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Review: The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle
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.”
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 was 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.
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.
Families have secrets, and one was imposed on the young Sherry. Her mother married Charles Zimmerman, which was her last name as he 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, about which more shortly.
Mom gets rid of Charles and within about another 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 does have a penis 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 issues 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 the 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 oneself. 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 professors 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 Reisman (The Lonely Crowd) and other less famous but equally inspiring teachers.
She 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” Jacque 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. Jaques 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 colleague 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 everyones 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. The 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, austic 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. 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 credibly 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 he 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
The Evidence: Empathy is Teachable, Trainable, Learnable
This essay is an excerpt from Chapter Four of the book Empathy Lessons. This essay is motivated by the need to debunk the position that the practice of empathy is vague and fuzzy and cannot be taught, that you either have it or you don’t. Bunk. I am addressing scientists, researchers, health care professionals who dismiss empathy as not scientific of evidence-based.
Substantial evidence is available that if you practice empathy, you get better at it. A bold statement of the obvious? Indeed. Yet the requirement to marshal the evidence is a significant one, even if it is often a function of resistance to practicing a rigorous and critical empathy. Key term: resistance to empathy. Overcome the resistance to empathy and the practice of empathy spontaneously and naturally comes forth. [See Empathy Lessons and other books by Lou Agosta on empathy: https://amzn.to/2S0ISPr.%5D
Evidence-based empathy
Even if one understands “evidence” in the most narrow and rigorous sense, substantial evidence is available from peer-reviewed research and publictions that empathy training is effective. The implications for evidence-based empathy training are direct. Empathy works. Some of this material may seem difficult or complex; but it is important to engage with it, because it undercuts the subtle resistances to empathy that dismiss empathy in the misguided belief that there are no evidence-based peer reviewed publications.
The first example is an empathy intervention so short that it passed the Institutional Review Board (IRB) criteria for the use of human subjects. The study was complete before people had a chance to drop out. An advertisement went out for people to receive a complimentary, free screening and short intervention for “problem drinking.” In fact, only problem drinkers responded.
The people were divided randomly into groups and given either an immediate check up with confrontational counseling that directed them to stop drinking; or the subjects were given a check up with motivational interviewing that used client-centered counseling and did not try counsel changing the client’s behavior, but in the manner of motivational interviewing explored the person’s motives with him or her. Motivational interviewing employs empathic methods of listening and questioning and, in this example, becomes a proxy for empathy.
Strictly speaking, the counselor facilitated a dicussion with the client of what might happen if the client either did or did not stop (reduce) drinking. A third group of clients was wait-listed, for control, without intervention. Motivational interviewing is a client-centered intervention that relies on empathic listening, questioning, and responding.
Both groups that received intervention resulted in a 57% reduction in drinking within six weeks, and the result was sustained at 1 year. However, there was one dramatic finding. The lead researcher and author (William Miller) reports: “Therapist styles did not differ in overal impact on drinking, but a single therapist behavior was predictive (r = .65) of 1-year outcome such that the more the therapist confronted, the more the client drank.”[i]
This bears repeating: the more confrontational the counselor, the more the client drank. If one starts with a confrontational approach rather than empathy, one is headed for trouble.
In another study, perspective taking was practiced in which the other person was imagined to be a neighbor or a member of one’s own community rather than a stranger.[ii] This examines empathic interpretation, though the study does not use that terminology. Practice perspective taking, it improves.
Other practitioners have developed exercises that focus on specific groups such as doctors of individuals with autism. This expands empathic understanding, though, once again, the terminology is different. Other experiments conduct explicit training in mentalizing, specifically, teaching participants in the training about associations between target facial expressions and emotions.[iii]
In a separate study, a large meta analysis by the Cochrane Library that reviewed fifty-nine peer-reviewed studies with 13,342 participants of a motivational interviewing intervention based on empathy for substance abuse over against other active interventions or no intervention and produced a similar result: motivational interviewing helped people cut down on drugs and alcohol.[iv]
Still, the debate goes on.
Is the empathic questioning, the back-and-forth conversation, in the motivational interview that causes something (attitude, hope, fear, and so on) in the client to shift? Or do people convince themselves? Or do they just get better informed? Or do they stop blaming themselves and feel better, and so they “self medicate” less with alcohol or street drugs?
Lots of questions. No easy answers. Yet when something is so effective across so many studies and researchers are still skeptical, then one has to say: “Okay, skepticism is proper and scientific. Yet nothing is wrong here; but there is something missing—empathy.”
Let’s do the numbers.
Evidence shows that those who train and practice being empathic succeed in expanding their empathy. Educational programs that target empathy have a demonstrably positive effect on empathy skills, according to peer reviewed studies.[v]
Another case in point: a meta analysis of 17 empathy nursing courses in an educational context indicated statistically significant improvement in empathy scores in 11 of the 17 studies (and non statistically significant improvements in the other 6). Similar positive outcomes were reported when medical students, training to be doctors, were included. When nurses and medical students work at practicing empathy; and they get better at it. How about that.[vi]
A disturbing factoid: The empathy of persons studying to become physicians peaks in the third year of medical school according to measures applied periodically (as reported by Dr. M. Hojat and his colleagues at Thomas Jefferson University).[vii] Empathy expands; but then it seems to contract. The suspicion is that the burnout occurs in the “college of hard knocks.”
Use it or lose it? The stereotype of the harried medical doctor, seeing twenty or thirty patients a day, is increasingly accurate. As the MD (or other health care professional) is pushed down into survival mode, empathy is not improved or expanded. Hear me say it, and not for the last time, the things that make us good at the corporate transformation of American medicine, improving productivity and efficiency, do not expand our empathy. This does not mean that empathy and efficiency are mutually exclusive. It means we have to get better at balancing quantity and quality in both business and empathy.
