak, but remains sequestered – split off or quarantined – from the person’s everyday going on being and ordinary sense of self. For both Caruth and van der Kolk, the survivor is suffering from an unintegrated experience of self-annihilating magnitude for which the treatment – whether working through, witnessing, or (note well) artistic expression – consists in reintegrating that which was split off because it was simply too much to bear.
For Dominick LaCapra (1999), the historian, “trauma” means the Holocaust or Apartheid (add: enslavement to the list). LaCapra engages with how to express in writing such confronting events that the words of historical writing and literature become inadequate. The words breakdown, fail, seem fake no matter how authentic. And yet the necessity of engaging with the events, inadequately described as “traumatic,” is compelling and unavoidable. Thus, LaCapra (1999: 700) notes: “Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or revenant.” Without intending to do so, this describes Beloved, where the infant of the infanticide is literally reincarnated, reborn, in the person named “Beloved.” For LaCapra, working through such traumatic events is necessary for the survivors (and the entire community) in order to get their power back over their lives and open up the possibility of a future of flourishing. This “working through” is key for it excludes denial, repression, suppression, and, in contrast, advocates for positive inquiry into the possibility of transformation in the service of life. Yet the attempt at working through of the experiences, memories, nightmares, and consequences of such traumatic events often result in repetition, acting out, and “empathic unsettlement.” Key term: empathic unsettlement. From a place of safety and security, the survivor has to do precisely that which she or he is least inclined to do – engage with the trauma, talk about it, try to integrate and overcome it. Such unsettlement is also a challenge and an obstacle for the witness, therapist, or friend providing a gracious and generous listening.
LaCapra points to a challenging result. The empathic unsettlement points to the possibility that the vicarious experience of the trauma on the part of the witness leaves the witness unwilling to complete the working through, lest it “betray” the survivor, invalidate the survivor’s suffering or accomplishment in surviving. “Those traumatized by extreme events as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it” (DeCapra 2001: 22). This “unsettlement” is a way that empathy may breakdown, misfire, go off the rails. It points to the need for standard empathy to become radical empathy in the face of extreme situations of trauma, granted what that all means requires further clarification.
For Ruth Leys (2000) the distinction “trauma” itself is inherently unstable oscillating between historical trauma – what really happened, which, however, is hard if not impossible to access accurately – and, paradoxically, historical and literary language bearing witness by a failure of witnessing. The trauma events are “performed” in being written up as history or made the subject of an literary artwork. But the words, however authentic, true, or artistic, often seem inadequate, even fake. The “trauma” as brought forth as a distinction in language is ultimately inadequate to the pain and suffering that the survivor has endured, which “pain and suffering” (as Kant might say) are honored with the title of “the real.” Yet the literary or historical work is a performance that may give the survivor access to their experience.
The traumatic experience is transformed – even “transfigured” – without necessarily being made intelligible or sensible by reenacting the experience in words that are historical writing or drawing a picture (visual art) or dancing or writing a poem or bringing forth a literary masterpiece such as Beloved. The representational gesture – whether a history or a true story or fiction – starts the process of working through the trauma, enabling the survivor to reintegrate the trauma into life, getting power back over it, at least to the extent that s/he can go on being and becoming. In successful instances of working through, the reintegrated trauma becomes a resource to the survivor rather than a burden or (one might dare say) a cross to bear. To stay with the metaphor, the cross becomes an ornament hanging from a light chain of silver metal on one’s neck rather than the site of one’s ongoing torture and execution. Much work and working through is required to arrive at such an outcome.
Though Beloved has generated a vast amount of critical discussion, it has been little noted that the events in Belovedrapidly put the reader in the presence of moral trauma (also called “moral injury”). Though allusion was made above to the DSM, the devil is in the details. Two levels of trauma (and the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)) are concisely distinguished (for example by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(5th edition) of the American Psychiatric Association (2013). There is standard trauma – one survives a life changing railroad or auto accident and has nightmares and flashbacks (and a checklist of other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)). There is repeated trauma, trauma embedded in trauma, double-bind embedded in double bind. One is abused – and it happens multiple times over a course of months or years and, especially, it may happen before one has an abiding structure for cognition such as a stable acquisition of language (say to a two-year-old) or happens in such a way or such a degree that words are not available as the victim is blamed while being abused – resulting in complex trauma and the corresponding complex PTSD.
But this distinction, standard versus complex trauma (and the correlated PTSD), is inadequate in the case of moral trauma, where the person is both a survivor and a perpetrator.
Thus, an escaped slave makes it to freedom. One Margaret Garner is pursued and about to be apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Act. She tries to kill herself and her children rather than be returned to slavey. She succeeds in killing one of the girls. Now this soldier’s choice is completely different than the choice faced by Margaret/Sethe, and rather like the inverse of it, dependent on not enough information rather than a first-hand, all-too-knowledgeable acquaintance with the evils of enslavement from having survived it (so far). Yet the structural similarities are striking. Morrison says of Sethe/Margarent might also said of the soldier, “[…][S]he could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive […]” (Morrison 1987: 67). Yet one significant difference between the soldier and Sethe (and the Jewish Zealots) is their answer to the question when human life ceases to be human. A casuistical clarification is in order. If human life is an unconditional good, then, when confronted with an irreversible loss of the humanness, life itself may not be an unconditional good. Life versus human life. The distinction dear to Stoic philosophy, that worse things exist than death, gets traction – worse things such as slavery, cowardice in the face of death, betraying one’s core integrity. The solder is no stoic; Sethe is. Yet both are suffering humanity.
However, one may object, even if one’s own human life may be put into play, it is a flat-out contradiction to improve the humanity of one’s children by ending their humanity. The events are so beyond making sense, yet one cannot stop oneself from trying to make sense of them. So far, we are engaged with the initial triggering event, the infanticide. No doubt a traumatic event; and arguably calling forth moral trauma. But what about trauma that is so traumatic, so pervasive, that it is the very form defining the person’s experiences. Trauma that it is not merely “unclaimed, split off” experience (as Caruth says). For example, the person who grows up in slavery – as did Sethe – has never known any other form of experience – this is just the way things are – things have always been that way – and one cannot imagine anything else (though some inevitably will and do). This is soul murder. So we have moral trauma in a context of soul murder. Soul murder is defined by Shengold (1989) as loss of the ability to love, though the individuals in Beloved retain that ability, however fragmented and imperfect it may be. Rather the proposal here is to expand the definition of soul murder to include the loss of the power spontaneously to begin something new – the loss of the possibility of possibility of the self, leaving the self without boundaries and without aliveness, vitality, an emotional and practical Zombie. In addition, as a medical professional, Shengold (1989) makes an important note: “Soul murder is a crime, not a diagnosis.” Though Morrison does not say so, and though she might or might not agree, enslavement is soul murder.
Beloved contains actual murders. Once again this is not for the fainto of heart. For example, Sethe’s friend and slave Sixo from the time of their mutual enslavement is about to be burned alive by the local vigilantes, and he gets the perpetrators to shoot him (and kill him) by singing in a loud, happy, annoying voice. He fakes “not givin’ a damn,” taking away the perpetrators’ enjoyment of his misery. It works well enough in the moment. His last. Nor is it like one murder is better (or worse) than another. However, in a pervasive context of soul murder, Sethe’s infanticide is an action taken by a person whose ability to choose -sometime called “agency” – is compromised by extreme powerlessness. Yet in that moment of decision her power is uncompromised by all the compromising circumstances and momentarily retored – whether for the better is that about which we are debating, bodly assuming the matter is debateable. One continues to try and justify and/or make sense out of what cannot have any sense. Sethe is presented with a choice (read it again – and again) that no one should have to make – that no one can make (even though the person makes the choice because doing nothing is also a choice). This is the same situation that the characters in classic Greek tragedy face, though a combination of information asymmetries, personal failings, and double-binds. Above all – double-binds. This is why tragedy was invented (which deserves further exploration, not engaged here).
Now bring empathy to moral trauma in the context of soul murder. Anyone out there in the reading audience experiencing “empathic unsettlement” (as LaCapra incisively put it)? Anyone experiencing empathic distress? If the reader is not, then that itself is concerning. “Empathic unsettlement” is made present in the reader’s experience by the powerful artistry deployed by Beloved. Yet this may be an instance in which empathy is best described, not as an on-off switch, but as a dial that one can dial up or down in the face of one’s own limitations and humanness. This is tough stuff, which deserves to be read and discussed. If one is starting to break out in a sweat, if one’s mouth is getting dry, if the pump in one’s chest is starting to accelerate its pumping, and one is thinking about putting the book down, rather than become hard-hearted, the coaching is temporarily to dial down one’s practice of empathy. While one is going to experience suffering and pain in reading about the suffering and pain of another, it will inevitably and by definition be a vicarious experience – a sample – a representation – a trace affect – not the overwhelming annihilation that would make one a survivor. Dial the empathy down in so far as a person can do that; don’t turn it off. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, but with practice, the practitioner gets expanded power over the practice of empathizing.
As noted, Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. Conversational implicature allows the empathy to get in – become present in the text and become present for the reader engaging with the text. The conversational implicature expresses and brings to presence the infanticide without describing the act itself by which the baby is killed. Less is more, though the matter is handled graphically enough. The results of the bloody deed are described – “a “woman holding a blood soaked child to her chest with one hand” (Morrison 1987: 124) – but not the bloody action of inflicting the fatal wound itself. “Writing the wound” sometimes dances artistically around expressing the wound, sometimes, not.
Returning to the story itself, Morrison describes the moment at which the authorities arrive to attempt to enforce the fugitive slave act: “When the four horsemen came – schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff – the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late” (Morrison 1987: 124). Conversational implicature meets intertextuality in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament. The four horsemen of the apocalypse herald the end of the world as we know it and the end of the world is what comes down on Sethe at this point. Perhaps not unlike the Zealots at Masada, she makes a fatal decision. Literally. As Hannah Arendt (1970) pointed out in a different political context, power and force (violence) stand in an inverse relation: when power is reduced to zero, then force – violence – comes forth. The slaves power is zero, if not a negative number. Though Sethe tries to kill all the children, she succeeds only in one instance. In the fictional account, the boys recover from their injuries and, in the case of Denver (Sethe’s daughter named after Amy Denver, the white girl who helped Sethe), Sethe’s hand is stayed at the last moment.
Beloved is a text rich in empathy. This includes exemplifications of empathy in the text, which in turn call forth empathy in the reader. The following discussion now joins the standard four aspects of standard empathy – empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness. The challenge to the practice of empathy is that with a text and topic such as this one, does the practice of standard empathy need to be expanded, modified, or transformed from standard to radical empathy? What would that even mean? Empathy is empathy. A short definition of radical empathy is proposed: Empathy is committed to empathizing in the face of empathic distress, even if the latter is incurred, and empathy, even in breakdown, acknowledges the commitment to expanding empathy in the individual and the community.
We start with a straightforward example of empathic receptivity – affect matching. No radical empathy is required here. An example of standard empathic receptivity is provided in the text, and the dance between Denver and Beloved is performed (1987: 87 – 88):
“Beloved took Denver’s hand and place another on Denver’s shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor. “
The contagious laughter is entry level empathic receptivity. Empathy degree zero, so to speak. This opening between the two leads to further intimate engagement with empathic possibility. But the possibility is blocked of further empathizing in the moment is blocked by a surprising discovery. At this point, Denver “gets it” – that Beloved is from the other side – she has died and come back – and Denver asks her, “What’s it like over there, where you were before?” But since she was killed as a baby, the answer is not very informative: “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here.” (1987: 88) Beloved, the person who returns to haunt the family, is the age she would have been had she lived.
The narrative skips in no particular order from empathic receptivity to empathic understanding. “Understanding” is used in the extended sense of understanding of possibilities for being in the world (e.g., Heidegger 1927: 188 (H148); 192 (H151)): “In the projecting of the understanding, beings [such as human beings] are disclosed in their possibility.” Empathic understanding is the understanding of possibility. What does the reader’s empathy make present as possible for the person in her or his life and circumstance? What is possible in slavery is being a beast of burden, pain, suffering, and early death – the possibility of no possibility of human flourishing. In contrast, when Paul D (a former slave who knew Sethe in enslavement) makes his way to the house of Sethe and Denver (and, unknown to him, the ghost of the baby), the possibility of family comes forth. In the story, there’s a carnival in town and Paul D, who knew Sethe before both managed to escape from the plantation (“Sweet Home”), takes her and Denver to the carnival. “Having a life” means many things. One of them is family. The possibility of family is made present in the text and the reader. That is the moment of empathic understanding of possibility:
“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust hold hands. Maybe he [Paul D] was right. A life. Watching their hand-holding shadows [. . . ] because she could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive [. . . .] [A]ll the time the three shadows that shot out of their feet to the left held hands. Nobody noticed but Sethe and she stopped looking after she decided that it was a good sign. A life. Could be.” (Morrison 1987: 67)
Within the story, Sethe has her own justification for her bloody deed. She is rendering her children safe and sending them on ahead to “the other side” where she will soon join them. “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (Morrison 1987: 193). The only problem with this argument, if there is a problem with it, is that it makes sense out of what she did. Most readers are likely to align with Paul D (a key character in the story and a “romantic” interest of Sethe’s), who at first does not know about the infanticide. Paul D learns the details of Sethe’s act from Stamp Paid, the person who is the former underground rail road coordinator, who knows just about everything that goes on, because he was a hub for the exchange of all-manner of information in helping run-away and would-be run-away slaves to survive.
Stamp feels that Paul D ought to know, though he later regrets his decision. Stamp tells Paul D about the infanticide – showing him the newspaper clipping as evidence and explaining the words that Paul D (who is illiterate) cannot read. Paul D is overwhelmed. He cannot handle it. He denies that the sketch (or photo) is Sethe, saying it does not look like her – the mouth does not match. Stamp tries to convince Paul D: “She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out hurt the hurter” (1987: 276). Paul D asks Sethe about the infanticide reported in the news clipping, and she provides her justification (see above). Paul D is finally convinced that she did what she did, yet unconvinced it was the thing to do and a thunderhead of judgment issues the verdict: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four […] and right then a forest sprung up between them trackless and quiet” (1987: 194).[1] Paul D experiences something he cannot handle.
Standard empathy misfires as empathic distress. Standard empathy chokes on moral judgment. Paul D moves out of the house where he is living with Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. Standard empathy does not stretch into radical empathy. In a breakdown of empathic receptivity, Paul D takes on Sethe’s shame, and instead of a decision to talk about the matter with her, perhaps agreeing to exit the relationship for cause, Paul D runs away from both Sethe and his own emotional and moral conflicts, making an escape. Stamp blames himself for driving Paul D away by disclosing the infanticide to him (of which he had been unaware), and tries to go to explain it to Sethe. Seeking the honey of self-knowledge results in the stings of enraged distortion and disguise. Paul D finds the door is closed and locked against him. Relationships are in breakdown.
At this point the isolation of the women – Sethe, Denver, Beloved – inspires a kind of “mad scene” – or at least a carnival of emotion. Empathic interpretation occurs as dynamic and shifting points of view. The rapid-fire changing of perspectives occurs in the three sections beginning, “Beloved, she my daughter”; “Beloved is my sister”; “I am Beloved and she is mine” (Morrison 1987: 236; 242; 248). These express the hunger for relatedness, healing, and family that each of the women experience. For this reader, encountering the voices has the rhythmic effect of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The voices are disembodied, though they address one another rather than the reader (as was also the case in Woolf). The first-person reflections slip and slide into a free verse poem of call and response. The rapid-fire, dynamic changing of perspectives results in the merger of the selves, which, strictly speaking, is a breakdown of empathic boundaries. There is no punctuation in the text of Beloved’s contribution to the back-and-forth, because Beloved is a phantom, albeit an embodied one, without the standard limits of boundaries in space/time such as are provided by standard punctuation.
This analysis has provided examples of empathic receptivity, understanding, and interpretation. One aspect of the process of empathy remains. In a flashback of empathic responsiveness: Sethe is on the run, having escaped enslavement at Sweet Home Plantation. She is far along in her pregnancy, alone, on foot, barefoot, and is nearly incapacitated by labor pains. A white girl comes along and they challenge one another. The white girl is named Amy Denver, though the reader does not learn that at first, and she is going to Boston (which becomes a running joke). What is not a joke is that Sethe and Amy Denver are two lost souls on the road of life if there ever were any. Amy is barely more safe or secure than Amy, though she has the distinct advantage that men with guns and dogs are not in hot pursuit of her. Sethe dissembles about her own name, telling Amy it is “Lu.” It is as if the Good Samaritan – in this case, Amy – had also been waylaid by robbers, only not beaten as badly as the man going up to Jerusalem, who is rescored by the Samaritan. Amy is good with sick people, as she notes, and practices her arts on Sethe/Lu. Sethe/Lu is flat on her back and in attempt to help her stand up, Amy massages her feet. But Sethe/Lu’s back hurts. In a moment of empathic responsiveness, Amy describes to Sethe/Lu the state of her (Sethe’s) back, which has endured a whipping with a raw hide whip shortly before the plan to escape was executed. Amy tells her:
“It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk – it’s red and spit wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What god have in mind I wonder, I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this” (1987: 93).
This satisfies the definition of empathic responsiveness – in Amy’s description to Lu of what Amy sees on Lu’s back, Amy gives to Lu her (Amy’s) experience of the state of Lu’s back. Amy’s response to her (Lu) allows / causes Lu to “get” that Amy has experienced what her (Lu’s) experience is. Lu (Sethe) of course cannot see her own back and the result of the rawhide whipping which is being described to her. On background, early in the story, Sethe tells Paul D: “Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher [actually a teacher, but mostly a Simon Legree type slave owner, and the brother of Mrs Garner’s late husband] made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still” (1987:20). The reader wonders, What is she talking about? “Made a tree”? The conversational implicature – clear to the participants in the story, but less so to the reader – lets the suspense – and the empathy – come out. The “tree” finally becomes clear in the above-cited passage. One has to address whether this attempt succeeds artistically to transform the trauma of the whipping into an artistic integration and transfiguration of pain and suffering. Nothing is lacking from Morrison’s artistry, yet the description gave this reader a vicarious experience of nausea, empathic receptivity, especially with the white puss. Once again, not for the faint of heart. This a “transfiguring” of the traumatic.
A further reflection on “transfiguring” is required. If one takes the term literally – transforming the figure into another form without making it more or less meaningful, sensible, or significant, then one has a chance of escaping the aporias and paradoxes into a state of masterful and resonant ambiguity. For example, in another context, when the painter Caravaggio (1571–1610) makes two rondos of Medusa, the Gorgon with snakes for hair, whose sight turns the viewer to stone, was he not transfiguring something horrid and ugly into a work or art? The debate is joined. The inaccessible trauma – what happened cannot be accurately remembered, though it keeps appearing in nightmares and flashback – is the inaccessible real, like Kant’s thing in itself. The performing of the trauma, the work of art – Caravaggio’s self-portrait as the Medusa[2] or the encounter of Amy and Sethe/Lu or Morrison’s Beloved in its entirety – renders the trauma accessible, expressible, and so able to be worked through, integrated, and transformed into a resource that at least allows one to keep going on being and possibly succeed in recovery and flourishing. Once again, the intention is a transfiguring of the traumatic. However, the myth of the Medusa itself suggests a solution, albeit a figurative one. In the face of soul murder embedded within moral trauma, the challenge to standard empathy is to expand, unfold, develop, into radical empathy. That does not add another feature to empathy in addition to receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, but it raises the bar (so to speak) on the practice of all of these. Radical empathy is committed to the practice of empathizing in the face of empathic distress. What does empathic distress look like? It looks like the reaction to the traumatic vision of the snake-haired Gorgon that turns to stone the people who encounter it. It looks like the tree on Sethe/Lu’s back, the decision that Sethe/Margarent should not have to make, but that she nevertheless makes, staring into her image of the Medusa, who show up as the four horsemen. This is to chase the trauma upstream in the opposite direction from the would-be artistic transfiguration. A
This points immediately to Nietzsche’s answer to Plato’s banning of tragic poetry from the just city (the Republic), namely, that humans cannot bear so much truth (1883: §39):
“Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence, that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could barely still endure, or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.“
And again, with admirable conciseness, Nietzsche (1888/1901: Aphorism 822): “We have art, lest we perish of the truth.” Here “truth” is not a semantic definition such as Davidson’s (1973, 1974) use of Tarksi (loosely a correspondence between language and world), but the truth that life is filled with struggle and effort—not fair—that not only are people who arrive early and work hard all day in the vineyard paid a full day’s wages, but so are people who arrive late and barely work also get paid a full day’s wages; that, according to the Buddha, pain is an illusion, but when one is sitting in the dentist chair, the pain is a very compelling illusion; not only old people get sick and die, but so do children. While the universe may indeed be a well-ordered cosmos, according to the available empirical evidence, the planet Earth seems to be in a local whorl in its galaxy where chaos predominates; power corrupts and might makes right; good guys do not always finish last, but they rarely finish first, based alone on goodness.
On background, the reader may recall that the hero Perseus succeeded in defeating this Medusa without looking at her. Anyone who sees the Medusa straight on is turned to stone. Perseus would have been traumatized by the traumatic image and rendered an emotional zombie – lacking in aliveness, energy, strength, or vitality – turned to stone. Beyond empathic unsettlement and empathic distress, moral trauma (moral injury) and soul murder stop one dead – not necessarily literally but emotionally, cognitively and practically. That is the challenge of the paradox and seeming contradiction: how to continue empathizing in the face of empathic distress. Is there a method of continuing to practice empathizing in the face of such distressing unsettlement? At least initially, the solution is a narrative proposal. Recall that Perseus used a shield, which was also a magic reflective mirror, indirectly to see the Medusa as a reflection without being turned to stone and, thus seeing her, being able to fight and defeat her. The shield acted as a defense against the trauma represented by the Medusa, enabling Perseus to get up close and personal without succumbing to the toxic affects and effects. There is no other way to put it – the artistic treatment of trauma is the shield of Perseus. It both provides access to the trauma and defends against the most negative consequences of engaging with it. The shield does not necessarily render the trauma sensible or meaningful in a way of words, yet the shield takes away the power of the Gorgon/trauma, rending it unable to turn one to stone. In the real-world practice of trauma therapy, this means rendering the trauma less powerful. The real world does not have the niceness of the narrative, where the Gorgon is decapitated – one and done! One gradually – by repeated working through – gets one’s power back as the trauma shrinks, gets smaller, without, however, completely disappearing. The trauma no longer controls the survivor’s life.
The question for this inquiry into Beloved is what happens when one brings literary language, refined language, artistic language, beautiful language, to painful events, appalling events, ugly events, dehumanizing events, traumatic events? The literary language has to dance around the traumatic event, which is made precisely present with expanded power by avoiding being named, leaving an absence. The traumatic events that happened were such that the language of witnessing includes the breakdown of the language of witnessing. As Hartman notes in his widely quoted study:
It is interesting that in neoclassical aesthetic theory what Aristotle called the scene of pathos (a potentially traumatizing scene showing extreme suffering) was not allowed to be represented on stage. It could be introduced only through narration (as in the famous recits [narrative] of Racinian tragedy) (Hartman 1995: 560 ftnt 30).
The messenger arrives and narrates the awful event, which today in a streaming series would be depicted in graphic detail using special effects and enhanced color pallet. One might say that Sophocles lacked special effects, but it is that he really “got it” – less is more. The absence of the most violent defining moment increases its impact. Note this does not mean – avoid talking about it (the trauma). It means the engagement is not going to be a head on encounter and attack, but a flanking movement. In the context of narrative, this does not prevent the reader from engaging with the infanticide. On the contrary, it creates a suspense that hooks the reader like a fish with the rest of the narrative reeling in the reader. The absence makes the engagement a challenge, mobilizing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blank in such a way that it recreates the event as a palpable vicarious event. It is necessary to raise the ghost prior to exorcising it, and the absentee implication does just that.
If this artistic engagement with trauma is not “writing trauma” in LaCapra’s sense, then I would not know it:
“Trauma indicates a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects in what I termed traumatic and post-traumatic writing (or signifying practice in general). It involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to [it] [. . . ] – processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms. Writing trauma is often seen in terms of enacting it, which may at times be equated with acting (or playing) it out in performative discourse or artistic practice” (LaCapra 2001: 186–187).
If the writing (and reading) of the traumatic events is a part of working through the pain and suffering of the survivors (and acknowledging the memory of the victims), then the result for the individual and the community is expanded well-being, expanded possibilities for aliveness, vitality, relatedness, and living a life of satisfaction and fulfillment. Instead of being ruled by intrusive flashbacks and nightmares, the survivor expands her/his power over the events that were survived. This especially includes the readers engaging with the text who are survivors of other related traumatic events, dealing with their own personal issues, which may be indistinguishable from those of fellow-travelers in trauma. That is the situation at the end of Beloved when Paul D returns to Sethe and Denver (Sethe’s daughter) after the community has exorcised the ghost of Beloved. It takes a village – a community – to bring up a child; it also takes a village to exorcise the ghost of one.
References
Anonymous. (2012). Trolley problem (The trolley dilemma). Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [checked on 2023-06-25]
Hannah Arendt. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
Caty Caruth. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Donald Davidson. (1974). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 183–198.
Geoffrey H Hartman. (1995). On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies New Literary History , Summer, 1995, Vol. 26, No. 3, Higher Education (Summer, 1995): 537 – 563 .
Martin Heidegger. (1927). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trs.). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.s
Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin. (1988). The Abuse of Casuistry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dominick LaCapra. (1999). Trauma, absence, loss. Critical Inquiry, Summer, 1999, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1999): 696–727
Dominick LaCapra. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, John Hopkins Unviersity Press.
Stephen Levinson. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Toni Morrison. (1987). Beloved. New York: Vintage Int.
Friedrich Nietzsche. (1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1961.
________________. (1888/1901). The Will to Power, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). New York: Vintage, 1968.
Ruth Leys. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Boris Sagal, Director. (1981). Masade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada_(miniseries) [checked on 2023-06-25).
J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090
Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.
Bessel van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin.
[1] For those readers wondering how Sethe regained her freedom after being arrested for murder (infanticide), Beloved provides no information as to the sequence. During the historical trial an argument was made that as a free woman, Margaret Garner should be tried and convicted of murder, so that the Abolitionist governor of Ohio could then pardon her, returning here to freedom. Something like that needs to be understood in the story, though it is a fiction. It is a fiction, since in real life, Garner and her children were indeed returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act. Moral trauma within soul murder indeed.
[2] Caravaggio was a good looking fellow, and he uses himself as a model for the face of the Medusa. This does not decide anything. Arguably, Caravaggio was arguably memorializing – transfiguring – his own life traumas, which were many and often self-inflicted as befits a notorious manic-depressive.
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, is now available as an ebook…
The release of the ebook version of Empathy: Lessons ,2nd Edition, coincided with a major astronomical event – the total solar eclipse that traversed North America on Monday April 8, 2024. The gods are watching and winking at us humans to encourage expanding our empathic humanism!
Empathy is oxygen for the soul (see Chapter 6: Evidence-based empathy training). So, if you are short of breath due to life stress, get the expanded empathy delivered in this book. Just as the body needs oxygen to live physically, the soul needs empathy to live emotionally. Most people are naturally empathic, but the cynicism and denial needed to survive everyday life drives empathy away. Remove the obstacles to empathy and empathy naturally develops and grows. That is the empathy lesson in a nutshell without all the guidance and practice needed to succeed. Find out how to take your empathy to the next level.
In addition to all the features of the First Edition—a readiness assessment for empathy, tips on overcoming resistance to empathy, evidence-based empathy training, empathic techniques of stress reduction, applications to dealing with bullying, healthy well-being, and capitalism—the enlarged Second Edition includes new chapters on rhetorical empathy in politics, the limitations of empathy (and what to do about them), and an expanded chapter on empathy as a lens on love and romance. Not to be missed!
The empathy lessons include how—
To perform a readiness assessment; establish a set up for success in cleaning up inauthenticities that block empathy so that empathy can expand and flourish;
Empathy is not an “on–off” switch but a tuner (a dial) that expands or contracts in accessing the vicarious experience of the other person;
Empathy works as a method of data gathering about the other person, providing a vicarious experience of the other person without being flooded by the experience;
Introspection, vicarious experience, listening to one’s own “voice over” and radical acceptance are the royal road to empathic receptivity;
Empathic receptivity overcomes emotional contagion, creating a set up for clear communication of feelings and experiences;
Empathic understanding overcomes conformity and enables shifting out of stuckness into contribution, transformation, and leadership, including satisfying and flourishing relationships;
Empathic interpretation overcomes projection and is the folk definition of empathy, walking in another’s shoes, adding “top down” empathy to “bottom up,” empathic receptivity;
Empathic responsiveness drives out anger and rage, acting as a soothing balm to suffering and emotional upset, deescalating conflict and aggression;
Scientific, peer-reviewed, evidence-based research confirms that empathy reduces inflammation and stress;
Relationships get “weaponized” in bullying and, coming from empathy, how to overcome bullying, reestablishing boundaries: recommendations to students, teachers, administrators on how to stop bullying (including cyber-bullying) and promote empathy;
“Corporate empathy” is not a contradiction in terms, “CEO” now means “chief empathy officer,” and empathy is now the ultimate “capitalist tool”;
In rhetorical empathy, the speaker’s words address the listening of the audience in such a way as to leave the audience with the experience of having been heard. The speaker articulates the experience the audience is hiding harboring in their hearts yet have been unable to express.
To expand empathy, start with and stick with integrity and authenticity – start with creating a safe space of acceptance and toleration. Fake in; fake out. Empathy is based on integrity and being straight with the other person to and with whom one is trying to relate.
Decline the choice between empathy and compassion, between expanding empathy and fighting and reducing the empire of prejudice, imperialism, the pathologies of capitalism, and violence.
Some have tried to force a choice between compassion and empathy. The world needs both more compassion and expanded empathy.
My colleagues and friends are telling me, “Louis, you are sooo 20th Century – no one is reading hard copy books anymore! Electronic publishing is the way to go.” Following my own guidance about empathy, I have heard you, dear reader. The electronic versions of all three books, Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide, and A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy – drum roll please – are now available.
Feeling like you are thrown “under the bus” again and it’s getting crowded under there? Get the empathy you need to fight back and flourish in this book. Get expanded empathy here!
Order from author’s page: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Order from author’s page: Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Order from author’s page: A Critical Review of Philosophy of Empathy: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
Read a review of the 1st edition of Empathy Lessons – note the list of the Top 30 Empathy Lessons is now (2024) expanded to the Top 40 Empathy Lessons: https://tinyurl.com/yvtwy2w6
Read a review of A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy: https://tinyurl.com/49p6du8p
Above: Cover art: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, illustration by Alex Zonis, original oil paint on board, entitled “Memory blocks: Shimon”
Order from author’s page: A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy: https://tinyurl.com/mfb4xf4f
Above: Cover art: A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy, illustration by Alex Zonis
In conclusion, let me again say a word on behalf of hard copy books – they too live and are handy to take to the beach where they can be read without the risk of sand getting into the hardware, screen glare, and your notes in the margin are easy to access. Is this a great country or what – your choice of pixels or paper!?!
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Top Ten Empathy Trends 2024
This is going to be a tough year—heck, some of these trends were formulated before January 1st, 2024, and it was already a tough year, not having even started! I am sick at heart for the atrocities and killing. I begin the year in grief for all the dead. I am regularly donating blood at the local blood bank, so I bleed in solidarity with the victims and survivors of boundary violations, atrocities, and killings. Based on empathy, I am confident that you, dear reader, will do whatever you can. As Lenin said, “You ask me for a contribution—we’re all doin’ what we can.” Just so there is no misunderstanding—that would be John Lennon. We need a lighter moment, too, amid all the bad news. Meanwhile—I am going with Paul Simon:
“Who says, “Hard times?” / I’m used to them / The speeding planet burns / I’m used to that / My life’s so common it disappears / And sometimes even empathy / Cannot substitute for tears” (1990, “The Cool, Cool River”)
—okay, I substituted the word “empathy” for “music”—but the point is similar.
(10) The first casualty of war is truth—the second is empathy. Empathy has to call for backup. The backup is in the form of radical empathy. In time of war, the power of empathy consists in putting oneself in the shoes of the opponent, thinking like the opponent, and thereby anticipating and thwarting the opponent’s surprise attack. Putting oneself in the opponent’s shoes requires taking off one’s own shoes first. Empathy should never be under-estimated, but empathy requires a safe space of acceptance and tolerance.
Yet, empathic engagement in such predicaments must be limited to cognitive empathy—use critical thinking to try to figure out what the Other is thinking and feeling in order to intervene in a way that is useful according the standards of a humane community. When confronting an aggressor, the empathic approach is to set limits, set boundaries, establish a safe space of one’s own that can be grown to include those willing to join.
The world was on fire last year at this time. The conflagration is spreading. Empathy is one of the few proven methods of deescalating anger and rage—but only if the parties are willing to do so. Empathy is based on creating a safe space of acceptance and tolerance within which the opposing parties can engage with the possibilities for expanding community. Killing everyone in sight and/or signing up for a suicide mission is indeed a solution—but all the evidence is that it is a bad solution. Once someone throws the first stone, or the first bomb, then self-defense, limit setting, drawing boundaries is appropriate. Empathy does not work with psychopaths, certain kinds of autism, most bullies, suicide bombers, totalitarian bureaucrats, and lynch mobs. It is not joke, but especially in the latter cases, call for backup. Many of these individuals will take your affective, emotional empathy and use it against you.
The FBI hostage negotiating team understands that empathy reduces rage and upset; and they use empathy in context for that purpose, though, as far as I know, they do not use the word “empathy” as such. Yet once the bullets start flying, the time for empathy has passed. Send in the swat team. For an illuminating article on the margins of empathy see Elizabeth Bernstein on “Advice From a [FBI] Hostage Negotiator” (WSJ.com 06/14/2020) [https://on.wsj.com/3ajoYon]. Never underestimate the power of empathy. Never.
Though not a new book, Micha Zenko’s Red Team considers the dynamics of thinking like one’s opponent, and it is as timely as it was five years ago.
(9) Radical empathy lands hard, and a grim empathy lesson hits home: If one wants to end a cycle of revenge killings and get peace, one is going to have to negotiate with the people who have killed one’s children and parents. As an analogous case, this grim empathy lesson was expressed by Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin (Oct 13, 2023) during Q&A in her talk, “The Triumph of Counter-Terrorism and the Despair of Human Rights” at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Aoláin draws on the example of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, The Troubles, between 1960 and 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. This had all the characteristics of intractable hatred, perpetrations and human rights violations, the British government making every possible mistake, the Jan 30, 1972 shooting of 26 unarmed civilians by elite British army troopers, internment without trail, members of the Royal Family (Louis Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy of India, and his teenage grandson (27 Aug 1979)) blown up by an IRA bomb, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) launching a mortar at 10 Downing Street (no politicians were hurt, only innocent by-standers), and many tit-for-tat acts of revenge killing of innocent civilians. It is impossible to generalize as every intractable conflict is its own version of hell—no one listens to the suffering humanity—but what was called The Peace Process got traction as all sides in the conflict became exhausted by the killing and committed to moving forward with negotiations in spite of interruptions of the pauses in fighting in order to attain a sustainable cease fire. The relevance to ongoing events in the Middle East will be obvious. An organization widely designated in the West as “terrorist” changes the course of history in the Middle East. Hearts are hardened by the boundary violations, atrocities, and killings. The response requires radical empathy: to empathize in the face of empathic distress, exhausted by all the killing. Though neither the didactic trial in Jerusalem (1961) of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann nor the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995) lived up to their full potentials, they formed parts of processes that presented alternatives to violence and extra judicial revenge killings. In this frame, the survivor is willing to judge if the perpetrator is speaking the truth and expressing what, if any, forgiveness is possible. The radical empathy that empathizes in the face of empathic distress acknowledges that moral trauma includes survivors who are also perpetrators (and vice versa). (See Tutu 1997 in the References for further details.) In a masterpiece of studied ambiguity, radical empathy teaches that two wrongs never make a right; they make at least twice the wrong; and one who sews the wind reaps the whirlwind.