In another example, training sessions directed at aggressive adolescent girls in a residential treatment center showed the benefits of expanded affective empathy. Affective empathy is the automatic dimension of empathy (“empathic receptivity” in my definition) that is perhaps hardest to influence.[viii] Parental effectiveness training (PET) was demonstrated to move the participants from below facilitative on the Truax Accurate Empathy Scale up to or beyond the facilitative level. “Facilitative” means knowing how to get things done. That is, the outcome is that the parent’s empathic effectiveness was expanded.[ix]
The effectiveness of empathy training is not limited to the affective dimension. A team at the University of Toronto produced a meta analysis of twenty-nine articles, using seven different approaches to empathy training. All the studies except two (93%) had positive outcomes, improving the cognitive component of empathy (86%). These studies were distributed as follows: education (24%), nursing (14%), therapy (7%), medicine (21%), social work (3%), psychology (7%), human service (7%), couples (10%) and divorcees (3%). Regardless of the training method, individuals expand their empathy when they practice or engage in effortful training.[x]
In another study, some 42 couples involved in a romantic relationship completed a five week empathy training program. The change in empathy was assessed by measured analyses of variance. The assessment reproduced the positive results of earlier findings. The training produced reliably increased empathic interaction between the partners. Scores on three empathic measures improved over a follow up six month period.[xi]
Further evidence that empathy is trainable is available in “The Roots of Empathy” (ROE). This is a formal program developed by Mary Gordon and colleagues in Canada.
First started in 1996 and introduced into U.S. schools in 2007, the ROE program has been featured on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the USA. ROE aims to build more peaceful and caring communities by expanding empathy in children.[xii]
The program targets elementary school classes, and consists of weekly visits to the class room by a new born baby and the baby’s mother for an entire school year. The group sits in a circle and the mom and baby interact, accompanied by a conversation about the life of the baby, biologically, psychologically, and socially.
The empathy lessons are elementary—unless you do not happen to have ever been exposed to a baby or the empathic care of one. Babies cry when they are hungry or wet or cold; they coo and gurgle and giggle when they are content and happy.
Some lessons are elementary; some, sophisticated, engaging with human development, of which the baby is Exhibit A, as the baby grows throughout the school year.
The roots of empathy are present in front of the class: the baby. The powerful presence of the baby calls forth the emotional resonance, natural curiosity, and wonder of the children. The baby provides the empathy lessons, in effect being the teacher. The baby provides the opening for conversations with the children about human development, socialization, and building a community. The vast majority of human beings are naturally inspired to care for a baby. Whether people know how to deliver such care effectively is a separate issue, requiring separate training. A complex species, these humans: human beings are naturally empathic just as they are also naturally aggressive.
At the heart of this kindergarten through 8th grade program is the goal of dialing down aggressive behavior patterns in children at an early age, in particular, curbing bullying (about which more in an entire chapter below). For example, roughly 160,000 children miss school every day “due to fear of an attack or intimidation by other students,” according to the National Education Association.
The program also documents an 11% improvement in standardized achievement tests for the class that is exposed to the Roots of Empathy intervention.[xiii] This is definitely not a predictable result. It should put us in touch with the humbling sense that there are many things that we do not even know we do not know.
When kids get the empathy to which they are entitled, they study harder and work smarter. When bullying is reduced, kids are less fearful, are less distracted, have more fun, and are able to study. When they study harder and smarter, they get improved scores.
The results of the program are “over the top” positive; and since this is the age of evidence-based everything, the program also spend a lot of cycles gathering key metrics on the results of the roots of empathy. A randomized control trial was conducted.
Findings indicated that children who had participated in the program compared to children who had not, were more advanced in their social and emotional understanding on all dimensions assessed. These included emotional understanding, perspective-taking, peer acceptance, classroom supportiveness, pro-social behavior and characteristics. Concomitant reductions in aggressive behaviors and increases in pro-social behaviors (e.g., helping, sharing, cooperating) were noted.
In particular, teachers rated three child (student) behavior outcomes (physical aggression, indirect aggression, and pro-social behavior). The Roots of Empathy program had statistically significant and replicated beneficial effects on all three child behavior outcomes.[xiv]
Peer reviewed research is compelling, but equally compelling are market dynamics: organizations are voting with their dollars that empathy is trainable.
People with chronic life style diseases such as hypertension (high blood pressure), type 2 diabetes, congestive heart failure, asthma, and so on, enjoy statistically favorable outcomes when their physicians show empathy—a fancy way of saying people “get better.”
Relying on such evidence, a company called “Empathetics” has been founded to train medical doctors in expanding their empathy.
Using intellectual property developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, affiliated with Harvard University, Empathetics, Inc. trains physicians in expanding their empathy through the use of biofeedback.
The CEO, Helen Riess, MD, delivered a Ted Talk about the value of empathy in health care.[xv] Dr. Riess and her colleagues at Mass General performed a meta analysis of the effects of empathy on all kinds of diseases.
Dr. Riess (and her colleagues) report on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in adult patients, in which the patient-clinician relationship was systematically monitored and healthcare outcomes were either objective (e.g., blood pressure) or validated subjective measures (e.g., pain scores). Those doctors (and related professionals) that scored higher on the empathy screening tests had demonstrably better patient outcomes than those with lower empathy scores.
Three trials included patients with diabetes, two included patients with osteoarthritis. Other disorders included fibromyalgia, oncology, lower respiratory infection, osteoarthritis, hypertension, smoking, somatic complaints, and asthma. The median patient sample size was 279 (range: 85 to 7,557). That’s a lot of people.