(8) In the USA, librarians are the point of the spear in expanding empathy. Reading teaches one to walk in someone else’s shoes. Reading takes one to worlds that don’t exist, like the world of Harry Potter. One can feel what it was like for Rosa Parks to refuse to sit in the back of that segregated bus in 1955. This trend calls out the convergence of reading and empathy—both open up new worlds, both provide vicarious experiences of the lives of Others, both point to possibilities that had not previously been imagined. In both reading and empathy, we relate to an Other—in the one case in-person, in the other case, in-fiction or the vicarious presentation of historical narrative. Librarians will receive expanded empathy—just not in Florida or similar cultural swamps—but will continue to struggle with unemployment insurance and lost healthcare benefits—empathy for the reader goes into reverse as more books are banned from library shelves (by volume count) than are added to the library inventory. To be sure, parents are responsible for vetting the reading material that their children encounter. According to a Washington Post article, a majority of book ban complaints were filed by eleven (11) people (Hannah Natanson, “Objection to sexual, LGBTQ content propels spike in book challenges,” Washington Post, May 23, 2023 [see shortened URL: https://shorturl.at/hpEHM%5D; see also Reshma Kirpalani and Hannah Natanson, “The lives upended by Florida’s school book wars,” Washington Post, Dec 21, 2023). Your library’s reading list is being dictated by someone whose fears and inhibitions are inspiring her to legislate morality. Never has the power of the word—or magical thinking—been greater—if one says the word “gay,” that calls it forth and gives it reality. Might be worth a try: “Empathy, empathy, empathy!” “Peace on earth, peace on earth, peace on earth!”
(7) Rhetorical empathy emerges as a new practice and the distinction expands. Empathy is generally understood as a listening skill with responses being limited to short speech acts of recognition and acknowledgment, “I get you, man!” Rhetorical empathy refers to empathic responsiveness—speaking into the listening of the person with whom one is attempting to empathize with a form of words that indicates one understands what the Other has experienced. Not just listening, but also speaking empathically. For example, when Abraham Lincoln called in his 2nd Inaugural address to “bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and is orphan,” Lincoln’s rhetorical empathy created a clearing for compassionate action. When Malcolm X said to his African American audience in an example of “out bound,” rhetorical empathy: “You didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth rock landed on you,” the audience felt heard and appreciated in its long suffering and struggle for social justice. The “Amens!” and laughter of knowledge that erupted in the audience were evidence of the accuracy of Malcolm’s empathic responsiveness. Arguably the Parables of Jesus of Nazareth—especially that of the Good Samaritan—are examples of rhetorical empathy—getting inside the experiences of the listeners to overcome their blind spots—in the case of the Good Samaritan of the understanding of who is one’s neighbor—the one who is in need right now. (See Blankenship 2019 in the References for more on rhetorical empathy.)
(6) Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense—about empathy. The trend is to confuse fake empathy and mutilated empathy with the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy, to the latter’s detriment. A cottage industry has grown up of demonstrating the biases and limitations of empathy, and, like any powerful skill, empathy has its strengths and weaknesses. A bold statement of the obvious: empathy can breakdown as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, or understanding getting lost in translation. However, these misfirings of empathy call for training and improving one’s practice of the skill, not giving up on it. That empathy can be parochial and favor the “in group” is properly remedied with expanded empathy and the practice of inclusion. The matter is complex. The practice of including the breakdowns of empathy in empathy’s definition is like invalidating the practice of carpentry because Roman soldiers used hammers and nails in crucifying their victims. A case in point is Alisha Gaines’ Black for a Day (see the detailed review: https://shorturl.at/ozNRU), in its own way an engaging narrative, which, however, presents significant problems. The narrative of Black for a Day consists in describing the cases of several non-fiction narratives of individuals, born Caucasian, who “go under cover,” changing the color of their skin cosmetically and chemically from white to black, in order to “pass” as African American while travelling in the American south (or, in one case, Harlem) in the late 1940s and 1950s (note well the dates!).
According to Black for a Day, these impersonations are supposed to produce empathy between the races and/or in white people for black people, but what they actually produce is “empathic racial impersonation”—that is, fake empathy. This is a subtle and complex point. Black for a Day denounces “empathic racial impersonation,” but what Black for a Day might more usefully be denouncing is fake empathy. Key term: fake empathy (my term, not Gaines’).
These social psychology experiments, “passing” as black, impersonating a black person, provide engaging adventures and misadventures that demonstrate that when one starts out by faking race, solidarity, integrity, relatedness, and empathy as input, then one gets fake race, fake solidarity, fake integrity, fake relatedness, and fake empathy as output. This is not surprising. Fake in; fake out. If one begins with pretense, deception, and inauthenticity as input, then one gets pretence, deception, inauthenticity—and fake empathy—as output. Black for a Day, as indicated, includes a fascinating account of what amounts to social psychology experiments gone bad. White people putting on the equivalent of black face, pretending to be black, is a bold experiment, which, admittedly engaging as a kind of misguided role playing, does not work as intended. As noted, such a mixed result no more invalidates a rigorous and critical empathy than that Roman soldiers invalidate the practice of carpentry by hammering nails into the limbs of the people they were crucifying.
A similar consideration applies to Glenda Carpio’s Migrant Aesthetics and the limits of empathy, which tries to force a choice between fighting against the evils of “empire” (racism, imperialism, the pathologies of capitalism, prejudices of all kinds, and so on) and empathy. (See the complete review at https://shorturl.at/absCQ.) But why force a choice between empire and empathy? Isn’t “empire” the systematic negation of empathy? Don’t we need to reduce the evils of empire and expand empathy? Such a choice must be declined and the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy brought to the struggle against global injustice.
(5) Historical empathy gets new relevance. You, dear reader, really gotta get this—history does repeat itself—a US President was elected to two non-consecutive terms and a popular socialist candidate ran for US President from prison after being convicted of sedition (but was not elected) in 1892 and 1920, respectively. This is an invitation to take an alternative, opposing point of view, regardless of what side you are on in 2024. Grover Cleveland was the only US President (so far!) to be elected twice to two non-consecutive terms (1885/1889, 1893/1897). During his first administration, Cleveland supported the Dawes Act of 1887, which basically legalized the stealing of Native American (Indian) land from the tribes. Shortly after assuming office for the 2nd time, Cleveland called out the US Army as strike breakers to operate the railroad during the Pullman railway strike in 1894 under the pretext of delivering the US Mail. As a historical footnote, the reader may know that the railroad baron, George Pullman, built an ideal “city” on the southside of Chicago for his workers in a utopian moment of flush profits when other capitalists were squeezing workers as hard as they could. This good start came to a violent end in 1894 when railroad revenues plunged in the economic panic of 1893 and workers were laid off—but the Pullmanville rents were not reduced. The President of the Railway Union, Eugene Debs, went on in historical fact to run for President from prison in 1920. Debs was sent to prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing US participation in World War 1. He garnered nearly a million votes for his socialist party while unable to campaign. Heading an oligarchy of monied interests, Cleveland was a model of personal integrity in what was in-effect a fascist dictatorship in which the US Presidency and Congress were dominated by the robber barons of capitalism. A fictionalized account of this period is narrated in Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), which tells of the conflict between the trade union labor movement in the USA and a fictional fascist dictatorship that reads a lot like the Cleveland Presidency. One of Marx’s most relevant observations: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In this case, it was indeed Karl, not Groucho, Marx, though, I submit, worthy of Groucho. Still, democracy (in some version somehow) survived. Previous performance is no guarantee of future results.
(4) Empathy disrupts the patriarchy. The innovations of Simon Baron-Cohen into mind blindness, the ability to take the perspective of the Other (the folk definition of empathy), are well-known, even legendary. In a different context, Baron-Cohen’s research on gender has been influential but controversial. Men and women have different routes to accessing and activating their empathy; they respond to different pressures to conform to (or push back against) what the community defines as conforming to gender-appropriate behavior; and men and women even have different incentives for empathic performance. For example, “…[M]en’s scores on an empathy task equaled women’s when a monetary reward for good performance was offered” (Bluhm 2017: 384). Monetary rewards up; empathy up? Though Bluhm does not say so, the author came away with the distinct impression of a much-needed debunking of the neurohype—what we would now call “alternative facts”—a job well done. Bluhm’s work is especially pertinent in constraining celebrity, executive consultants (once again, my term), running with the neuro-spin, and publishing in the Harvard Business Review, who assert that brain science shows one needs more women executives on corporate boards to expand empathy. I hasten to add that we do indeed need more women executives, but that is not something demonstrated by brain science, at least as of this date (Q4 2023). We need more women executives because it is demonstrated by statistics (just one of many sources of reasons other than brain science) that to devalue their contributions to innovation, service, and productivity of slightly more than half the population is a highly problematic business practice—foolish, inefficient, and wasteful. The challenge is that the practices that make one good at business—beating the competition, engaging technology problems, solving legal disputes—do not necessarily expand one’s empathy, regardless of gender. Empathy under capitalism is an equal opportunity debunker—take a walk in the Other’s shoes in order to sell him or her another pair; treat the workers with respect and dignity in order to sustain commitment to the mission and enhance productivity.
(3) The banality of empathy gives way to a thoughtful rigorous and critical empathy. Namwali Serpall’s “The Banality of Empathy” (2019) provides the entry point. Nice title. Serpall is invoking Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1971), about which it is hard to say just a little. I shall try. One of Arendt’s recurring themes is that evil is a consequence of thoughtlessness. “Enlarged thinking” interrupts thoughtlessness by “trying on” and integrating many diverse points of view. According to Arendt, Eichmann was a simpleton, a “Hans Wurst” from the folktale, who did not think and just followed orders. The wanted-dead-or-alive poster for Thoughlessness has Eichmann’s photo on it. The result of thoughtlessness was catastrophe. Indeed. Of course, Eichmann had many “fellow travelers” in genocide.
If one empathizes thoughtlessly, the banality of empathy of Serpall’s title, then one is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and Arendt, no advocate for sloppy anything, much less sloppy empathy, is halfway, but not all-the-way, there with her invocation of Kant’s rigorous and critical method. The above-cited quotation from Arendt and my analysis of terms must count towards a clarification of the nuances of the matter of empathy.
Serpall’s article then raises the question about narrative art “If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?” Though this may have been intended as a rhetorical question, the answer requires an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Some witnessing of suffering does indeed spark good deeds. The standard Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan when he stops to help the survivor of the robbery thereby creating neighborliness and community; whereas the Levite and Priest succumb to empathic distress and cross the road, thereby expanding indifference and alienation. These events get “narrativized” in the Parable of the same name, which, in turn, inspires some to good deeds, though others are left paralyzed by empathic distress.
(2) In the USA, empathy causes the temperature in politics to cool down. Groups called Braver Angels and the Listening First Coalition are making it a priority to bring the practice empathic listening to hot button political issues and disrupt “false polarization” with empathy—similar to the “empathy circles” (work inspired by Edward Rutsch and thecultureofempathy.com). Such empathy-based conversations are not trying to change participants’ minds about the issues; they are trying to change the participants’ minds about each other. In an account in Aaron Zitner’s WSJ.com article (cited below): “Each party would meet separately at the start and come up with a list of the most common false stereotypes of their group—what they think the other party believes incorrectly about them. Then, they would ask what was true of themselves, instead. Finally, they would ask themselves to acknowledge any kernel of truth to the stereotype. Only then would the two parties meet and discuss how each side sees the other. A central goal was to reduce “false polarization”—the misperception that the people in the other party are more extreme in their views than is true.” If this is not the practice of empathic listening, then I would not know it. As the Wall Street Journal article points out, substantial donor dollars are in play, so this trend has legs. See the shortened URL for Aaron Zitner’s Dec 25, 2023 Wall Street Journal article, “Meet the Americans Trying to Lower the Temperature in Politics”: https://shorturl.at/bBM23.
(1) Empathy “the hard way” results in radical empathy. Empathy “the hard way” means that there is no way of getting to radical empathy except through empathy. For example, one could take a short cut through mind reading, mindfulness, diverse spiritual or religious practices, or chemical interventions such as micro dosing with psilocybin. No doubt all of these and more will be assayed by one thinker or would-be empath or another, and nothing is wrong with that. However, the approach of this work is that the hard work of practicing a rigorous and critical empathy is the path on which radical empathy goes forward. Empathy, whether radical or standard, is at risk of breaking down into empathic distress, misfiring, or failing into the breakdown, or failure of standard empathy with which a would-be radical empathy has to struggle. The short account is that standard empathy encounters a hard case—complex physical and moral trauma, double-binds, tragedy embedded in tragedy (examples are many and not hard to find)—and standard empathy breaks down into empathic distress.
When empathy is practiced by an individual or group that is committed to continuing to empathize in the face of empathic distress, then standard empathy is able to emerge from the refiner’s fire of the breakdown of empathy as radical empathy. This is empathy the hard way. In other words, radical empathy is not a predictable result. As an exercise consider what would empathy “the easy way” look like? What is really needed is a kind of Turing Test for empathy. No, not ChatGPT, though that is a possibility for future research. As a first approximation such a test exists—though it does so in a fictional universe. A masterpiece ahead of its time, Philip K. Dick’s (1928–1982) negative fantasy of the future Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) provides for the Voight-Kampff Empathy test (a fiction within a fiction). Once again, life continues to imitate art. One thinks that nothing like a Philip K. Dick’s Voight-Kampff empathy test ever existed. Think again. Helen Riess, MD, (2018) and her neuroscience colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, have developed a bio-feedback-like set of protocols to train medical doctors and related healthcare professionals in regulating their physiological arousal in contexts relevant to empathy, which context, in medicine, is exactly every encounter with a conscious patient. These protocols and this training are proprietary, intellectual property, and are confidential, so I cannot assess the details. Though I am not sure, it sounds like the trainer puts the little Velcro-cuff on one of the subject’s fingers to measure the galvanic skin response. Galvanic skin response is a blunt instrument and does not distinguish between emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, high spirits, much less subtle states such as envy or indignation, yet it does provide a measure of physiological stimulus and arousal. Useful. Might be worth a try. Never was it truer, if you want to sell something, put the word “neuroscience” on it. That’s empathy “the easy way,” but it’s not empathy. It’s gimmick, but, heck, maybe a gimmick just just what empathy needs in these times of alternative facts and fake everything. However, if one is “suffer[ing] woes which Hope thinks infinte; […] wrongs darker than death or night” and one needs “to defy power, which seems ominipotent,” then empathy “the hard way” is the alternative path – to empathize in the confrontation with empathic distress until empathy creates from its own wreck the empathy it contemplates.
References
Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (tr.). New York: Bantam Books, 1961.
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Robyn Blum. (2017). Gender and empathy. In (2017). The Routledge Handbook of the philosophy of Empathy. Heidi Maibom (ed.). London/New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis).
Brenda Carpio. (2019). Migrant Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Pres. [See separately published review: at https://shorturl.at/absCQ.]
Simon Baron-Cohen. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books (MIT Press), 1997.
______________________. (2003). The Essential Difference: Males, Females, and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books.
______________________. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26]
Alisha Gaines. (2018). Black for a Day. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. [See separately published review: at : https://shorturl.at/ozNRU.]
H. Riess. (2018), The Empathy Effect. Boulder, CO: Sounds True; for details see separately published “Review: The Empathy Effect by Helen Riess”: https://shorturl.at/AFZ36 [checked on 2023/09/12].
Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].
Desmond Tutu. (1997). No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Random House.
Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.
© Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project
Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son
Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son(New York: Harper Perennial 504 pp + end matter)
The varieties of empathy and empathic experiences extend from authentic empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic responsiveness, all the way to fake empathy and mutilated empathy. Wright’s novel, Native Son, provides abundant examples of how empathy breaks down into emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications getting lost in translation. Of course, once empathy breaks down and fails, strictly speaking, it is no longer empathy and calls for a response to “clean up” the misunderstanding out of which a rigorous and critical empathy is restored and reestablished. Nevertheless, the varieties of empathically related phenomena that are constellated makes Wright’s classic work a study in empathy in all its diverse forms.
Native Son is as powerful and timely as it was when Richard Wright first published it in 1940. Though it has aspects of tragedy and traffics in ruin and wreck, in the final analysis, it has as much in common with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as it does with ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.
The novel has not changed since 1940, but the world has – becoming both better and worse. To open up the reader’s historical empathy, a background report will be useful and is provided. This report also provides a chapter in African American history. The engagement with Native Son will be interspersed in this review with historical details that bring to life the power of the story in ways that might not be appreciated without a firm historical grounding. This is not a digression but of the essence, lest we forget how far we have come, and how far we still have to go to expand empathy and attain social justice.
The world has become better in that the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus the Board of Education (1954) that separate, segregated education in grammar and high schools is inherently
unequal. That is worth repeating: Separate but equal is inherently unequal. The world has become better in that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (1965/1965) were passed by a super majority of Congress. These outlawed segregation by law, also called “Jim Crow”; these enabled county and congressional districts in the South (or anywhere) with majority black populations to register to vote and elect black sheriffs and local officials. Why could they not do so previously? There were discriminatory poll taxes, which the impoverished people could not afford to pay; there were written tests (including trick questions) which people who lacked reading skills or merely had a grammar school education were unable to pass; there were other bureaucratic obstacles including the need to present state issued documents that were hard to obtain, putting the would-be voter in a double bind. One hastens to add that the struggle for social and political justice continues, with the US Supreme Court (2023) requiring Alabama and Georgia to redraw their gerrymandered congressional districts to allow for majority black districts. Under backward steps, the so-called “war on drugs” – espoused by Nancy Reagan and implemented by the Clinton administration, resulted in the incarceration (still ongoing) of a generation of young black men for relatively victimless crimes involving using crack cocaine.