In summary, empathic doctoring produces favorable results. Patients get better compared with those whose doctors who do not score as well on the applied empathy scale. A word of caution. Correlation points to a significant path to improved outcome through empathic relatedness, but, at least in the context of this study, correlation is not causation.
Using the language of evidence-based medicine is trending. The “effect size” of empathy is so large that it overwhelms any confounding variables that might be hiding beneath the surface of experience. Thus, empathy fits right in with the trend. The results are compelling. Applying empathy in interacting with the vast majority of people is like using penicillin to treat the vast majority of significant bacterial infections. Applying empathy in interacting with people is like using a parachute when jumping out of an airplane. If you don’t do it, you are headed for trouble.
Common factor, empathy, in social healing practices
Psychotherapy is regarded as an example of a social healing practice. Psychotherapy is a conversation for possibility between two persons, one of whom is dealing with difficult personal issues and emotions and another person who is committed to making a difference through empathy.
Experience shows that physical disorders, injuries, and lesions get elaborated psychosocially. This is not just hypochondria or imaginary disorders that are “in someone’s head.” This is lower back pain, migraines, life style disorders such as type 2 diabetes, asthma, and irritable bowel that are aggravated by job, family, and relationship issues (conflicts, stresses, upsets) in a person’s life. Nutrition and exercise are behavioral practices that positively affect health, but can be difficult to influence.
People have different ways of expressing their pain and suffering. When an investigation of the person’s life indicates that non-biological factors are contributing to the person’s decline or distress, then it is useful to engage an alternative point of view on pain and suffering. It is useful to undertake an inquiry without making too many assumptions that one knows what is actually going on. It is useful to have a conversation for possibility.
The first person to undertake such an inquiry of whom we have any record was named “Socrates.” His student, Plato, wrote down what Socrates had to say, the most famous statement of which was that he knew only one thing: “I know that I do not know.” Socratic’s approach was so powerful that he was able to undertake fundamental inquiries that challenged his own inauthenticities and those of the persons with whom he engaged in dialogue. His questioning led to insights about basic values of truth, right and wrong, pleasure and enjoyment, and the organization of the community. The example of Socrates inspired talk therapists of all kinds—not to mention religious leaders, politicians of integrity, and educators in diverse disciplines.
The word “empathy” does not occur in Plato’s dialogues with Socrates, who instead spoke of being a “midwife” of ideas. When a friend of mine read this account of Socrates as a midwife, he shared with me an anecdote from when he was a medical student. He was walking through the hospital maternity department one evening after class. As he passed an open door, one of the patient’s called out to him. She was in labor and she asked his help. As he told me candidly, at that time in his medical training, he knew nothing about childbirth. Thus, as far as he was concerned, the qualification of Socratic ignorance was satisfied.
My friend asked the woman how he could help. She asked to hold his hand. He thought to himself, “Now this I know how to do!” He held her hand for awhile. She pushed and pushed. The result was a healthy baby boy. How or why the woman was left alone, and what further help arrived was not specified.
My friend cited this as an example of empathic understanding that just shows up spontaneously. In his recollection this was an example of empathy at a moment of crisis to which no words were adequate. I would say the woman was training him in being empathic, and the empathy lesson worked just fine.
Socrates did not claim to produce original knowledge himself. But he acted as a midwife for others, who were trying to give birth to sustainable, viable knowledge. In terms of empathic understanding, Socrates exemplified the commitment to new possibilities as opposed to conformity. Socrates made the case for dwelling in the comfort-zone stretching, discomfort of open-ended inquiry in the face of “being right.” He helped his dialogue partners give birth to ideas of their own and distinguish those ideas that are viable from those that are still-born.
Socrates enjoyed a special relationship with his students and colleagues. He had a special rapport that was a combination ofidealization and affection that set him apart from many of the other teachers of his time, called “Sophists.” The latter were masters of argumentation and rhetoric for hire.
The sophists were perhaps the original purveyors of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” Socrates’ relationship with the sophists in the community was not positive. He spoke truth to power in such a way that those in power were deeply threatened. Some of those in authority came to fear and hate him.
Eventually Socrates was indicted and convicted, in a trial of questionable merit, of a crime against the state, corrupting the youth. For reasons that are still controversial today, Socrates decided to drink the hemlock instead of fleeing into exile, becoming a martyr to prejudice and political intrigue.
Nevertheless, the principles that Socrates espoused have become the basis for talk therapy—and overcoming resistance to empathy. To engage in therapy with human beings in their struggle with emotional pain and suffering requires: providing a gracious and generous listening and an authentic human response; inquiry into possibility and open-ended questioning; an alliance between the therapist and client against the disorder and suffering against which the client is struggling; and an understanding of cultural context and community.
Amid an alphabet soup of therapeutic approaches today, the Socratic method of inquiry stands out as a common factor. It is challenging to try to find something in common between cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), eye movement desensitization routine (EMDR), rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), psychodynamic therapy, psychoanalysis, existential and humanistic psychotherapy, and so on.
“Common factor” is an idea given credibility by Jerome and Julia Frank in their book on Persuasion and Healing.[xvi] The Franks debunk not only psychoanalysis, but also many of the alternative therapeutic approaches. The Franks’ position is that the beneficial results of therapy are a function of persuasion and suggestion. The therapist is applying his or her own empathic and emotionally generous personality in the context of the trusted relationship, committed to healing, to persuade the client to alter his habitual life practices in the direction of behaviors that are adaptive, accommodating, and empowering. The hypnotists called it “the rapport”; modern practitioners, “the therapeutic alliance.”
However, the point here is not to back into an advertisement for empathy. Rather the point is to look at what actually happens in stage one of therapy whether it is CBT, DBT, or one of the diverse talk therapies. Each of these interventions, after establishing a framework around schedule and fee, takes steps to deepen and expand the client’s “in touchness with” his or her own experiences. In DBT this is called “mindfulness”; in psychoanalysis, “free association”; in CBT and REBT, identifying and “interrupting the pathogenic thought”; in existential-humanistic therapy and ACT, “radical acceptance” of what’s so.
This “getting in touch with” is also the first step in becoming more empathic, and so highly relevant to empathy training. One has to be in touch with one’s own experiences in order to appreciate how the other person shows up in one’s vicarious experiences of that other person. In short, empathy is a common factor shared by virtually all approaches to talk therapy.
The problem is that grouping empathy with “common factors” has become a way of dismissing empathy. All the interventions share empathy. It occurs on all sides of the multi-dimensional equation, and so empathy itself cancels out. Empathy falls out of the equation—and out of the discussion.
I suggest an alternative point of view.
What if empathy were the very process that was creating the benefit—and the very equation itself—for each of these supposedly distinct interventions? What if empathy were the very thing that was creating the clearing for EMDR, ACT, and so on, to be effective in the person’s shifting out of stuckness, attachment to suffering, emotional disregulation, self-defeating behavior, or repetitive enactment?
What if empathy was not the idle wheel, falling out of the equation, but the drive shaft? What if the techniques of CBT, DBT, ACT, EMDR, and so on, were themselves so much formal scaffolding, providing a ritual framework for the dynamics of the empathic relatedness to have its effect?
Following the baton or dancing light in EMDR would be something to keep the client distracted while he was verbally expressing his experience of the trauma into the gracious listening of the therapist.
Filling out the paperwork, the surveys, and the homework of CBT would be so much busy work designed to keep the client’s mind off of his anxiety and depression for long enough for the therapist’s empathic responses to the client’s issues to have an impact.
The breathing in and out of mindfulness, literally a metaphor for empathy as oxygen for the soul, would be a useful holding pattern enabling the client to get in touch with his experience so he can communicate it to the therapist and be “gotten” for who he is as the possibility of radical acceptance in empathic understanding.
The “tough love” of DBT and the group skills back-and-forth would be a useful distraction for the client’s intolerable emotions until the therapist was either able to get it right with his empathic interpretation or the client exhausted the payer’s twelve approved sessions. Then, in every case, the empathic exchange as it occurs in the conversation between therapist and the client would be what is making the difference.
More work is definitely needed on this hypothesis. Nor is it likely to be an “either/or” matter. CBT’s “trigger log,” “dysfunctional thinking report,” and “daily thought record,” are useful exercises. Highly useful. It is just that, absent empathy, the CBT process is indistinguishable from dental work—and then the client does not even do the “homework.” What would an evidence-based comparison between empathic and alternative interventions even look like?
The client comes in, and the therapist greets him with a standard human response, using all her abilities to understand and grasp that with which the other person is struggling. Is one supposed to compare being empathic with being rude? With being hard-hearted? With being confrontational? With misunderstanding the other person? With being stone-faced and unemotional? All of these are possibilities. The stone-faced option has actually been tried, but not with adults presenting for therapy. Presumably because it would be a short session. The adults would not stand for it, and most (possibly excepting the masochistic) would get up and walk out.
However, it has been tried with infants in the context of attachment studies. When infants are briefly presented with a “still face,” a blank face from which emotion has been removed on the part of care-takers, who are usually warm and welcoming, the infants become noticeably upset. Some start to fuss; others, to cry. So do most people, whether in personal or experimental situations such as being on “candid camera.” Babies and children of tender age are people, too, and I suggest that their response is an example of a standard human one, albeit without any grammatical use of language, and typical of what one might expect from adults.
What is clear is that an overwhelming number and diversity of psychotherapy approaches engage in the use of empathy. This is so even when these interventions allow empathy subsequently to fall out of the equation as a “common factor.”
Even if the approach in question devalues empathy as a narrow psychological mechanism, it has to endorse its use, because when empathy is absent, generally, positive outcomes are also absent. Those few interventions that devalue empathy—electro shock therapy (ECT), shaming, jail, capital punishment, collective shunning—begin by paying it rhetorical lip service. The result? The amount of aggregated experience that indicates that empathy is an effective intervention is vast and arguably sufficient to overcome any hidden, confounding variables.
Judgments based on clinical practice, tacit knowledge, and deep life experience will continue to have a essential role; however, these need to be qualified by the best available evidence. As noted, the issue is that there are some interventions such as penicillin and using a parachute when jumping out of an airplane that seem to limit or even defy the gold standard. It would be unethical not to give someone penicillin if they were infected with an infection serious enough to require such treatment, since it is a matter of historical accident that penicillin was invented prior to the “evidence based” paradigm shift. And, as regards using a parachute, that case is the reduction to absurdity of not using common sense as a criteria in deciding what counts as evidence. What is going on here? The answer bears repeating for emphasis: The effect size is so large that it outweights and overwhelms any hidden confounding factors and so rises to the level of evidence (without quotation marks). [xvii]
The “effect size” is a function of the facts—the evidence—that there are so many examples and so much experience that penicillin works—that parachutes work—that the risk of one’s over-looking some other confounding variable is vanishingly small. It really was the penicillin, not (say) the effects of the alignmnet of the planets hidden behind the penicillin.
Likewise, with empathy. The use of empathy in human relations is demonstrably so effective in the medical and behavioral health world in question that not to apply empathy would be like not prescribing antibiotics against a bacterial infection. Empathy has been effective in shifting the suffering and transforming the psychic pain throughout history. The criticism of empathy has usually been that it results in burnout and compassion fatigue. But penicillin, too, has to be properly dosed, and people allergic to it excluded, or the results will be unpredictable.