Meanwhile, schools of all kinds continue to be under stress because of mass casualty gun violence. Teaching is a tough job, especially elementary and middle schools and it has gotten tougher; the bureaucratic requirements to present politically correct curriculum has pushed out fundamental skills of critical thinking along with skills such as the three R-s – reading, writing and (a)rithmetic. These have been replaced by the need for librarians and administrators to act in the role of surveillance state capitalism (see Zuboff 2018), overseeing whether some text refers to “gay,” “trans,” the name of a sex organ, and so on, and that someone – especially a parent – might be made to feel uncomfortable. To be sure, parents and educators need to be sensitive to the stages of child development and present material that fits the stage at which the growing child is maturing.
While Jim Crow is a historical reference and black empowerment is advancing, at times haltingly, the number of unarmed black people who end up dead after encounters with the local police has astonished everyone – everyone except black people who have known all about it all along. Today the number of black CEOs of major corporations is some 5.9 % out of an overall black population of 13.6% (US Census). That is progress since 1940 when Wright’s work was published, at which time the percentage was essentially zero. Johnson Publications, the publisher of Ebony magazine (among others), would not be founded until 1942. Yet a case can be made that, though many of the social and legal details are different, the need for struggle and protest is as powerful today as it was in 1940. We are not living in a post racial society, notwithstanding fact of having had a black president. All this and more may usefully inform our reading of Native Son.
Now to the narrative. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas (henceforth referred to as “BT”), completes the 8thgrade. He is too poor to continue school, nor is he motivated to do so. He experiences segregation and prejudice wherever he turns, as indeed do all black people. BT says, “Hell, it’s a Jim Crow army. All they want a black man for is to dig ditches. And in the navy, all I can do is wash dishes and scrub floors” (1940: 353). BT is not allowed to become a pilot or a tank driver or a professional. “I wanted to be an aviator once. But they wouldn’t let me go to the school where I was suppose’ to learn it. They built a big school and then drew a line around it and said that nobody could go to it but those who lived within the line. That kept all the colored boys out” (1940: 353). It is true there were a few exceptions – some black people go to college and become doctors, lawyers, or engineers, though how they pulled that off is not for the faint of heart.
However, basically, the form of life under segregation (Jim Crow) does not just lack possibility – the possibility of possibility itself is missing. Possibility is not even defined. What does that mean? For example, as soon as Barak Obama was elected US President, the media went to middle schools and interviewed black ten-year-old children about what they wanted to be when they grew up. They immediately knew they wanted to be President. Now this little different than wanting to be a cowboy or a fireman or a doctor, a child’s fantasy. The point is that prior to Obama’s election the possibility could not even be imagined by black children, excepting perhaps some weird science fiction scenario. That is what is meant by the possibility of possibility. BT lacks the possibility of possibility.
What happens in the narrative after BT serendipitously gets a “good job” as a chauffeur with a wealthy white family, shows that BT still does not “get” – understand or experience – the possibility of possibility. BT is so constantly in survival mode that, in trying to survive, he does the very thing that causes his tragic undoing. It is a well-known stereotype that whenever a black man is lynched or otherwise “taken down” socially, he is initially accused of assaulting or trying sexually to molest a white woman.
Who Is BT as a person and as a possibility at the start of the story? He is bully and a petty criminal. Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X, was eleven years old when Wright began working on Native Son in 1936. Both BT and Malcolm, each in their own way, started out as petty criminals. Malcolm was arrested and went to prison. Malcom was the only person I ever heard of who said that prison made him better – indeed saved his life – because he met a follower of a version of strict Islam that enabled him to turn his life around, channeling his intelligence and leadership skills into black empowerment (though, ultimately, it also eventually led to his undoing in a tragedy of betrayal).
Meanwhile, in Native Son, Mary Dalton is the young adult daughter of the wealthy Henry Dalton, who has given some $5 million dollars to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) while continuing to operate inner city slums overcrowded with blacks who are unable to rent or buy in other neighborhoods due to red lining and restrictive covenants (contracts) that prevent selling to black people. Moral ambiguities and flat-out hypocrisy are front and center. Henry’s wife is blind – she cannot see – and walks about the mansion dressed in white like a ghost. Everyone else in the novel – black and white – can see well enough – are visually unimpaired – but have blind-spots and unconscious biases sufficient to sink the Titanic. They do. Full speed ahead into the field of ice bergs!
Mary is an undergraduate at the local university near their mansion on Drexel Blvd. As a part of her late adolescent rebellion, she goes for the kind of boyfriends most calculated to shock her parents. She likes those “bad boys.” In this case, that would be the left wing radical and card carrying communist, Jan. On background, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – Sacco and Vanzetti – were executed in the electric chair in 1927 for being anarchists, amid anti-Italian and anti-immigrant hysteria, not for the robbery and murder of which they were convicted and did not commit.
Wright was authoring at a time (circa 1936) when the Great Depression was still very much an economic reality. The Mayor was a machine boss, who would respond to crime waves by rounding up Communists and Negros. The Governor would call out the National Guard to put down workers who tried to form a union and go out on strike. The blacklisting of workers, both white and black (but mostly white because the blacks did not have jobs), who attempted to form unions was common, which meant they could not find work. Corporations stockpiled tear gas, vomit gas, ammunition and machine guns for armed strike breakers to use against railroad, steel, and manufacturing workers who dared to go out on strike. The National Labor Relations Board was not even validated by the US Supreme Court until 1937 in NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1 (1937). The forty-hour work week did not become law until the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first enacted in 1938 under President Roosevelt’s New Deal.
This was a different world from 2023 and being a “Communist” meant something different than it does today, when, in the wake of the success of the trade union movement, much of what the original movement sought to accomplish (such as the 40 hour work week, sick leave, paid overtime, etc.) is part of standard legal labor law practice, rendering The Party irrelevant. Nevertheless, Mary and her boyfriend, Jan, a committed Communist, saw a common cause between the oppressed workers and the oppressed black people, and in this they were accurate enough, but naïve and idealistic, even utopian, in what it was going to take to make a difference.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions – and fake empathy. The privileged daughter, Mary, of the wealthy real estate tycoon (Mr Dalton), wants something from her new chauffeur. Remember, BT has just got a new, good paying job as the chauffeur. Mary wants him (BT) to ignore orders from her father, BT’s employer, and drive her around town with her boyfriend instead of to the University. Mary uses him (BT) as she would any extension of her own self-interest. For Mary, BT is an extension of her narcissism. BT later reports on his first encounter with Mary:
“She acted and talked in a way that made me [BT] hate her [Mary]. She made me feel like a dog. I was so mad I wanted to cry [. . . .] Mr Max, we’re all split up. What you say is kind ain’t kind at all. I didn’t know nothing about that woman. All I knew was that they kill us for women like that. We live apart. And then she comes and acts like that to me” (1940: 35).
The “acted like that” is the fake empathy – it seems kind enough on the surface in that the language does not have any devaluing words; yet there is a subtext – a soft violence, a quiet aggression, a conversational implicature that wrappers the relationship in BT’s subordination. “Acted like that” may also have a seductive aspect to it in that “being nice” in a situation where “no contact” is the norm may easily be misinterpreted as romantic flirting. The latter is not explicit in the text, but one thing is clear: BT and Mary Dalton really are the moth and the flame. Naivete and innocence are abundant on all sides. The moth has an automatic, hypnotic-like attraction to the flame. Little does the moth know what awaits. Does the flame have empathy for the moth? No, the flame is just the flame, towards which the moth has a luminously-based incentive that is its incineration. On background, the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Loving v Virginia in 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws, prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks (among others), were unconstitutional.
BT has survived on the street among white people by saying “Yessum; it’s all right with me” (1940: 64) and doing as he is told, and (in effect) justifying it by saying he was following orders. Recall, this is 1938 and that statement will come to have a different meaning in 1963 as Hannah Arendt reports for The New Yorker magazine on the trial of one Adolph Eichmann, who said something similar regarding the Holocaust. “I was just following orders.” There is nothing wrong with a chauffeur following orders, yet, in this case, “following orders” from Mary because she is white is an integrity outage in relation to his employment agreement with Mr Dalton to drive Mary to school. BT’s relationship to his word is as “fast and loose” as a rabbit randomly zig-zagging to try to survive by escaping a predatory fox.
Mary tells him “After all, I’m on your side” (1940: 64), and BT was not even aware of the possibility that changing side was imaginable – that there was a gate in the wall between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, employed and unemployed – mostly white and black. BT is getting $25 dollars a week and a pound of pork chops costs 5 cents ($.05), so that is a good wage. BT is in touch with his own self-interest, which is to keep his job so he can help himself and his mother and siblings. Yet something is off:
“Now, what did that mean? She was on his side. What side was he on? Did she mean that she liked colored people? Well, he [BT] had heard that about her whole family. Was she really crazy? How much did her folks know of how she acted? But if she were really crazy, why did Mr Dalton let him drive her out? [….]
“She was an odd girl, all right. He [BT] felt something in her over and above the fear she inspired in him. She responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she. And he had never felt that before in a white person. But why? Was this some kind of a game? The guarded feeling of freedom he had while listening to her was tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do” (1940: 64, 65).
If someone tells you something that is too good to be true, it probably is. The ancient Greeks besieging Troy give up, sail off, and leave behind a giant horse as a gift to the gods. Casandra throws a spear at it, and it makes a hollow sound – thwomp! “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!” No one believes her. Things do not work out well for the Trojans. “After all, I’m on your side.” The blind Mrs Dalton, walking around the mansion in her ghostly white gown, is the ineffective prophet, representing the blindness of all the players.
“Fake empathy” is defined here as a form of empathic responsiveness in which the person(s) claiming to be empathic towards the Other believe their own BS (bunkum, baloney, balderdash), endorse their own malarky, and, in effect, are sincerely self-deceived about the conflict of interest in which they are engaged. In another context, “fake empathy” could mean being intentionally deceptive as when a used car salesman knows the auto is defective but represents it as being in excellent shape. In most cases, the problematic sales person believes his or her own lies and could pass a lie detector test, which, of course, does not detect lies, but merely physiological arousal due to the stress of trying to deceive.
Mary wants BT to hide the facts from her father (that she is not gong to night school but out on the town with her “bad boy” community friend Jan). This puts BT at risk of losing his job. Mary acts in such a way as to claim to be on BT’s side, which is accurate enough in that she endorses racial integration and rights for workers, while seemingly remaining uninformed about the monopoly rents collected from black people by her father’s South Side Real Estate Corporation. Yet how could she not know? Another blind spot. More deception and self-deception.
If a further example is needed, Mary’s fake empathy continues as an expression of naivete and projection:
“You know, Bigger [BT], I’ve long wanted to go into these houses,” she said, pointing to the tall, dark apartment buildings looming to either side of them, “and just see how your people live. You know what I mean? I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro house. Yet they must live like we live. They’re human . . . . There are twelve million of them . . . ” (1940: 69–70; italics and ellipsis in the original)
In so far as Mary genuinely cares about her black neighbors, this is a first step, born of good, caring intentions. However, Mary’s privilege, naivete, and arrogance (this list is not complete) are obstacles to her empathy. Her empathy misfires as projection. Mary speaks to BT in the third person about the group of which he himself is a part. The condescension is so thick that BT’s street knife would not cut through it had he even thought to try. Mary says, “Yet they [black people] must live like we live,” and that is definitely not the case. BT lives with his mother and two younger siblings in a single room. The opening scene of the novel involves a battle with a large rat in the small single room. Thus, the building is rat infested. Mary lives in a mansion with multiple servants, including BT. Mary tries to take a walk in BT’s shoes, shifting points of view, but it does not work. She is unable to take off her own shoes, so to speak – she can only imagine a glamorous life of travel – and her empathic imagination is insufficient to have a vicarious experience of the grinding, dehumanizing, poverty of her black neighbors, which poverty lives in her blind spot.
In contrast to fake empathy, a rigorous and critical empathy examines its own blind spots, projections, and conflicts of interests. It knows that it can be inaccurate or misfire. By cleaning up its conflicts of interests, projections, emotional contagions, and/or messages lost in translation, empathy becomes critical and rigorous. Unfortunately, Mary does not live to have the opportunity to work through her fake empathy to a rigorous and critical one, and BT experiences this dawning realization as he awaits execution for killing her.
The reader may say, I want instant empathy. Like instant coffee, just add water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice? Nor is anyone saying such a thing as “instant empathy” is impossible. It may work well enough in a pinch; but like instant coffee, the quality may not be on a par with that required by a more demanding or discriminating appreciation and taste.
Jan’s case is similar to Mary’s though more nuanced. Jan wants something from BT as does Mary, but Jan’s agenda is less individual and, as befits a Communist, guided by an analysis of class. Yet he is equally naïve and utopian. Driving along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which offers a panoramic view of the tall buildings in the central city from the South Side, Jan remarks:
“We’ll own all that some day, Bigger,” Jan said with a wave of his hand. “After the revolution it’ll be ours. But we’ll have to fight for it. What a world to win, Bigger! And when that day comes, things’ll be different. There’ll be no white and no black; there’ll be no rich and no poor” (1940: 68).
Jan’s innocence can be measured in that he is not even a very good Communist – his economic analysis is badly flawed. Jan talks as if the Communist revolution will change ownership from the capitalist to the communists whereas any Communist will tell you that the revolution will bring about the abolition of private property. Yet even if he is not a good Communist, Jan is a good human being. His righteous indignation is functioning. Learning that BT’s father was killed in a riot (read “massacre”) targeting black people in the South, Jan says to BT:
“Listen, Bigger, that’s what we want to stop. That’s what we Communists are fighting. We want to stop people from treating others that way. I’m a member of the Party. Mary sympathizes. Don’t you think if we got together we could stop things like that?” [….] You’ve heard about the Scottsboro boys?” (1940: 75; quotations and italics in the original)
On back ground, in 1931 eight black young adults and one juvenile, The Scottsboro Boys, were falsely accused of raping two women. After examination by a medical doctor, no evidence of rape was found. None. The testimony of the women themselves was coerced in that they were involved in sketchy activities that might have opened them up to criminal charges. The young men were tried by an all-white male jury for rape and sentenced to death for it (except for the juvenile, who was sentenced to life in prison). The NAACP and the Communist Party provided legal assistance to the young men and stopped the State from executing them; but they had to endure long and unjust years in prison. The novel calls out the newspaper headline in bold type in referring to BT:
“AUTHORITIES HINT SEX CRIME. Those words excluded him [BT] utterly from the world. To hint that he had committed a sex crime was to pronounce the death sentence; it meant wiping out of his life even before he was capture; it meant death before death came, for the white men who read those words would at once kill him in their hearts” (1940: 243).
BT’s life unfolds in three phases. Phase 1 lasts until, BT puts a pillow over the face of an intoxicated Mary Dalston, in trying to keep Mary from crying out and giving away that he (a black man) is alone with a white woman, even more “incriminating,” in her bedroom. At best he will lose his job – before being lynched for “rape.” The latter is here defined as the white man’s projected fantasy of the black man’s sexual attraction to and on the part of the white woman, which fantasy must be eliminated by lynching the innocent black man. (See the appendix on the varieties of prejudice below.)
What actually happens when BT is left alone with Mary Dalton, who is completely drunk? Mary is sloppy drunk, and can barely stand. BT tries to help her to her bedroom – by supporting her up the stairs. Practically, he has to carry her. Mary’s blind mother, Mrs Dalton, an insomniac, is wandering about the mansion like a ghost. The reader can see trouble coming – suppose they are discovered together in the dark in or near the bedroom? BT tries to explain to his girlfriend Betsy what happened:
“I didn’t mean to kill her. I just pulled the pillow over her face and she died. Her ma came into the room and the girl was trying to say something and her ma had her hands stretched out, like this, see? [The mother, Mrs Dalton, is blind and could not see BT.] I was scared she was goin’ to touch me. I just sort of pushed the pillow hard over the girl’s face to keep her from yelling. He ma didn’t touch me; I got out of the way. But when she left I went to the bed and the girl … She … She was dead” (1940: 227; italics in the original).
This decisive event happens early on in the story. The reader can see it coming. Mary is drunk. BT is uncertain what to do. Mr Dalton did not clarify to the new chauffeur (who is an extension of the auto) that the “boss” is Mr Dalton, who seems to have a blind spot about his angelic daughter’s rebellious streak. The unconscious fantasy, the unconscious bias, is that a black man alone with a white woman, much less an intoxicated one, is the equivalent of statutory rape. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense move the action forward. Every action that BT takes to avoid the false accusation advances the action in the direction of an even more tragic outcome. BT ends up smothering Mary in order to avoid being discovered with her and being falsely accused of rape (which, of course, will get one lynched). In BT’s conversation with his attorney, Mr Max, BT muses:
“They would say he had raped her and there would be no way to prove that he had not. That fact had not assumed important in his eyes until now. He stood up, his jaws tightening. Had he raped her? Yes, he had raped her [but, of course, not literally]. Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a well and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape very time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too was rape.” (1940: 227 – 228)
BT’s lawyer (Mr Max) tells the judge at BT’s trial:
“…[T]hat night a white girl was present in a bed and a Negro was standing over he, fascinated with fear, hating her; a blind woman walked into the room and that Negro [BT] killed that girl to keep from being discovered in a position which he knew we claimed warrants the death penalty” (1940: 400).
The being present together in the bedroom of the black chauffeur and the drunken white college age daughter is in 1940 already a capital crime for all intents and purposes. Here” rape” becomes a cipher for all the boundary violations perpetrated by survivors of perpetrations of survivors of perpetrations, and so on, in a seemingly endless cycle back to the Atlantic slave trade (which does not come up in the novel). Two wrongs do not make a right, and yet it is BT’s ownership of the crime that gives him agency, even if that agency is mutilated by the crime that calls it forth.