In conclusion, the critical path lies through empathy training: empathy is not an on-off switch but a dial/tuner that requires training to get it just right. Examples of peer-reviewed publications exist in which empathy was shown to be effective (in comparison with less empathy) in correlating with favorable outcomes in diabetes, cholesterol, and the common cold (?!) and are cited in the bibliography (and will be further engaged in Chapter Six of Empathy Lessons).[xviii] Expect this work to expand and gain traction in other areas such as psychiatry and cognitive behavioral therapy.
In short, not to begin with empathy would be like jumping out of the airplane without a parachute or not providing penicillin when the infection was bacterial. If you are jumping out of an airplane, use a parachute; if engaging with struggling, suffering humans, use empathy.
[i] W.R. Miller, R.G. Benefield, J.S. Tonigen. (1993). Enhancing motivation for change in problem drinking: a controlled comparison of two therapist styles, Journal of Consultative Clinical Psychology, June; 61 (3): 455-61: 455.
[ii] Jay S. Coke, Gregory Batson, Katherine McDavis. (1978). Empathic mediation of helping: A two-stage model, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36(7):752–766. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.36.7.752; Mark H. Davis, Laura Conklin, Amy Smith, Carol Luce. (1996). Effect of perspective taking on the cognitive representation of persons: A merging of self and other, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 70(4), Apr 1996: 713–726.
[iii] Ofer Golan and Simon Baron-Cohen. (2006). Systemizing empathy: Teaching adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism to recognize complex emotions using interactive multimedia, Development and Psychopathology 18, 2006: 591–617. DOI: 10.10170S0954579406060305; J. Hadwin, S. Baron-Cohen, P. Howlin, and K. Hill. (1997). Does teaching theory of mind have an effect on the ability to develop conversation in children with autism? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 27: 519–537. DOI:10.1023/A:102582600 9731.
[iv] Geir Smedslund, Rigmor C. Berg, Karianne T. Hammerstrom, Asbjorn Steiro, Kari A Leiknes, Helene M Dahl, Kjetil Karlsen. (2011). Motivation interviewing for substance abuse, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, May 11, 2011, Issue 5: CD 008063. DOI: 10.1002/12651858.CD008063.pub2.
[v] C.T. Ozcan, F. Oflaz, B. Bakir. (2012). The effect of a structured empathy course on the students of a medical and a nursing school, International Nursing Review, Vol. 59, Issue 4, December 2012: 532–538. DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-7657.2012.01019.x.
[vi] Scott Brunero, Scott Lamont, Melissa Coates. (2010). A Review of empathy education in nursing, Nursing Inquiry: Vol. 17, Issue 1, March 2010: 65–74.
[vii] M. Hojat, M. J. Vergate, K. Maxwell, G. Brainard, S. K. Herrine, G.A. Isenberg. (2009). The devil is in the third year: A Longitudinal study of erosion of empathy in medical school, Academic Medicine, Vol. 84 (9): 1182–1191.
[viii] E.V. Pecukonis. (1990). A cognitive/affective empathy training program as a function of ego development in aggressive adolescent females, Adolescence, Vol. 25: 59–76.
[ix] Mark E. Therrien. (1979). Evaluating empathy skill training for parents, Social Work, Vol. 24, no. 5 (Sep 1979): 417–19.
[x] Tony Chiu, Ming Lam, Klodiana Kolomitro, Flanny C. Alamparambil. (2011). Empathy training: Methods, evaluation practices, and validity, Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, Vol. 7, No. 16: 162–200.
[xi] J..J. Angera and E. Long. (2006). Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of an empathy training program for couples in marriage and romantic relationship, Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, Vol. 5(1): 1–26.
[xii] PBS staff reporter. (2013). Using babies to decrease aggression and prevent bullying. PBS News Hour: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/using-babies-to-decrease-aggression-prevent-bullying/
[xiii] PBS staff reporter 2013.
[xiv] Mary Gordon. (2005). The Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child. New York/Toronto: The Experiment (Thomas Allen Publishers): 250–256.
[xv] Helen Riess. (2013). The power of empathy, TEDxMiddlebury: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=baHrcC8B4WM [checked on March 23, 2017]. See also: John M. Kelley, Gordon Kraft-Todd, Lidia Schapira, Joe Kossowsky, Helen Riess. (2014). The influence of the patient-clinician relationship on healthcare outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials, PLOS, Vol. 9, No. 4 | e94207: 1–7 Helen Riess, John M. Kelley, Robert W. Bailey, Emily J. Dunn, and Margot Phillips. (2012). Empathy training for resident physicians: A randomized controlled trial of a neuroscience-informed curriculum, Journal General Internal Medicine. 2012 Oct; Vol. 27(10): 1280–1286. DOI: 10.1007/s11606-012-2063-z.
[xvi] Jerome D. Frank and Julia B. Frank. (1981). Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1991. I express appreciation to Danny Levine, MD, for calling my attention to this outstanding contribution from the Franks. Also see my A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, and Recovery (2015) for a critique of the psychopharmacological (psychiatric) approach in chapter three “Plato, Not Prozac!” (a title that I borrow from Lou Marinoff (2000), who I hereby acknowledge for his contribution).
[xvii] Howick 2011: 5, 11.
[xviii] Howick 2011; M. Hojat et al, 2011; John M. Kelley, Helen Riess et al 2014); David P. Rakel, Theresa J. Hoeft, Bruce P. Barrett, Betty A. Chewning, Benjamin M. Craig, and Min Niu. (2009). Practitioner empathy and the Duration of the common cold, Family Medicine 41(7): 494–501.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy is good for your health and well-being (The evidence)
Empathy is good for your health and well-being: Empathy is on a short list of stress reduction practices including meditation (mindfulness), Tai Chi, and Yoga. Receiving empathy in the form of a gracious and generous listening is like getting a spa treatment for the soul. But do not settle for metaphors.