In Phase 2, BT lives into the devaluing expectations that white people have of him – he becomes a kind of Frankenstein – not just a monster but one created by white society, which monster seeks to strike back for the perceived injustice but goes about it in all the wrong ways that indirectly validate the stereotypes that live in white fantasy. James Baldwin has criticized Wright for writing a protest novel in which black people are depicted as dangerous – sexually and aggressively – in a way that maps to white racist stereotypes. And there is truth to it, yet at every step, Wright’s exaggerated “black badness” calls forth the unexaggerated social and legal injustices of discrimination in the North and Jim Crow in the South. Once again, two wrongs do not make a right. Two wrong make a bad situation worse – and at least twice the wrong. Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone; and, in this case, shame does not stop the stones from flying. Once the stones start flying, no one is spared. Wright makes it clear that BT is caught in the double bind of his own untutored judgment and the incoming pervasive slow violence (and fast aggression) of white society’s segregationist limitations.
In Phase 2, BT descends into hell in a particular sense. It is a kind of mutilated journey of the hero (think of Joseph Campbell’s mythologizing (1990)) on the way to a rebirth of agency, however, with one key difference. BT had not yet been born as a responsible agent, so, instead of “rebirth,” it would be better to say “birth,” born for the first time ever. The definition of hell includes an abundance of pain and suffering, to be sure, but the real hell is that no one hears it – not even God. This is BT’s description:
“[…[T]here were screams and curses and yells of suffering and nobody hears them, for the walls were thick and darkness was everywhere” (1940: 361).
This is BT’s experience of hell as he is locked up in Cook County Jail awaiting his fate. There is no evidence that Wright ever read Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus(or vice versa) or Mephistopheles’ description of hell contained in it. Wright was writing just as World War 2 was starting; Mann, perennially and a few years afterwards as Europe was a smoking ruin that still stank of the crematoriums of the Nazi concentration camps. Note well the above-cited quote is Wright not Mann, and it was written seven years before Mann penned his own description of hell. In a fine literary gesture, in {Mann’s) Mephistopheles’ description of Hell, words are used indirectly to describe the indescribable. In Hell –
“Every compassion, every grace, every sparing, every last trace of consideration for the incredulous, imploring objection ‘that you verily cannot do so unto a soul’: it is done, it happens, and indeed without being called to any reckoning in words; in soundless cellar, far down beneath God’s listening […]” (Mann 1947: 245).
The key aspect of hell – what makes a hell into Hell – is not the fire and ice – though, to be sure, that is not to be dismissed – but the hellish thing is that no one is listening, not even God, especially not God. BT’s fate indeed, though a spark of what might be called radical hope (Lear 2008) emerges when BT meets Mr Max. Mr Max is a “Clarence Darrow for the defense” type lawyer, who is retained for BT by the Communist Party. They are trying to find a common cause between exploited works and the black victims and survivors of racial prejudice, poverty, and social injustice.
In phase three, BT discovers his agency in taking ownership of the quasi-accidental killing of Mary. But this is a very qualified (re)birth in that agency is shot through-and-through with moral trauma. BT is asked to make a choice he should not have to make; that, strictly speaking, he cannot make; and that, in any case, he inevitably makes whether he takes action or not, since doing nothing is also an action. BT enters Mary’s room as a survivor of systematic racism and Jim Crow. He tries to survive the encounter with Mary’s blind mother. He takes an action to prevent being discovered alone with a drunken white woman, and in doing so he unwittingly smothers her with a pillow to prevent her from talking drunken nonsense. BT enters the room a survivor, and leaves it as a perpetrator. That is moral trauma (also called moral injury” (Shay 2014)).
In phase three, BT becomes a kind of Frankenstein and chooses the dark side (in the Star War’s sense – already the language is impossible). Recall that in the original Mary Shelley story, Victor Frankenstein rejects the creature that he assembled out of spare body parts and animated using electricity (electricity being a not-well-understood phenomenon at the time (1808) to which quasi-magical powers were attributed). Dr Frankenstein’s creature is lonely and wants a mate, in effect, a girl friend; but the “mad scientist” cannot countenance creating another such physically hideous creature, thereby, giving birth to an entire race of miscreants. At that point the creature has a kind of Richard III moment – “since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / and hate [. . . ]” Though it changes the meaning of the sentence to stop it mid-phrase, “hate” is the active ingredient here. He becomes a monster, exacting his revenges by murdering members of Victor Frankenstein’s family. Likewise with BT.
Though all the details are different, BT’s fate follows a parallel trajectory at this point with hatred simultaneously providing the dehumanizing and humanizing element. Hate is also the principle that animates BT’s emergence into agency, albeit a mutilated one, since it occurs on death row.
Until BT committed the first murder, he was little different than the biblical Cain before he slew Abel. Human history begins at the point at which that murder, born of envy, occurs. The murder creates agency. Likewise with BT:
But, after he murdered, he [BT] accepted the crime. And that’s the important thing. It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight [. . . .] It was an act of creation! (1940: 396, 400)
In the beginning was the word – murder. Murder results in one thing for sure – more murder. “The surest way to make certain that there will be more such murders is to kill this boy [BT]” (1940: 391).
Now one may well say, there’s gotta be a better way to get one’s agency, and that would be an accurate statement.
An argument can be made that Mr. Max’s rejection of sympathy in favor of empathy serves the reader well. But does it serve BT well? In terms of saving BT’s life, it would be better to question his agency, to make a play for sympathy, and to point to poverty, cognitive limitations, and a limited IQ. Insult BT, but save his life? Max asks:
“Is love possible to the life of a man I’ve described to this Court?” (1940: 401)
The ability to love, to experience empathy for an Other, has been negated, annulled, killed, by the systematic racism of the entire community – this is soul murder. The short definition of soul murder (a distinction arguably implicit in Wright) is that it is the systematic lack of empathy that destroys the possibility of love, that destroys the very possibility of possibility.
Max’s Jeremiad raises the text to the level of an early articulation of the key theses of the 1619 project (see Hannah-Jones 2019). Max argues to the court that BT is in so many double binds, that his agency is compromised, his empathy is mutilated, by soul murder. (For a sustained treatment of soul murder see Shengold 1989.)
“But in conquering they [the early American settlers] used others, used their lives. Like a miner using a pick or a carpenter using a saw, they bent the will of others to their own. Lives to them were tools and weapons to be wielded against a hostile land and climate.”
Given that BT was convicted by an all-white jury and the Governor, to whom an appeal for clemency was to be made, was a known racist, one might say Max was like Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry undertaking a full frontal assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner – it was a massacre:
“I do not say this in terms of moral condemnation. I do not say it to rouse pity in your for the black men who were slaves for two and one-half centuries [. . . .] It was the imperial dream of a feudal age that made men enslave others” (1940: 389)
Once again, Mr Max eloquently anticipates the 1619 project (Hannah-Jones 2019):
“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country [….] Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life [….] What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst” (1940: 391).
“Men once oppressed our forefathers to the extent that they viewed other men as material out of which to build a nation; we in turn have oppressed others to such a degree that they, fumblingly as yet, try to construct meaningful lives out of us!” (1940: 398).
“The hate and fear which we have inspired in him [BT], woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness, into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality, have become the justification of his existence” (1940: 400).
This is again an early version and invocation of the ideas that would become the 1619 project. One result of systematic oppression, not just the loss of possibility, but the loss of the possibility of possibility. If one cannot get a job, then that is the loss of possibility; but if one needs and cannot get a work permit, then that is the loss of the possibility of possibility.
Max does not ask for sympathy for BT. Sympathy results in guilt, and people hate those who make them feel guilty, enacting aggression against them. Max asks for empathy, without, however, using the word, which, if granted, would result in community, in belonging, in relatedness. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, people will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 390) and sympathy does precisely that. Max address the court:
“If I should say that he [BT] is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate.”
[Max continues] “Of all things, men to not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but failing that […] they will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 389–390)
BT’s act of murder becomes a cause célèbre in the narrative. The NAACP and the Communist Party get BT a powerful attorney, Mr Max, who resembles the historical Clarence Darrow, taking on unpopular causes.
On background, the reader recognizes historical aspects of the Leopold/Loeb (1924) trial in which two wealthy, privileged University of Chicago students engage in a “thrill killing” of 14-year-old Bobby Franks for no good reason other than the killing itself. The perpetrators had near-delusional fantasies of über-man cognitive superiority and committing the perfect crime. Things do not go well. Leopold drops his reading glasses at the location where the victim’s body is dumped, connecting him to the crime scene. The dumbest mistake possible – and just possibly a “Freudian” slip. So much for cognitive superiority. Their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, engages in a 12-hour presentation at the sentencing hearing, in which, with a penetrating critique of capital punishment, Darrow successfully saves the 18- and 19-year-old murderers from the death penalty (Stone 1971). Darrow’s arguments are still used to today to defend teenage offenders. On background, Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936. Leopold was paroled in 1958.
Less well known is the case of Robert Nixon, who in May 1938 was arrested for murdering a woman with a brick in the course of robbing her apartment (1940: 504; 455 line 17). Nixon was poor and black – was not defended by Clarence Darrow, and was executed in August 1939.
Mr Max talks to BT like a Mensch, like a fellow human being, asking about what he (BT) thought had happened. Max asks a lot of questions, trying to get a sense of what BT had to survive and what motivated him to do what he did.
“Bigger [BT] knew that Max was trying to make him feel that he accepted the way he looked at things and it made him as self-conscious as when Jan had taken his hand and shaken it that night in the car. It made him live again in that hard and sharp consciousness of his color and feel the shame and fear that went with it, and at the same time it made him hate himself for feeling it. He trusted Max” (1940: 346–347)
BT gets in touch with his feelings. Max asks him if he raped Mary. The answer:
“Naw. But everybody’ll say I did. What’s the use? I’m black. They say black men do that. So it don’t matter if I did or if I didn’t” [ . . . .] Mr Max, when folks says things like that about you, you whipped before you born. What’s the use? Yeah; I reckon I was feeling that way [hating Mary] when I was in the room with her. They say we do things like that and they say it to kill us. They draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line. They don’t care if there’s no bread over on your side. They don’t care if you die. And they say things like that about you and when you try to come from behind your line they kill you” (1940: 349, 351).
BT is coming from a life of no possibility – no personal space, no (limited) education, no career, no respect from the community, no self-respect – and living into an imminent future of capital punishment, the electric chair: “Over and over he [BT] had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed” (1940: 345).
“He [BT] breathed softly, wondering about the cool breath of peace that hovered in his body. It was as though he was trying to listen to the beat of his own heart. All around him was darkness and there were no sounds. He could not remember when he had felt as relaxed as this before. He has not thought of it or felt it while Max was speaking to him; it was not until after Max had gone that he discovered that he had spoken to Max as he had never spoken to anyone in his life; not even to himself. And this talking had eased from his shoulders a heavy burden. [….] Max had not compelled him to talk; he had talked of his own accord […] by a curiosity about his own feelings. Max had only sat and listened, had only asked questions” (1940: 359 – 360).
Max gives BT a good listening – gives him empathy – and BT feels “better” – the “heavy burden” is lifted from his shoulders.. His hatred gets dialed down, though not completely extinguished. His inner conflict and hatred are lessened, even as he knows he is not going to get out alive from his self-made predicament:
Max validates BT’s perspective of “no possibility” in a description that also validates how whites are also entangled in systematic racism that lives in unconscious bias, albeit with less harmful effects on whites than blacks:
“And I know that almost every white face you’ve met in your life had it in for you, even when that white face didn’t know it. Every white man considered it his duty to make a black man keep his distance. He doesn’t know why most of the time, but he acts that way” (1940: 346).
In acknowledging how hopeless is the situation, something shifts in BT.
So far BT gets empathic receptivity – another person, Max, is able to take his point of view and have a vicarious experience of how he (BT) feels. In conversation with Max, BT comes to appreciate a new possibility – an empathic possibility. The Other – in this case Max – brings forth the BT’s own humanness, mutilated though it is, by taking the Other’s perspective.
“He [BT] stood up in the middle of the cell floor and tried to see himself in relation to other men, and thing he had always feared to try to do, so deeply stained was his own mind with the hate of others for him. With this new sense of the value of himself gained from Max’s talk, a sense fleeting and obscure, he tried to feel that if Max had been able to see the man in him beneath those wild and cruel acts of his, acts of fear and hate and murder and flight and despair, then he too would have, if he were they, just as now he was hating them and they were hating him. For the first time in his life he felt ground beneath his feet [. . .]” (1940: 361).
BT experiences the emerging ability to “see himself in relation to other men [persons].” Being related to others requires the distinction “self-Other,” open up the possibility of the Other taking a point of view on oneself. This is what Max did for BT in seeing “the man in him [BT] beneath those wild and cruel acts of fear and hate.” If Max can be related to BT, it demonstrates to BT that he can do that for himself and for and with Others, too.
“If he [BT] reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through those stone walls and felt other hands connected with other heart – if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock? Not that he wanted those hearts to turn their warmth to him; he was not wanting that much. But just to know that they were there and warm! [. . . .] And in that touch, response of recognition, there would be union, identity’ there would be a supporting oneness, a wholeness which had been denied him all this life” (1940: 362).
What makes the hands come alive in this image of electrical connection and the shock of the human is precisely “the response of recognition,” which brings strength, energy, and vitality to the human heart. This is the empathic moment for BT, which, however, arrives late in the day as he awaits almost certain execution for his crimes.
Thus, the accusation of early critics (and James Baldwin) against Wright of didacticism and protest literature. Perhaps in our own time, but before the racist jury, judge, mayor, and governor, Max makes the best of a bad situation. The result?
BT gets his vitality and aliveness from the Other, in this case Max. Max is able to “see the man in him” and BT, in turn, is able to see that Max sees the man in him (BT), and that grounds him (BT). The Other brings forth empathy for the one, who, in this example, is trying to see himself in relation to other men. A new possibility opens up – the possibility of possibility – relatedness, connectedness – empathy.
Appendix: A Short “Ted Talk” on the Varieties of Prejudice
One may say, prejudice is prejudice and all prejudices are alike, and there would be truth to saying that. Yet when one looks at the dynamics of prejudice, one cannot simply substitute the underlying dynamics of racism against black people for antisemitism or sexism or for homophobia. A short “Ted Talk” on prejudice will again inform our historical empathy.
The fantasy of black hyper masculinity is repressed as a source of anxiety challenging the white male’s (imagined) inadequate sexual potency. It then gets reversed and projected onto the devalued other, who comes at the white man as white woman’s desire for the stereotyped hyper sexed black man. Elisabeth Young-Breuhl (1996: 367) writes in The Anatomy of Prejudices:
The white male’s mythological contractions of black male sexuality – the images of Negro phallic power, animal lust, and rapaciousness – signal the jealousy and resentment over the black’s defilement pleasure, and they also reflect the white male’s anxiety that white women really desire the black’s aggressive sexuality.
In contrast to the hysterical fantasy of the over-dramatized black male, the Jewish person is made the target of an obsessional paranoid over-intellectualization – the totally fictional worldwide conspiracy of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense. The nonsense continues: In the case of homophobia, one stays with the dynamic of difference for one has to project that, in a certain sense, the boy finds other boys attractive, in that special sexual way, and must defend against being a “fag” by perpetrating acts of aggression. Nor should the sexism and misogyny be overlooked, for BT kills two women – Mary and Bessie – in the one case quasi-accidently and in the other in a cowardly fear of betrayal. In the case of the prejudices of racism (in the narrow sense against blacks) and antisemitism the devalued, despised Other becomes the target of projections one of own inner black and jew in every imaginable positive and negative sense. The differences collapse – inwardly I am the despised Other and get rid of the negative value by externalizing it. In sexism, the dynamic changes, and the anatomical difference between the sexes is such that the difference is impossible to deny, so the Other must be denied, deleted, “killed,” in order to reestablish integrity of the self. In the prejudices stereotype, the Other – the woman in this case – is hated for being inferior cognitively, physically, and so, even as the male harbors an unconscious fantasy of superiority, the power to create life, womb envy.
References
Joseph Campbell. (1990). The Hero’s Journey. Novato, CA: The New World Library.
Nicole Hannah-Jones. (2019). The 1619 Project. New York: One World (NYT Magazine).
Jonathan Lear. (2008). Radical Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Thomas Mann. (1947). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090
Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.
Irving Stone (1971). Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Signet.
Richard Wright. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper Perenniel, 1998.
Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Harvard UP
Shoshona Zuboff. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.
Photo image credit: Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas in the original Broadway production of Native Son (1941), photographed by Carl Van Vechten.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Fake empathy in Black for a Day by Alisha Gaines (Reviewed)
Book Review: Fake Empathy in Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy by Alisha Gaines (University of North Carolina Press, 2017: 212 pp)
This reviewer is inclined to compare Black for a Day to Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Last Supper.” Leonardo’s painting was a fresco, which is made by applying paint to wet plaster. The plaster for Leonardo’s fresco did not dry properly and the painting began to peel almost immediately. The painting has had to be continuously patched up ever since then. Leonardo’s masterpiece “The Last Supper” has, therefore, been called “a magnificent wreck.” So is this book, Black for a Day.
Black for a Day paints an engaging and indeed fascinating picture of individuals (most but not exclusively white) who try to masquerade, to “pass as,” to impersonate, black people. It is a page-turner and eye-opening. Parts of it are confronting, and definitely not for the faint of heart. The short review: if one begins with pretense, deception, and inauthenticity as input, then one gets pretence, deception, inauthenticity—and fake empathy—as output. Black for a Day, as indicated, includes a fascinating account of what amounts to social psychology experiments gone bad. White people putting on the equivalent of black face, pretending to be black, is a bold experiment, which, however engaging as a kind of misguided role playing, does not work as designed or intended. Yet, such a mixed result no more invalidates a rigorous and critical empathy than that Roman soldiers hammered nails into the limbs of the people they were crucifying invalidates carpentry. The entire matter is nuanced and complex and the longer review follows.