For evidence-based research on empathy, empathy and stress reduction, and empathy training you may start by googling: Antoni et al. 2011; Ciaramicoli 2016; Del Canale et al 2012; Farrow et al. 2007; Irwin et al. 2012; Maes 1995, 1999; Pollack et al. 2002; Rakel et al. 2009; Segerstrom and Miller 2004; Slavich et al. 2013 [this list is not complete].
You do not have to buy the book, Empathy Lessons, to get the research, but if you would like more detail see especially Chapters Four and Six in Empathy Lessons (click here to get book from Amazon).
[Also included are chapters on the Top 30 Tips and Techniques for Expanding Empathy, Overcoming Resistance to Empathy, Empathy Breakdowns, Empathy as the New Love, Empathy versus Bullying, and more.]
The healing powers of stress reduction are formidable. Expanding empathy reduces stress; and reducing stress expands empathy. A positive feedback loop is enacted. Expanding empathy expands well-being. Here empathy is both the end and the means.
A substantial body of evidence-based science indicates that empathy is good for a person’s health. This is not “breaking news” and was not just published yesterday. We don’t need more data, we need to start applying it: we need expanded empathy.
Evidence-based research demonstrates the correlation between health care providers who deliver empathy to their patients and favorable healthcare
outcomes. What is especially interesting is that some of these evidence-based studies specifically exclude psychiatric disorders and include mainline medical outcomes such as reduced cholesterol, improved type 2 diabetes, and improvement in related “life style” disorders.
Generalizing on this research, a small set of practices such as receiving empathy, meditation (mindfulness), yogic meditation, and Tai Chi, promote well-being by reducing inflammation. These practices are not reducible to empathy (or vice versa), but they all share a common factor: reduced inflammation. These anti-inflammatory interventions have been shown to make a difference in controlled experiments, evidence-based research, and peer-reviewed publications.
Using empathy in relating to people is a lot like using a parachute if you jump out of an airplane or getting a shot of penicillin if one has a bacterial infection. The evidence is overwhelming that such a practice is appropriate and useful in the vast majority of cases. The accumulated mass of decades of experience also counts as evidence in a strict sense. Any so-called hidden or confounding variables will be “washed out” by the massive amount of evidence that parachutes and penicillin produce the desired main effect.
Indeed it would be unethical to perform a double blind test of penicillin at this time, since if a person needed the drug and it were available it would be unethical not to give it to him. Yes, there are a few exceptions – some people are allergic to penicillin. But by far and in large, if you do not begin with empathy in relating to other people, you are headed for trouble.
Empathy is at the top of my list of stress reduction methods, but is not the only item on it. Empathy alongwith mindfulness (a form of meditation), Yoga, Tai Chi, spending time in a sensory deprivation tank (not otherwise discussed here), and certain naturally occurring steroids, need to be better known as interventions that reduce inflammation and restore homeostatic equilibrium to the body according to evidence based research.
Biology has got us humans in a bind, since the biology did not evolve at the same rate as our human social structures. When bacteria attack the human body, the body’s immune system mounts an inflammatory defense that sends macrophages to the site of the attack and causes “sickness behavior” in the person. The infected person takes to bed, sleeps either too much or too little, has no appetite (or too much appetite), experiences low energy, possibly has a fever, including the “blahs,” body aches, and flu-like symptoms. This response has evolved over millions of years, and is basically healthy as the body conserves its energy and fights off the infection using its natural immune response.
Now fast forward to modern times. This natural response did not envision the stresses of modern life back when we were short stature, proto-humanoids inhabiting the Serengeti Plain and defending ourselves against large predators. Basically, the body responds in the same way to the chronic stressors of modern life—the boss at work is a bully, the mortgage is over-due, the children are acting out, the spouse is having a midlife crisis—and the result is “sickness behavior”—many of the symptoms of which resemble clinical depression—but there is no infection, just inflammation.
The inflammation becomes chronic and the body loses its sensitivity to naturally occurring anti-inflammatory hormones, which would ordinarily kick in to “down regulate” the inflammation after a few days. Peer reviewed papers demonstrate that interventions such as empathy reduce biological markers of inflammation and restore equilibrium. This is also a metaphor. When an angry—“inflamed”—person is listened to empathically—is given a “good listening” as I like to say—the person frequently calms down and regains his equilibrium.
Empathy migrates onto the short list of inflammation reducing interventions. The compelling conclusion is that empathy is good for your well-being.
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(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
![Urizen [old spirit]from the front page of Copy G (c. 1818) of The Book of Urizen currently held by the Library of Congress[](https://louagosta.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/350px-urizen_by_william_blake.jpg?w=120&h=80&crop=1)
The case of Dr Know-it-all: Empathy gives us our humanity
You do not need a philosopher to tell you what empathy is. What then do you need? How about a folktale, a fairy tale, a narrative, a Märchen?
Rather than start with a definition of empathy, my proposal is to start by telling a couple of stories, in which empathy (and its breakdown) plays a crucial role. Both stories are anonymous folktales from the collection edited by the Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The distilled wisdom of the ages accumulated in traditional anonymous narratives will do nicely. Both stories include a significant amount of humor, underscoring that humor and empathy are closely related (on humor and creating a community see also Ted Cohen’s book Jokes (1999)).
How so? In both humor and empathy one crosses the boundary between self and other while preserving that boundary. In both humor and empathy one builds a community, even if only of two people, by transiently, temporarily weakening the boundary between self and other, then reestablishing it. In the case of humor, the boundary crossing is loaded with an element of aggression, violation of community standards, or sexuality—the source of the tension that is released in laughter—whereas with empathy proper the boundary is traversed with a respectful acknowledgement and communication of mutual humanity, whether as high spirits, suffering, or community expanding affinity and affection.
I hasten to add that while the philosopher does not necessarily have a better mastery of empathy than any parent, teacher, doctor, nurse, first responder, therapist, flight attendant, business person with customers, professional with clients, and so on, the philosopher is useful—and at times indispensable—in clarifying distinctions, analyzing concepts, and disentangling misunderstandings about empathy.
Thus, the fairy tale (Märchen) of Doctor Know-it-all is a perfect place to start a philosophical inquiry into
Image credit:
John Thomas Smith / Wellcome V0020405.jpg (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0)
empathy. An uneducated, illiterate, hungry peasant named “Herr Crabb” delivers a load of wood to a doctor.[1] Crabb observes the doctor eating a sumptuous lunch; and Crabb asks him how he (Crabb) might improve his station by becoming a doctor. The doctor tells him to sell his ox and cart and buy an ABC book, buy a fine suit of clothes, and put a sign in front of his hovel that says “Dr Know-it-All.” (Note that the English “Know-it-all” is a translation of the German “allwissend,” which is also the standard translation of the divine attribute “omniscient.”)
Scene two: thieves steal the treasure from the rich noble lord of the manor on the hill. Dr Know-it-all is called in to consult on the case, solve the crime, and recover the treasure.
Now getting a good meal is a recurring theme in this story, and Crabb insists on beginning the consulting engagement by coming to dinner. The nobleman, Crabb, and Crabb’s wife, sit down to a fine three-course meal served by the nobleman’s servants. The first servant brings in the first covered dish, and Crabb says, “That is the first.” Likewise with the other two courses: “That is the second” and “That is the third.”
Now the servants are starting to get worried, because, as is sometimes the case with such crimes, the theft was an inside job, and the servants were ones who did it. “This Crabb guy seems to be onto us,” say the servants to one another between courses. Meanwhile, the nobleman challenges Crabb to say what is under the third covered dish, testing Crabb’s credential as Dr Know-it-all. Of course, Crabb has no idea, and in frustration, he gestures as if to slap himself in the head and says his own name “Oh, Crabb!” Right! The meal is of crab cakes.
Now the servants are really worried—this guy really does know-it-all. The servants create a pretext to take Crabb aside and confess their theft to him, telling him that they will tell him where the treasure is hidden and even give him an extra fee in addition if only he does not identify them as the culprits. An agreement is reached. Crabb shows the lord where his treasure is hidden, collects ample fees from all sides, does not betray the servants, who, after all, are fellow suffers of social injustice like Crabb himself, resulting in the latter’s becoming rich and famous. By the end of the story, living into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as his performance catches up with his reputation, Crabb does indeed become Dr Know-it-all.
This is the perfect narrative with which to begin an engagement with a group of philosophers and thinkers who propose answers about the core issues in the study of empathy. One could let one’s scholarly egoism result in a narcissistic injury; but a better response would be self-depreciating humor. The occupational hazard of over-intellectualization looms large whenever philosophers sharpen the cutting edge of their analytic tools. And there is nothing wrong with that as such, but the approach does have its risks and constraints.
Philosophically speaking, the peasant Herr Crabb, Dr Know-it-all, is the personification of our Socratic ignorance. Socrates’ fame was assured when the Oracle at Delphi—a kind of latter day Wikileaks—proclaimed him as the wisest person in the world, because he acknowledged (i.e., knew) that he did not know.
Socrates was a commitment to pure inquiry; and that has remained a valid approach to philosophizing in such thinkers as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Hume in his skeptical phase, and the Kant of the transcendental dialectic. Nevertheless, the commitment of this review is to provide both questions and answers about empathy, in a Socratic spirit, even if those answers then become the basis for further debate, argument, and inquiry.
Meanwhile, the story of Dr Know-it-all is meant to be told with a totally strait face. Notwithstanding the relatively primitive state of medicine in 1804, one still had to go to the university, even if only the better to understand how the planets influenced disease as in influenza. Nevertheless, it is a depreciating and mocking guidance that the doctor gives in the opening scene to the peasant to sell his ox and get a sign that says “Dr Know-it-all.” The peasant follows the advice.
This is the first empathic encounter in the story. Crabb brings the mind of a beginner to the relationship. In a “once upon a time” moment, this is Crabb’s Socratic ignorance, though of course the story does not use such language. Crabb often seems to be thinking about his next meal, and, in that limited sense, he has a desire—to be well fed like the ruling class. However, in a deeper sense, Crabb is without desire and without memory. That is empathy lesson number one in this story: bring the innocence of a beginner’s mind to one’s relationships. That is the readiness assessment for empathy: be open to possibility, no matter how unlikely or counter-intuitive.
Next, in a series of seeming coincidences, Crabb makes simple, ambiguous statements such as: “That is the first one,” “That is the second one,” and so on. These statements become ambiguous Gestalt figures like the famous duck-rabbit, which spontaneously reverses between one figure and another, depending on one’s perspective. Is it a duck or is it a rabbit? (For an image of the duck-rabbit see Wittgenstein 1951: 194 (or Google it).) Likewise, in the folktale, does the statement refer to the dish of food being served or to the answer to the discussion question, who is the thief? Yes.
This is top-down cognitive empathy; take a walk in the other person’s shoes. The servants employ top down empathy—imagining that they are the consultant(s) brought in to solve the mystery of the missing treasure, taking Crabb’s perspective, putting themselves in his shoes. But their empathy misfires. It doesn’t work. Instead of taking a walk with the other person’s personality—Crabb is after all a poor peasant like the servants (but they do not necessarily know that)—they project their own issue onto Crabb.