Alisha Gaines, professor of English at Florida State University, begins with a personal reflection on her participation her high school’s production of the Broadway hit musical Finian’s Rainbow in 1996. Now Finian’s Rainbow was a Broadway musical first produced with considerable success in 1947. It is a fairy tale, including a pot of gold, a leprechaun, and a mythic creature with green skin. I acknowledge that I need to get out more, and I thank Professor Gaines for calling Finian’s Rainbow to my attention.
Finian’s Rainbow was made into a major motion picture in 1968 directed by Francis Ford Coppola staring Petula Clark (her hit song “Downtown” was a “hit”) and Keenan Wynn. The main action occurs when a racist US Senator modeled on the historical Theodore G. Bilbo, but reminding me of Jesse Helms, another notorious racist in the US Senate, is magically turned into a black person. This magically transformed Senator gets to walk in the shoes of the despised, devalued Other, presumably while singing various Broadway hit show tunes. As Black for a Day properly points out the empathy is “painted on.” Furthermore, if the empathy lessons were so well learned by the racist senator, then why was he so eager to be transformed back into a white person (which he is as part of a happy ending)? Unconscious biases, white fantasies, and prejudice, strike again! They continue to do so in the remaining, non-fictional, chapters.
One may say, prejudice is prejudice and all prejudices are alike, and there would be truth to that. Yet when one looks at the dynamics of prejudice, one cannot simply substitute the underlying dynamics of racism against black people for antisemitism or sexism or for homophobia.
The fantasy of black hyper masculinity is repressed as a source of anxiety challenging the white male’s (imagined) inadequate sexual potency. It then gets reversed and projected onto the devalued Other, who comes at the white man as white woman’s desire for the stereotyped hyper sexed black man
For example, Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices: page 367:
“The white male’s mythological contractions of black male sexuality – the images of Negro phallic power, animal lust, and rapaciousness – signal the jealousy and resentment over the black’s defilement pleasure, and they also reflect the white male’s anxiety that white women really desire the black’s aggressive sexuality.”
In contrast to the hysterical fantasy of the over-dramatized black male, the Jewish person is made the target of an obsessional paranoid over-intellectualization – the totally fictional worldwide conspiracy of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. In the case of homophobia, one stays with the dynamic of difference for one has to project that, in a certain sense, the boy finds other boys attractive, in that special sexual way, and must defend against being a “fag” be perpetrating acts of aggression. Nor should the sexism and misogyny be overlooked. In the case of the prejudices of racism (in the narrow sense against blacks) and antisemitism the devalued, despised Other becomes the target of projections one of own inner black and jew in every imaginable positive and negative sense. The differences collapse – inwardly I am the despised Other and get rid of the negative value by externalizing it. In the sexism, the anatomical difference between the sexes is such that the difference is impossible to deny, so the Other must be denied, deleted, “killed,” in order to reestablish integrity of the self. In the prejudices stereotype, the Other – the woman in this case – is hated for being inferior cognitively, physically, and so, even as the male harbors a certain womb envy. One should try to keep these complex, simultaneously changing variables in mind in confronting, deconstructing, and debunking prejudices of all kinds (see Young-Breuhl 1996 for a magisterial account). Meanwhile –
The main action of Black for a Day leaves the Finian fairy tale behind, in order to engage with confronting racial stereotypes—the “white fantasies of race” called out in the book’s subtitle—such as the stereotype of the hyper-sexed black Mandingo male and the morally loose black woman, fantasies everyone. However, the main fantasy that “racial impersonation” brings forth is empathy. The narrative of Black for a Day consists in critically reviewing several non-fiction narratives of individuals, born Caucasian, who go “under cover,” changing the color of their skin cosmetically and chemically from white to black, in order to “pass” as African American while travelling in the American south (or, in one case, Harlem) in the late 1940s and 1950s. Ray Sprigle, John Howard Graham, Grace Halsell, the cast of a Fox Reality TV show called Black.White (the latter show bring an exception in premiering in the year 2006) engage in what may be described as a bold, though misguided, experiment in social psychology (my terms, not Gaines’). This is supposed to produce empathy between the races and/or in white people for black people, but what it actually produces is fake empathy. Key term: fake empathy (once again, my term, not Gaines’).
On background, the reader may usefully recall that Finian’s Rainbow is a Broadway musical written in 1947. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, making Jim Crow laws illegal. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, giving counties with majority black populations the ability to register to vote and elect their own sheriffs, a much-needed step in the direction of obtaining social, political, and criminal justice. The importance of this step should not be under-estimated, even as much work remains to be done today (2023), and as the US Supreme Court orders appointing a Special Master to redraw Alabama’s racially gerrymandered Congressional districts. Nor should one overlook that Wikipedia reports that one of the last lynchings occurred in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981 of Michael Donald. One perpetrator Henry Hays was executed by electric chair for the crime in 1997, one year after Gaines’ high school production of the fairy tale. Tough stuff, and not for the faint of heart. Nevertheless, this is on background and is not mentioned, though arguably implicated, in Black for a Day.
The motives of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, and so on, were as diverse as the individuals themselves. Ray Sprigle was a Pulitzer Prize (1938) winning journalist, whose muck-raking writing tended to be sensationalist, emphasizing what Black for a Day describes as “Dixie-terror” against blacks while ignoring discrimination in the North. Gaines properly points out that Sprigle had a blind spot around the fact that black people were the victims of discrimination even in Northern States. In that context, however, this reviewer finds Black for a Dayproblematically asserting: “Although Sprigle’s original motivation was his career, he does his part to fulfill Myrdal’s dogma,” referring to Gunnar Myrdal’s An America Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944 (2 vols)).
The reader may usefully recall that Myrdal’s work was originally published in 1944, and Sprigle had started his experiment in 1947. Readers had little time to engaged the 1500 pages much less make it into a dogma in those three years. Myrdal’s two volume work cannot be summarized here, but one important challenge that it made to its readers was to stop being hypocrites, pretending to “all men (persons) are created equal,” while perpetrating Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and other forms of oppression and prejudice. That Myrdal’s work has become accepted “dogma,” notwithstanding its historical limitations in the eighty years since it was published is not an entirely bad thing. If this be dogma, stop being hypocritical, then make the most of it. Finally, to imply that the journalist, Sprigle, had some sort of career conflict of interest for wanting to win another Pulitzer Prize is concerning. This is not a conflict of interest – this is a journalist trying to do his job. The extent of his success is, of course, an open question.
Meanwhile, Myrdal needs no defense from me (nor am I capable of one here), but Myrdal does need one from Black for a Day, which charges him, accurately enough, with not having innovated in the matter of African-American History and/or Academics (p. 43), and, less charitably, of appealing to the consciences of the white people (p. 10) with his accusation of hypocrisy instead of advocating for Black Power (my use of the term at this point, not Gaines’) through economic, politics, and legislation. However, while I might be mistaken, a cursory find function using the Internet Archive of Mydral’s work disclosed hits on W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier, the “erasure” of whose academic labor Black for a Day accuses Myrdal of having enacted (2017: 43; Myrdal 1944 passim). No pass on that one. The references were already there in the 1944 edition. It is hard not to be cynical – 1500 pages and still not enough footnotes, nor does Myrdal have the distinction “Critical Race Theory”!
Myrdal maintained that northern whites were, in effect, living in their all-white enclaves, ignorant of the struggles of Negro citizens and would-be citizens. With that in mind, the flurry of journalist activity exemplified in Black for a Day by Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc., might usefully be redescribed as attempting to address informatively the white ignorance, the depths of which we have still not exhausted, with their respective journalistic reportage and social psychology undercover work. Black for a Day makes it sound like one has to decide between morality and empathy versus economics and legislative action. Why would someone force a choice like that? Don’t we need all of the above?
By the way, a search of Myrdal using the find function does not disclose a single occurrence of “empathy” or “cross racial empathy” or “cross-racial empathy” (note the hyphen), though the word “segregation” does get 592 matches and “Southern” over a thousand. So, Myrdal was fighting a different battle. Or was he? As noted, in Q2 2023 the Alabama State legislation had its gerrymander voting districts declared invalid by Supreme Court – again. Presumably a federal judge will be appointing a Special Master to complete redistricting to allow for another black-majority Congressional District. It is not only microaggressions, which Gaines calls out as having endured, that are troubling (though they are surely that). Macroaggressions are concerning, too.
Still, it is never simple to distinguish cause and effect, and the informal social psychology experiments of “passing,” going under-cover, and assuming a false identity, present a tangle of issues. Black for a Day tries to disentangle them by committing to the position that such impersonations resulted in false consciousness – the illusion of racial understanding. Disagree. On the contrary, this reviewer allows for the likelihood that, especially between 1947 and 1965, a significant number of white folks, including some of my grandparents’ and parents’ generations, found their appreciation of the struggles for social justice and against racial prejudice to be expanded by these journalist “exposés,” notwithstanding their limitations. As for causes, the passing of the Voting Rights Act was caused, in the strict sense, by the fact that the Democratic Party had a super majority in the US Congress and were able to surmount the filibuster of the Southern Segregationists. That was the cause. Full stop. The rest is speculation. It turned out that President Johnson (LBJ) was a closet progressive (but, unfortunately, not on foreign policy).
Meanwhile, John Howard Graham was a Saint of Empathy (my term, not Gaines’). Graham escaped from genteel Southern privilege in north Texas to study in France at the age of fifteen, going on to study psychiatry in France. According to Gaines, after studying psychiatry, Graham helped to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis by pretending they were mentally ill and sending them abroad. In the US Army in World War II, Graham was knocked head-over-heels unconscious by a near miss of an artillery explosion. The head trauma left him blind. Graham spent ten years learning to function as a blind person before seemingly miraculously regaining his sight.
As near as I can understand the story, Graham’s project of studying racial prejudice led him to send out a questionnaire as part of what amounted to a seat-of-the-pants social psychology experiment on what it was like to be black. Most of the response were blank – arguably an expression of contempt – but a few black responders insisted he would not understand what black people were experiencing without “getting inside the skin” of the black person. Even if it was a “hair-brained” idea to try to change his racial identity, on my reading, Graham was a man of integrity with a lot of social scientific (and psychiatric) curiosity and no more unconscious bias than the population as a whole.
Never was it truer, correlation is not causation. Meanwhile, John Howard Graham’s memoire was made into a move Black Like Me in 1964, staring the well-known actor James Whitmore. As Black for a Day points out, Whitmore’s make-up looked fake – Gaines’ text has photos – as if he had escaped from a minstrel show in black face. However, the outrages depicted in his encounters with segregation and racism, even though clumsily enacted, were real enough and helped stoke the outrage of the audiences against injustices, social, political, and legal.
In every case, Springle, Graham, Sewell, and the Fox reality TV show Black.White, appear to this reviewer like social psychology experiments that go off the rails, even as they become eye-opening paradigms of the apartheid-like status of black people in 1947, including the unconscious bias of both the investigators and their subjects, and the near delusional fantasies of the families on the Fox Reality TV show Black.White (2006). (Note “Black.White TV” is also a pun since TV was broadcast only in black and white until color TV because common around 1966 in the States.) There is a long history in social psychology of experiments “blowing up” and failing, albeit in ways that are more engaging than most standard social psychology outcomes that differentiate some obscure distinction by a percentage or two.
As regards social psychology experiments that go off the rails, the reader may recall Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison experiment. Severely criticized for ethical and scientific lapses, this experiment divided research subjects into Prisoners and Jailers and then took extensive notes on what happened. The experiment had to be stopped as the jailers became sadistic, abused their power, and the prisoners were getting ready to revolt violently.
In another experiment that was not stopped, but some wish it had been, Stanley Milgram (1963) gives the research subjects a device to deliver electric shocks if the remoted learner in the other room gives the wrong answer. The electric shocks are fake. There were no real shocks administered and the supposed learner subjects were “confederates,” part of the research staff. However, the willingness to follow orders was shocking (no pun intended) as people obeyed commands from the white-lab-coat-wearing authority in charge to deliver voltages that would have gravely injured or killed a person if actually administered as the confederate shouted in fake agony, pounding on the walls in fake distress from the next room.
Milgram’s experiments did not have to be stopped, since no one was shocked, but the results are deeply disturbing. We learn that people are obedient to authority to an extent that seems to entail an altered state of consciousness such as a hypnotic trance, perhaps like the concertation camp guards and other perpetrators of suicide bombings or war crimes. Though not quoted by Black for a Day, Lord Acton comes to mind: Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, much precedent exists for social psychology experiments that fail spectacularly, and yet disclose disturbing results in spite of their limitations about people’s aggression, sheep-like obedience, out-and-out thoughtlessness, seeming incapacity for critical thinking – and racial prejudices; likewise with Gaines’ work?
Gaines does not make such a connection with social psychology, nor does she necessarily need to do so. A number of responses from black people suggested to Graham that he could never know the black person’s struggle without literally getting inside the skin of a black person. But that was his commitment – so that is what he tried to do. Remember, Graham person rescued Jewish children from the Nazis by pretending they were mentally ill and sending them abroad – a righteous use of deception if I have ever heard of one. Still, it turns out that changing one’s exterior color and working for a few weeks on changing the interior conversation makes great headlines, but does not work in establishing empathic relatedness. How could it?
Empathy is based on being authentic about who one is in relating to another person. Empathy is based on integrity and being straight with the other person to and with whom one is trying to relate. So the idea of starting off by pretending to be someone who one is not – impersonating a person one is not – is not going to produce empathy. One cannot start out by being a fake and expect to produce an authentic relationship. Hence, the idea of an empathic impersonation is a contradiction in terms.
Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity – or empathy. It does not make a difference if one adds “race” to the mix. Empathic racial impersonation still results in fake relatedness and fake empathy. Now one may still learn a lot by going “under cover” and seeing how other people behave when they think you belong to the “in group” (in this case the “in group” of Southern segregationists or Northern racists), but one is going to get a complex, morally ambiguous integrity outage rather than an authentic relationship.
In short, the muck-raking, memoires and experiments, of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell are social psychology experiment that go “off the rails.” The same can be said of the consistently devaluing assessment of these works in Black for a Day. These experiments, including Gaines’, provide engaging adventures and misadventures the demonstrate that when one starts out by faking solidarity, integrity, relatedness, and empathy as input, then one gets fake solidarity, fake integrity, fake relatedness, and fake empathy. This is not surprising. Fake in; fake out. The author calls this “empathic racial impersonation.”
Along the same lines, one might rewrite Black for a Day to leverage Frantz Fanon, whose thought does get referenced but not really developed, to invalidate Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc., along the following lines: Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks notes a certain blind spot – one might say false consciousness – in survivors of colonialism, black people who pretend or fake white mannerisms, customs, styles, etc., for so many reasons, including in order to survive in a hostile, racist community. Now we have white people (Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc.) pretending (faking) being black. So, by the transitive property of logic, these white people are pretending to be black pretending to be white – that is, they are white, pretending to be white. Of course, this is a reduction to absurdity, and an over-simplification, but it might have shortened Gaines’ book and argument. Still, it devalues the possibility and application of empathy to promote racial understanding.
So does Black for a Day. Gaines (2017: 8, 171) claims to get her definition of empathy from Leslie Jamison and bell hooks. First, following up on bell hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), there is much about the relation to the Other and Otherness that resonates with my own interests. Speaking in the first person for emphasis, I get my humanness from the Other. In a strategic reversal, the infant humanizes / creates empathy in the parent; the student humanizes / creates empathy in the teacher; the patient, in the doctor; the customer, in the business person. The infant, in her lack of socialization, calls forth empathy in the parent to relate socially. The problem is that in bell hooks the Other relates to the one (and vice versa) in colonization, domination, subordination, imperialization, exploitation, manipulation. Nor do I dispute that these ways of relating are all-too-common. One reader finds a critique of empathy in bell hooks, whereas I find a critique of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which indeed deserves debunking. Her (bell hooks’) book uses the word “empathy” four times in the standard way without defining it. Arguably hooks’ essay “Eating the Other” (1992) is an implied definition of empathy – though a diligent search does not turn up the word “empathy” in the essay.
The challenge is that empathy is not “eating the other,” either literally or metaphorically. If anyone wishes to cite hooks’ magisterial authority, then the alternative point of view is that “eating the other” is the breakdown of empathy into merger, not the respectful distinction that maintains the integrity of the self and Other in the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. If one starts by eating the Other (in any sense), one does not get to empathy. Eating the Other is a mutilation of the Other and a mutilation of empathy. If one arrives at eating the Other (in any sense), one has not gotten there via empathy. One gets empathy mutilated by emotional contagion, projection, conformity, and so on. One gets various fragments of humanness and human beings that are the breakdown products of empathy under capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, oral aggression, and so on. However, above all else – one gets indigestion.
Second, Leslie Jamison’s “Empathy Exams” (2014) is credited with the strategic ambiguity between the gift of empathy and invasion of the Other (though I would argue that falls short of a proper definition). Here are the facts. Ms Jamison is a struggling writer, and she gets a job as a medical actor. She is given a script in which she plays the role – pretends to be – impersonates – someone who has a major mental illness. This is part of medical training and the medical students know the medical actor is not a real patient. The medical student must question the “patient” and interact with the “patient” to establish the best diagnosis of the disorder. Speaking personally, I teach a class at Ross University Medical School that uses films with medical actors doing just that – and the students are challenged to get the best diagnosis. As far as I know, Jamison is not in any of the films. Furthermore, the “patient” then provides feedback to the student and the medical authorities on how empathic the MD-in-training was in questioning and relating to the “patient.” That is the empathy exam.
This must be emphasized – and empathized – the integrity of the situation is intact – no one is pretending to be really ill when they are not, or black when they are white, and so on, and people understand the exercise as training; thus, Jamison’s penetrating and engaging and amusing account of her misadventures as a medical actor. In any case, the medical actor does not pretend to be mentally ill the way the Sprigle, etc. pretended to be black. The medical actor and the student MDs know the actors are acting. All the world is a stage, but the audience does not jump up on it to try and rescue the innocent orphan from the villain.
The experiments of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, etc. provide strong evidence, and I believe Gaines would agree, that when one attempts to take a walk in the other person’s shoes, it is harder to take off one’s own shoes than it might at first seem. Sprigle and company are trying to put the Other’s shoes on, but they cannot quite get their own off. They struggle mightily and I give them more credit for the effort than Gaines.
Staring with the integrity outage of impersonation does not create integrity – or empathy. I hasten to add it may expose the hypocrisies of Southern segregationists who claims that black people are happy with their subordinate roles (yet another white fantasy); or it may expose the unconscious biases (not explicitly invoked but ever present) of Northerners or the microaggressions of white liberals (and many others), who after all still struggle with racial stereotypes and the “white fantasies” of the subtitle of the stereotypes of the hyper-sexed black male or promiscuous black females. However, that is the thing about fantasies. There is nothing that prevents black people from having them too, though based on different experiences and in a different register than their white neighbors. The really tough question is whether Black for a Day believes that the possibility of racial cooperation and/or harmony – whether as an exemplary cooperative rainbow coalition or peaceful coexistence – is itself a mere fantasy – and so unlikely of realization. The steady drum beat in Black for a Day which calls out “empathic racial impersonation” sixty-five times in some 171 pages provides evidence that this is the main fantasy being debunked.
Back covers of books are famously misleading, but after reading Black for a Day line-by-line, cover-to-cover, I believe the cover accurately represents the author’s position. I am not aware that anyone, black or white, has ever said – as does the back cover of Black for a Day – that “empathy is all that white Americans need” (my italics) to racially navigate social relations. With the exception of the second to last paragraph of Black for a Day, the reader does not find a single statement in this book that is positive about the practice of empathy. None. One does not find a single example in the text of a rigorous and critical empathy that works to produce healthy empathic relatedness. If empathy is not “all” that is needed, what then is needed? Someone may usefully ask – because the author has not done so: what then is needed?
The list of what is need is long, but it starts with a small set of related skills such as critical thinking, showing respect, acknowledgement, dignity, rigorous examination of one’s own implicit biases, and, of course, the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy. A case can also be made for reparations for survivors of slavery, such as a college education, but to get there is a whole issue in itself, and that cannot be pursued here. Okay, be charitable and attribute the “all” to the marketing department. However, once again, whatever the source, this “all” – as in “all you need is empathy” – is a nice example of an uncharitable argument, setting up a strawman – not in the sense of the Good Samaritan – but in the sense of engaging with the weakest, distorted, watered-down version of an argument, not the strongest. As noted, positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work.
On background, the point is to be cooperative – “charitable” in Donald Davidson sense (1973: 136–137) – try to make the opponent’s argument work. Though it does not come up even to be summarily dismissed in Black for a Day, a case could be made that the journalist and social scientific experiments made a significant contribution to expanding the consciousness of the struggle against Jim Crow laws, the struggle for civil rights, and social justice, between 1947 and the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. (The “opponent” in this case is the journalist or social psychology experimenter, not the racist, whose argument has been examined and is invalid and full of defects. If Black for a Day tries to make the argument in favor of empathy work, it does not try very hard.)
How shall I put it delicately? Empathy doesn’t work on or with those suffering from psychopathic personality disorder, delusional disorders, certain forms of childhood autism, or lynch mobs. IF you encounter any of these, especially the latter, dial 911 and call for backup such as the FBI and the FBI hostage negotiation team, who do actually practice a kind of Red Team empathy to take a walk in the shoes of one’s opponents (such as the racist sheriff or white supremacist, survivalist hostage taker).
In contrast, the practice of empathy in the class room, therapy, coaching, clinical practice, and medical training (see Jamison above on the “Empathy Exams”), requires the creation of a safe space in in which people can be self-expressed, open about who they are authentically, and emotionally vulnerable without being bullied or subject to microaggressions. Indeed that is the one-minute empathy training – drive out bullying, aggression, prejudice (there are so many kinds!), cynicism, resignation, judgment, evaluation, politics in the negative sense, then empathy naturally and spontaneously comes forth. People want to be empathic, if given half a chance.
In all of these difficult situations of dealing with difficult and even hostile people, the empathic practice consists in setting boundaries, establishing limits, and all necessary measures of self-defense. There is the practice of a kind of radical empathy in nonviolent civil disobedience as taught by Gandhi and King, which powerfully appeals to the conscience of the racist sheriff by accepting the punishment of the fine or two weeks in jail. Note that implies there is a community, however broken, because the racist sheriff is credited with having enough conscience to think “something is wrong with a system that punishes someone for trying to come in through the front door and sit in for lunch at the local diner” Nor is this relevant only in 1947 for in Q2 2023 the Alabama State legislation had its gerrymander voting districts declared invalid by the Supreme Court again in Q2 2023. As noted, it is not only microaggressions that are so troubling.
Hindsight is 20-20 and Gaines’ work is rich in it – the last lynching was supposedly in 1981 (see Wikipedia article cited below), but the cop’s knee on George Floyd’s neck occurred in 2020. In July 2022, Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 21 years in prison (where Chauvin is today) for violating Floyd’s civil rights. An example of an uncharitable argument would be to charge the author with not acknowledging this ongoing macroaggression – more problematic is that one can and should oppose both microaggression and such macroaggressions as the risks of wide spread disenfranchisement of minorities, militarized police behavior that does not protect minority communities while profiling them for super-surveillance, and the effective banning of teaching African American history in HS’s in Florida where, coincidently, the author teaches college. It is easy to be cynical and resigned and propose “empathic racial impersonation” as another sixty-five bricks in the cynical wall of interracial relations. The hard work consists in driving out cynicism and resignation and allowing empathy to expand in the individual and community.
And while we are elaborating fantasies, all the times that empathic connections were being attacked, invalidated, faked, and impersonated, I am deeply ashamed to acknowledge that I had the fantasy that empathy was being lynched, lynched as retributive justice for not making a difference during all those body and soul murdering lynchings that occurred and are still occurring during encounters with unprofessional police. If you encounter any of these, then take action to set boundaries, reestablish limits, and recover safety and security. However, the misfiring and breakdown of empathy into fake empathy does not invalid empathy as such or its ability to make a profound difference in conflict resolution when deployed by a skillful partitioner. As I like to note, empathy should never be under-estimated, but, once again, empathy does not work with psychopaths, certain kinds of autism, most bullies, and lynch mobs. I am skeptical after Gandhi, King, and Malcolm, to add race relations to the list, notwithstanding that Black for a Day has tried to make a case for doing so.
Black for a Day may object that the critique of empathy only applies to the limited and unconsciously biased practices of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, and so on. However, Black for a Day has at least one significant blind spot of its own. In 171 pages of adventures and misadventures there are sixty-fives uses of “empathic racial impersonation,” which I determined in a line-by-line reading as the distinction is not in the index. In every case without exception as the impersonator tries to reach an understanding between the races, the interaction fails, misfires, and devolves into false consciousness of “empathic racial impersonation.” No good comes of it. White people can’t be anything but white (see above). There is not a single instance of a successful practice of empathy or clearly attained understanding between two individuals of different colors resulting in authentic empathic relatedness. Not one in 171 pages. Except for the second to last paragraph of the book, the practice of empathy is dismissed and devalued. In this one instance of a near miss of interracial empathy, with Carmen and Rose, mother and daughter (white pretending to be black), they are ever-so-close to reaching an expanded appreciation of the struggles of black people, but their experiences are invalidated. Gaines writes: “Both Rose and Carmen come away from this project with a profound sense of alienation. They feel a wall – one built by history, suspicion, paranoia, stereotype, and assumptions they conclude are nearly impossible to either penetrate or scale” (2017: 155).
This reviewer protests. I repeat with urgency: Why is it that in 171 pages of penetrating and incisive and dense description, there is not a single instance of successful empathy? Why is there not one example of what a healthy example of successful empathic relatedness would look like so that one could identify it if one happened to run across it? Possibly the author has never seen or experienced one, but I do not accept that as the author is a sensitive, intelligent, empathic human being. My hypothesis is that the author has a grievance about the microaggressions – the dignity violations – to which she was unempathically and disrespectfully subjected; and one must agree that there are many things exist about which to be aggrieved. This results in the possibility of a rigorous and critical empathy – authentic empathy – being lost in the mistranslation of “empathic racial impersonation.” “Racial impersonation,” yes – but fake empathy is not empathy. Fake empathy has little or nothing to do with empathy, which remains unclarified by this work or its subtitle.
At every turn – I counted them – sixty-five times, we get “empathic racial impersonation,” and the steady drum beat of invalidation. Empathy goes off the rails as projection, conformity, bad faith, conscious and unconscious bias, communications lost in translation. Indeed, empathy is a most imperfect practice, nor are these struggling and misguided impersonators given the benefit of the doubt. Black for a Day does not engage with the strongest version of the argument that empathy is valuable. Empathy is the weakest, watered-down, or distorted one – “eating the other” or being a fake medical actor. Hmmm. Positively expressed, the scholarly standard is to try to make the opponent’s argument work rather than engaging with a distorted, strawman version of it. The one possible exception is if an author wishes to write a polemical piece. For example, Nietzsche explicitly subtitles his Genealogy of Morals “A Polemic.” If that is the author’s intention here, it is nowhere expressed, for example, in the preface.
Absent engaging in polemics, the point is to be cooperative – “charitable” in Donald Davidson’s sense (1973: 136–137) – try to make the opponent’s argument work. Though a whole essay is be required to explain “charity” in this argumentative sense, a short version of a charitable position might argue that, through the efforts of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell, ”reality” Black.White TV, and so on, were clumsy and ultimately flawed, the consciousnesses of poorly informed (and prejudiced) white people were expanded in being exposed to the injustices with which black people were struggling, and going forward black people can be counted on to take economic and legislative action on their own behalf.
As Malcolm-X said to his black audience, “You didn’t’ land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on you.” The “opponent” in this case is the social psychology experimenter, who is seeking interracial understanding, not the racist or white supremacist, whose argument has been tested and is invalid, full of defects. Malcolm-X: The white man (person) has behaved like the very devil – indeed is the devil – and if the black person is waiting around for help from the white person, it is going to be a long wait. That is agency: Get to work, which arguably Gaines has done, attacking every empathic connection she could find. Nevertheless, Malcolm modified his view when he encountered white Europeans, Middle Easterners, and especially Islamic people of good will, who championed the causes of social justice and black economic progress in the US.
Though the contributions of Sprigle, Graham, Halsell are flawed – deeply flawed – in the time of Jim Crow, before the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964/65, these pioneers contributed to rousing the conscience of the nation against the injustices of segregation in the south and alternative forms of discrimination in the north. What they did not do is invent or promote Black Power – black agency – in calling forth economic, political, and legislative action to improve black lives. What they did not do is address the problem of microaggressions, dignity violation and insults that cumulatively add up to significant narcissistic injury. Such insults, subtle meanness, and narcissistic slights have existed from time immemorial, but the distinction “microaggression” as such was first articulated in 1970 Harvard University psychiatrist Chester Piece (according to D. W. Sue 2010).
An example from Black for a Day? The author’s seventh grade history teacher – tin-eared, hypocritical, racist, or just having had the class read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, or all of the above – asks the young Gaines to explain to her classmates what slavey was really like (2017: 2) – as if Alisha had been a slave?! Such a dignity violation is exemplary of what sounded like – but I am guessing – a difficult if not hostile and unempathic environment (and that is matter for the author’s memoire, not this text). It is no wonder that the author is aggrieved. Even enraged. But why against empathy?
One may argue back: No, no, Lou, you just don’t get it – the grievance is against “empathic racial impersonation.” Okay fine. I assert that I got that. Here is the problem with that: when one starts out with impersonation to deceive the Other, then one is going to be prevented from relating to that Other authentically as is required by and with empathy. “Empathic impersonation” is fake empathy. So, coming from impersonation, the attempt to practice empathy based on an integrity outage is not going to work.
Never under-estimate the power of empathy, yet empathy is not going to work coming from an integrity outage. Now impersonation might produce credible undercover journalism; it might produce legally admissible undercover police work; it might produce engaging war games at the Pentagon where the Red Team takes a walk in the Blue Team’s opponent’s shoes to sink their ships in an imaginary Persian Gulf scenario; it might even produce an engaging social psychology experiment in which “confederates” of the experimenter pretend to be who they are not to disclose unconscious bias. However, what such impersonation is not going to produce is empathy. “Empathic impersonation,” as noted, is a contradiction, and blows itself up. It is not going to produce authentic person-to-person understanding of who the other person is as a possibility of relating with openness and integrity. One does not get to integrity and openness by being closed off and deceptive. Well and good. Gaines and I are in agreement about the problematic nature of impersonation; where I take strong exception to Black for a Day, is the claim that this is a valid critique of empathy.
I comment on Black for a Day as the author of three peer-reviewed books on empathy (2010, 2014, 2015). I grew up in Chicago, so the Jesuits who taught me world history and US history included liberation theology and significant elements of what was then called “Black History,” but I am no authority on either of the latter. However, regarding empathy, I have done my homework, though in a deep sense I am no more or less empathic than any parent with children, doctor with patients, business person with customers, or teacher with students. Empathy is a high bar. On a good day, I get there; on other days, I struggle like everyone else.
What my empathy suggests to me is that the author is aggrieved about something – maybe a lot of things – possibly microaggressions – and I am inclined to say, “It sounds like you could use some empathy – please count on mine!” However, based on the text, she is not asking for it – empathy – does not see value in it – and seems to find satisfaction in attacking every possibility of empathic connection that comes forth. When it comes to empathy, Gaines does not “get it” – in just about every sense. Gaines fails a readiness assessment for the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy – does not commit to or try to create a safe space in which a debate or empathic listening could occur. One could argue back – one is human, therefore, ready or not, here comes empathy; and one is ready for empathy whether one likes it or not, and the point must be acknowledged – there is an unwillingness to engage with the strongest version of a rigorous and critical empathy rather than a watered-down weird “eat the other.” In short, the rumor of empathy remains a rumor in the case of Black for a Day; the rumor is not confirmed; and empathy does not live in this work. It is where empathy goes to become fake empathy. Don’t go there.
References
Authors of Wikipedia. The lynching of Michael Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Michael_Donald [checked on 2023-09-24]
Donald Davidson. (1973). Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 125–139.
Milgram, Stanley (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience”. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67 (4): 371–8.
Gunnar Myrdal. (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 Vols, 2ndEdition (1965). New York: Harper and Row”
https://archive.org/stream/AmericanDilemmaTheNegroProblemAndModernDemocracy/AmericanDelemmaVersion2_djvu.txt[checked on 2023-0925]
D. Wing Sue. (2010). Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. New York: Wiley.
Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Philip Zimbardo. (2008). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
My empathy lessons – in the beginning
My empathy lessons started when I was about four years old. My Mom would tell me bedtime stories. Right before bed, she would weave a narrative out of the significant events of a day in the life of an “on the go,” four-year-old boy. She would make a whole out of my experiences by telling me a story about this imaginary boy—his name was “Doodle Bug.”
For example, in a favorite story, Doodle Bug would ride his tricycle, and he would go through the park to visit the Indian Chief. He would make a treaty with the Chief. Then he would ride to the bakery. At the bakery he would sample a selection of cookies and cakes. Always the talented young man, Doodle Bug would “stand on his noodle for apple strudel.”
In the moment, as a four-year-old, this was hilariously funny. I had no idea what apple strudel was, and when I found out a little later, I did not particularly like it. To me, the suspense in the story was palpable. Would the Indian Chief (surely a father figure) be open to a treaty or would hostilities break out as in the cowboy movies that were popular at the time? The rhyme with which the story ended released the suspense in the narrative. It was funny, provoking a laugh, and it brought the story to a satisfying, dramatic close, clearing the way for a soothing transition to sleep.
This was my Mom’s empathic response to a busy, on the go, growing boy. I acknowledge her for it; and my emotional life and future were richer thanks to her. She took my experiences on a given day, wove them into a nuanced narrative, and gave them back to me as a bedtime story. I recognized the experiences as my own. I recognized that she got who I was for her. Brilliant. I was mesmerized. I was spell bound. I was soothed. I was comforted. I was stimulated (but not too much). This was the empathic moment.
Mom was tuning down the day as she was tuning up the empathy for me. She was calming down the day as she was also tuning up my empathy for myself. I was empathically transitioned from a busy day to a state of restfulness and readiness for sleep without the anxieties that can sometimes accompany a child at bedtime.
This was not to say that my childhood was all rainbows and balloons. There were plenty of upsets, too. It is not that I never had anxieties, but, in this case, they were over shadowed by the good stuff. This is a fine example of things going just right for a change; and how empathic responsiveness made a positive difference in one young boy’s life.
Story time—narrative—gives back to the other person his own experience in a way that he can recognize and integrate it. In this case, Mom wove a narrative out of the events of the day, helping her child integrate his experiences. When the other person recognizes his own experience in the story, as I did, then the empathic loop is complete. I got empathy at the end of the day.
Note that, in this and similar situations, a lot of work has to occur prior to the story. The narrator (Mom, in this case) must have access to the events being woven into the story. Her empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic interpretation were activated and engaged. I hasten to add that the distinction “empathy” was not made explicit. This was just Mom being Mom—a parent doing here job and getting it just right.
Therefore, advice to parents: if you want to expand your empathy with your child, and your child’s empathy for her- or himself, have a bed time story. Bring the day to a close in an orderly way. If you can make up a story, so much the better. But not everyone is a natural born storyteller, as my Mom seems to have been. If you want to read a story, that is good, too. Pick something that you think will resonate with the child, or let the child decide what she or he wants. In the case of my daughter, after awhile, I read her whatever she requested. The genius of the “out there” and wholesome sense of humor of Richard Scarry for children of tender age also deserves honorable mention. The point is to have that time together—that, too, is the empathic moment.
Then when tough times occurred—I do not go into the details since my now grown-up daughter will read this—emerging adults learning how to handle things (and sometimes mishandling things), I went down to dorm and said, “Okay, get your stuff—you are coming home for awhile.” And, low and behold, she listened! She knew I was concerned about her and had her well-being in mind and she listened; and then she got a job for awhile and went back to school a year later. Now flourishing and working on flourishing in ways that were not visible at the time, this is not a fairy tale ending, but is perhaps good enough in this world of helicopter parents, absent parents, and failures to launch.
For those who would like a further inquiry into how empathy is defined – storytelling shows up in many contexts, but when it builds an empathic relationship, storytelling falls under “empathic responsiveness” –
Empathy consists of four parts or dimensions, which, in turn, form the integral whole of authentic relatedness between individuals in community. These four dimensions are receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness:
- Empathic receptivity is the dimension of empathy that consists in being open to the other person’s feelings and experiences. It often presents as a vicarious experience.
- Empathic understanding is the dimension of empathy that engages the other person as possibility in his or her humanity. It often presents as possibilities of accomplishment, fulfillment, flourishing.
- Empathic interpretation is the dimension of empathy that takes a walk “in the other’s shoes,” the part corresponding to the folk definition of empathy. It often presents as shifts in perspective or points of view.
- Empathic responsiveness is that dimension of empathy that provides a gracious and generous listening as the source of a response that offers the other person her or his own experience back in a gesture, statement, story, or narrative. It often presents as a short narrative (“micro narrative”) or story, also called “rhetorical empathy.”
These four dimensions of a rigorous and critical empathy go around, but not exactly in a circle. One does not end up exactly where one started; one makes progress—progress up the winding and twisting hairpin curves of the mountain of human understanding. One goes “round the mountain,” ending up at the same coordinates at which one started, but higher up the mountain. Different perspectives open up as one goes up.
Those in the empathic relationship have advanced upward, coming back to where they started, but at a higher level, forming an upward spiral, round the mountain of empathic understanding of other human beings. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: How empathy works: The four dimensions of empathy
One can start at any point with any one of these dimensions and, as noted, go “round the mountain,” engaging the other three dimensions, forming the integrated whole that we call “empathy.” One has a different perspective on the relationship, one’s own contribution to it, and the other person’s role. One key empathy lesson that drives this work forward and gets repeated at important points is: the four dimensions of empathy are a coherent whole. All four dimensions of empathy (empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness) link to one another in a round trip extending from receptivity to understanding, from understanding to interpretation, from interpretation to response, and back. One can start anywhere in the cycle, and go around covering all the bases and end up back with the distinction with which one started, albeit at a “higher” level. You start with empathy and end up with empathy, expanded and (to shift the directional metaphor) “deepened” empathy in relating to the other person and to the community made up of other persons.
References
This post is an except from –
Lou Agosta. (2018). Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pears Press: pp. 38 – 42.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Left stranded when the music stops: What to do about the shortage of talk therapists actually available
An article in the Washington Post by Lenny Bernstein: “This is why it is so hard to find mental health counseling right now” (March 6, 2022) struck a chord with many readers.[1]
The article begins by describing an individual in the Los Angeles area who said she was willing to pay hundreds of dollars per session and called some twenty-five therapists in the area but was unable to find an opening. The person willingly shared her name in the article. Be careful not to blame the survivor or victim – the report is credible – and she maintained a spreadsheet!
One of the main points of the article is that after several years of pandemic stress prospective clients and patients are at the end of their emotional rope and providers (therapists) are over-scheduled and burned out too. No availability.
The problem is systemic. There seems to be no bottom in sight as regards the opportunistic behavior of insurance companies, the lack of behavioral health resources, and the suffering of potential patients. The WP article goes on to document other potential patients with significantly less resources who cannot even get on a wait list. The article documents third party insurance payers whose “in network” providers are unwilling to see prospective patients due to thin
reimbursements from the payer – once again, the individual is unable to get on a wait list or get help urgently needed; supply side shortages are over the top in the programs that train psychiatrists, a specialty in medicine. Psychiatrists, when available, are most often interested in lucrative fifteen-minute medication management sessions, but unless they are “old school” and were psychoanalytically trained in the “way back,” they are rarely available for conversations. This all adds up to a crisis in the availability of behavioral health services.
This leads to my punch line. Often time depression, anxiety and emotional upset are accompanied by negative self-talk, shaky or low self-esteem. One reaches out and asks for help but instead has an experience of powerlessness that is hard to distinguish from the original emotional disequilibrium. The conversation spins in a tight circle – “maybe I deserve it – no I don’t – this sucks – I suck – help!” The person resigns himself to alife of gentile poverty, thinking she or he is not worthy of financial well-being. The prospective patient is left aggrieved. This grievance is accurate and real enough in context, but it is hard to identify what or who can make a difference. Nevertheless, there is no power in being aggrieved. One still has to do the thing the person in distress or with shaky self-esteem is least inclined to do – invest in oneself because one is worth it!
I have spoken with numerous potential and actual clients who pay a lot of money for health insurance. However, when they want to use the insurance for behavioral health services, they find the insurance is not workable. Not usable. The service level agreement is hard to understand, and having a deductible of a couple of thousand dollars is hard to distinguish from having no insurance at all. If the client goes “in network,” the therapists are unresponsive or inexperienced. If the client goes out of network, the therapists are often more experienced and able to help, but onerous deductibles and copays rear their heads. Why don’t the experienced therapists go in network? There are many reasons but one of them is that the insurer often insists the therapist accept thirty cents on the dollar in compensation, and some therapists find it hard to make ends meet that way. In short, as a potential patient, you think you have insurance, but when it comes to behavioral health, you really don’t.
My main point is to provide guidance as to some things you can do to get the help you need with emotional or behavioral upset and do so in a timely way. Turns out one has to give an informal tutorial on using insurance as well as on emotional well-being. I hasten to add that “all the usual disclaimers apply.” This is not legal advice, medical advice, insurance advice, cooking advice or any kind of advice. This is a good faith, best efforts to share some brain storming and personal tips and techniques earned in the “college of hard knocks” in dealing with these issues. Your mileage may vary.
Nothing I say in this article should be taken as minimizing or dismissing the gravity of your suffering or the complexity of this matter. If you are looking for a therapist or counselor, it is because you need a therapist or counselor, not a breach of contract action against an insurance company. You want a therapist not a legal case or participation in a class action law suit, even if the insurance contract has plenty of “loop holes.” For the moment, the latter is a rhetorical point only.
When a person is anxious or depressed or struggling with addiction or other emotional upset, being an informed assertive consumer of behavioral health services is precisely the thing the person is least able to do. “I need help now! Shut up and talk to me!”
Notwithstanding my commitment to expanding a rigorous and critical empathy, here’s the tough love. Without minimizing your struggle and suffering, the thing you least want to do is what you are going to have to try to do. If one is emotionally upset, the least thing you want to do is be an assertive consumer of services designed to get you back your power in the face of emotional upset or whatever upsetting issues you are facing.
The recommendation is to speak to truth to power and assertively demand an “in network” provider from the insurance company or invest in yourself and pay the private fee for an experienced therapist whom you find authentically empathic, then you already be well on the way to getting your power back in the face of whatever issues you are facing.
If your issue is that you really don’t have enough money (and who does?), then you may need to get the job and career coaching that will enable you to network your way forward. An inexpensive place to start is The Two Hour Job Search by Steve Dalton. Highly recommended. Note the paradox here – the very thing you do not want to do keeps coming up. You definitely need someone to talk to. Once again, the very things with which you need help are what re stopping you from getting help
The bureaucratic indifference of insurance companies is built into the system. The idea of an insurance is a company committed to making money by spreading risk between predictable outcomes and a certain number of “adverse” [“bad risk”] events. It is not entirely fair (or even accurate) but by becoming depressed or anxious (and so on), you are already an adverse event or bad risk waiting to happen. You may expect to be treated as such by most insurance companies.
In a health insurance context, the traditional model for the use of services is a broken arm or an appendicitis (these are just two examples among many). You definitely want to have major medical insurance against such an unfortunate turn of events. Consider the possibility: Buy major medical only – and invest the difference saved in your therapy and therapist of choice.
But note these adverse medical events are relatively self-contained events – page the surgeon, perform the operation, take a week to recover or walk around in a sling for awhile. The insurance company pays the providers (doctors and hospitals) ten grand to thirty grand. That’s it. With lower back pain, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disorders, it is a different story. These are notoriously difficult to diagnose and treat. Yet, modern medicine has effective imaging and treatment resources that often successfully provide significant relief if not always complete cures for the patient’s distress in these more complex cases.
Consider similar cases in behavioral health. Start by talking to your family doctor. Okay, that is advice – talk to your family doctor for starters. Front line family doctors have the authority – and most have the basic training – needed to prescribe modern antidepressants (so called SSRIs), which also are often effective against anxiety, to treat simple forms of depression and anxiety due to life stresses such as an ongoing pandemic, job loss, relationship setbacks.
Even though I am one of the professionals who has consistently advocated “Plato not Prozac,” I acknowledge the value of such psychopharmacological interventions from a medical doctor to get a person through a rough patch until the person can engage in a conversation for possibility and get at the underlying cause of the emotional disequilibrium. Note this implies the person wants to look for or at the underlying dynamics. This leads us to the uncomfortable suggestion that it is going to take something on the part of the client to engage and overcome the problem, issue, upset, which is stopping the client from moving forward in her or his life.
There is a large gray area in life in which people struggle with relationship issues, finances, career, education, pervasive feelings of emptiness, chronic emotional upset, self-defeating behavior in the use of substances such as alcohol and cannabis (this list is not complete).
A medical doctor or other astute professional may even provide a medical diagnosis when the interaction of the person’s personality with the person’s life falls into patterns of struggle, upset, and failure. Insurance companies require a medical diagnosis. One thinks of such codable disorders as adjustment disorder or personality disorders (PD) such as narcissistic, histrionic, schizoid, antisocial, or borderline PD. These are labels which can be misleading and even dangerous to apply without talking to the person and getting to know them over a period of time. It’s not like the Psychology Today headline – top three ways to know if you are dating a narcissist. I am calling “BS” on that approach.
Nevertheless, if after a thorough process of inquiry, some such label is appropriate (however useless the label may otherwise be except for insurance purposes), then the cost will be right up there with “fixing” an appendicitis – only you won’t be able to do it in a single day – and it won’t be that kind of “fix”. An extended effort and of hard to predict duration must be anticipated, lasting from months even to years. This is not good news, but there are options.
My commitment is to expanding a rigorous and critical empathy in the individual and the community. I consider that I am an empathy consultant, though at times that is hard to distinguish from a therapeutic process and inquiry into the possibilities of health and behavioral well-being. Therefore, and out of this commitment, I have a sliding scale fee structure for my consulting and related empathy services. People call me up and say “I make a lot of money, and want to pay you more.” Of course, that is a joke. I regularly hear from prospective clients whose first consideration is financial. They do not have enough money. I take this assertion seriously, and I discuss finances with them. Between school debt and the economic disruptions of three years of pandemic, people are hurting in many ways including financially. One must be careful NEVER to blame the victim or survivor.
The best way for such financially strapped individuals to go froward is to find an “in network” provider. Key term: in network. But we just read the Washington Post article that furnishes credible evidence such networks are tapped out, in breakdown, not working. Those that are working well enough often deal with the gray area of emotional upset and life challenges by moving the behavioral health component to a separate corporate subsidy at a separate location to deal with all aspects of behavioral health. (See above on “bad risk.”) When I had such an issue years ago, I had to search high and low to get the phone number, web site, or US postal address. You can’t make this stuff up. This is because ultimately, the issues that come up are nothing like an appendicitis or even hard to diagnose migraines. Moving the paying entity to a corporate subsidy is also a way that the insurance company can impose a high deductible and/or copay by carving out that section of the business and claims processing. There are other reasons, too, but basically, they are financial.
You may be starting to appreciate that many health insurance contracts are not really designed to provide behavioral health services (e.g., therapy) the way they are designed to address a broken leg or appendicitis. There is a way forward, but it is more complex (and expensive in terms of actual dollar, though not necessarily time and effort). I will address this starting in the paragraph after next, because, sometimes in the case of behavioral health, people who have insurance do not really have useable, workable behavioral health insurance. For all intents and purposes, they think they have insurance, but, in this specific regard, they have a piece of paper and a phone number that is hard to find. I hasten to add I am not recommending going without major medical health insurance, inadequate though it may be in certain respects.
This brings us to those individuals who decide to go without insurance. What about them? Such individuals choose to take the risk. They are living dangerously because if they do break an arm or incur an appendicitis, then they are going to have another $30K in medical debt [this number is approximate and probably low], along with a mountain of school debt, credit card debt, and bad judgment debt (this list is not complete). These good people need insurance, not so much to get therapy – because, as the accumulating evidence indicates, it really doesn’t work that way – as to be insured against a major medical accident. Many people are not clear on this distinction, but I would urge them to consider the possibility.
I spoke with this one prospective client who began with a long and authentically moving narrative that she did not have enough money and could not afford therapy. This is common and not particularly confidential or sensitive. As part of a no fee first interview to establish readiness for therapy, I acknowledged her courage in strength in reaching out to someone she did not really know to get help with her problems. I acknowledged that one of her problems was she did not have enough money. A bold statement of the obvious. I asked if there was anything else she wanted to work on. It turns out that she was a survivor of a number of difficult situations and would benefit from both empathy consulting, and talk therapy – and I might add job coaching. Here’s the thing – when a person is hurting emotionally, they do not want to look for another job – or a better job that pays more money. But one just might have to do that, at least over the short term, with someone who can provide that kind of guidance to those who are willing. I encouraged her to be assertive with her insurance company and I heard she found someone in network at a low rate.
And if you are a therapist who believes such job coaching compromises the purity or neutrality of the therapy, I would agree. However, never say never. In the aftermath of World War I, when the victorious allies maintained a starvation blockage on Germany and Austria even into 1919, Freud (that would be Sigmund) was reportedly seeing a client in exchange for a substantial bag of potatoes. I have no facts – none – but I find it hard to believe they were discussing matters pertinent to individual and collective survival. So far no one has offered me a bag of potatoes (I am holding out for a quantity of olive oil and basil to make pesto), but see the above cited article from the Washington Post.
We circle back to where we started. If the individual named in the Washington Post article has not yet found a therapist, then I believe there are many in the Chicago area would welcome the opportunity to make a difference for her. She has a budget for therapy, she says. If you have a budget, the work goes forward. It can be confronting and difficult to contemplate, but if you were buying a car, you would look at your budget. If you were planning a vacation, you would think about your vacation budget. If you were thinking of going back to school, you would look at your education budget. You get the idea. What is your budget for empathy consulting, counseling, talk therapy, cognitive retraining, life coaching, or medication management services (this are all distinct interventions, appropriate in different circumstances)? Zero may not be the right number. Just saying. Of course, if the client is in LA and the empathy consultant is in Chicago, it would be a conversation over Zoom. That starts a new thread so I may usefully clarify that I prefer to meet with people in person – the empathy is expanded in person – but the genie is out of the bottle and online can be good enough in some circumstance. (See my peer reviewed article “The Genie is Out of the Bottle”: https://bit.ly/37vxJ0L.)
The insurance system is broken as regards behavioral health (as evidenced by the WP article). There is a vast gray area of people with modest emotional disregulation who genuinely need help. These are not only the “worried well,” but people whose understandable lack of assertiveness in navigating an indifferent (and it must be said unempathic) bureaucracy leaves them high and dry with their moderate but worsening emotional, spiritual, and behavioral upsets. These people deserve help, and are entitled to it even under the specific terms of their insurance contracts. Indeed they are entitled to help even if they do not have insurance, though the revenue model is simpler in that case, though not less costly.
The insurance company has been unable to make money off of this gray area – therefore, the insurance company does what it does best – it turns to making money off of you. But you need health insurance against a major medical event or accident. You want a therapist, not a breach of contract case in small claims court (where the small claim often goes up to $100k). Therefore, it does little good to document having called ten or twenty-five in network providers with no result. Or does it? You – or a class action attorney firm – have a case for breach of contract. Go out of network and forward the invoices to the payer by mail with a tracking number, requesting that the full therapy fees be treated “in network” for purposes of reimbursement, and, therefore, no or low deductible and copay. Of course, one would have to have funds for that upfront, and lack of money is where this circle started. Back to expanding one’s job search skills?
This is crazy – and crazy making behavior – though only as a function of a system that is crazy. You see the problem. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the insurance payer, when confronted with an actual summons to small claims court, would then find you a therapist – of course, the therapist might be relatively inexperienced or someone who (how shall I put it delicately?) is less motivated than one might hope. Thwarted again!
As I wrap up this post, it occurs to that while it would be crazy for an individual to seek legal redress – it might even be “acting out,” there might be a basis for an enterprising law firm to establish a system wide “class action” for breach of contract. This will not solve your problem of getting help in the next two weeks, but it might be a necessary step to benefit the community. You know the insurance company has the money!
As noted above, your grievance over being sold unworkable behavioral health insurance may be [is] accurate and real. Nevertheless, I am sticking to my story: the guidance: there is no power in being aggrieved. You still have to do the thing the person in upset or with shaky self-esteem is least inclined to do – dig down, including into your pockets, and find self-confidence – or enough self-confidence for the moment – and invest in yourself because you are worth it!
The one minute empathy training – runtime is actually five minutes, but a personal introduction is included: https://youtu.be/747OiV-GTx4
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/03/06/therapist-covid-burnout/
Update (12/12/2025): Legislation to inspire better access to behavioral healthcare services: https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/shortcode/CHI785/edition/d8ea77df-580d-4bc9-915b-3f1592ac9778?page=74db2eb7-1233-4d50-94eb-67777298f953&
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