Their issue? The servants know who are the thieves and they have one thought too many about it. They have guilty consciences. Though they are hungry peasants in their own way, they identify with the values of the dominant class. When authentic human relatedness misfires, then one gets the psychological mechanism of projection. The thieves guiltily project their knowledge onto Crabb. They imagine that Crabb knows their secret. Here the servants’ empathy is in breakdown. The readers learn about empathy by means of its misfiring, breaking down, going astray, and failing.
Taking a step back, the fundamental empathic moment is so simple as to be hidden in plain view. Crabb’s empathy tells him what the servants are experiencing. Fear. They are afraid. If Crabb identifies them as the thieves, they will be hanged. The servants actually say that to Crabb in the story.
Note this is a world circa 1804 in Central Europe, in which there is a different set of rules for judging servants and noblemen. When a nobleman steals, it is called rent, taxation, or user fees. When the servants steal, it is a hanging offense. Theft remains a transgression, so the treasure must be returned. But when the hungry steal to eat, it is arguably a much less serious offense if not an actual entitlement. “Cast not the first stone: go—and sin no more.”
So the story also belongs to a type in which the servant outwits the master, a type of which The Marriage of Figaro is perhaps the most famous example. (See also the narrative approach of Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There, a major motion picture that features Peter Sellers as a naive gardener educated only by watching TV.) In our narrative, integrity is restored at multiple levels. The treasure is returned, the peasant Crabb and his wife acquire the means to eat well going forward, and the servants escape an unfair punishment.
This highly subversive message must be wrappered in humor, so as not to so threaten the prevailing social hierarchy or social injustice of rigid class distinctions with violent revolution. Getting the message out overrides transforming the social order, a perhaps unrealistic expectation in the listening of the folk audience. Crabb’s empathy tells him what the servants are experiencing; his compassion tells him what to do about it—not identify the servants as the perpetrators. I do so like a happy ending, rare though those be.
The case of the young man lacking empathy
The second fairy tale is a kind of thought experiment, a condition contrary to fact. What would be the case if someone completely lacked the capacity for empathy—and how would one acquire such a capacity?
“The story of the youth who set forth to learn fear” is about a young man who is such a simpleton that he does not even experience fear.[2] It is a long and intricate story. I simplify. The folktale is a ghost story. In the story, as people are telling ghost stories, they say “it made me shudder”—a visceral sensation of “goose bumps” in German the onomatopoeic “grüseln.” This simpleton says: “I wish I knew what that was—shuddering. It sounds interesting, maybe I could make a career out of it.” His poor father is now in despair, thinking, “What am I going to do with this one?” Being charitable, we might say nothing is wrong with this young man, the protagonist in the story, but there is definitely something missing.
The father is agreeable. He apprentices the youth out to the local sexton to teach him fear. The sexton tries to scare him by dressing up in a sheet as a ghost at midnight, but the sexton breaks his leg when the youth is not scared and fights back. Thus, the youth is exiled, going on an educational journey into the world to learn visceral fear—shuddering. Having no idea what fear is, he volunteers to spend three nights in the haunted castle, from which no visitor has ever, ever returned alive.
The youth is a simpleton, but one might say, no fool. He takes with him, a knife, a turning lathe with vice grip, and a fire, the three things one is likely to need in case of an emergency. The first night he is confronted by dogs and cats with red-hot chains—the beasts of hell. He uses the knife to dispatch them. The second night he is confronted by fragmentation and dismemberment. Disconnected arms, legs, and heads fall down the chimney, and the zombie-like, quasi-men propose a game of bowling. But the heads, being elliptical, do not roll well. Fearless as usual, he uses the turning lathe to make well-rounded bowling balls, and all enjoy the game.
All the while, the youth is obsessively complaining: “I wish I knew what was shuddering. I wish I could shudder.” On the third night, pallbearers bring in a coffin with the dead body of his cousin. In a scene that authentically arouses the reader’s shuddering, the youth gets into bed with the corpse to warm it up. He succeeds. The corpse comes alive, and, not behaving in a friendly way, threatens to strangle him. But the youth is as strong as he is simple. He overpowers it. Then the old spirit appears, the old man in a long, white beard appears. They struggle. Though consistently depicted as a simpleton, the youth has a breakthrough in his intelligence. Instead of using the physical strength that has served him up until now, the youth cleverly catches the old one’s beard in the vice grip; and he thrashes him until the latter surrenders. The youth wins, and the old spirit shows the youth the treasure hard-to-attain, one third of which goes to the king, one third to the poor, and he gets to keep one third. He also gets the hand of the princess in marriage.
However, the youth has still not learned to shudder. Fear not! On the morning after his wedding night, the chambermaid hears of his persisting complaint from his wife. The chambermaid asserts that the problem is easily fixed. She takes the decorative bowl of gold fish in cold water and throws it on him, as he lies in bed still asleep. The little fish flop around. He awakes. He gets it: Goose bumps. “At last I understand shuddering!”
Fear is perhaps the most primordial and basic emotion. The flight/fight response is a function of the basic biological response of the organism to situations that threaten the integrity of our creaturely existence. The amygdala is activated, adrenalin (norepinephrine) pours into the blood stream, a visceral state of arousal of the body is mobilized that includes increased heart beat, rapid pulse, enhanced startle response, hair standing on end, and a withdrawal of blood from the surface of the skin that results in “goose bumps.” It is a thought experiment similar to riding on a beam of light, going light speed, to imagine a person who does not experience fear in the face of the fearful. Such a thought experiment might not require as much equipment as riding on a beam of light, but, in any case, it is just as rare.
However, no sooner did I pen these words, then I came across a case, in which an individual was identified who did not experience what we would conventionally call “fear.”[3]
As usual, the real world is more complex than one’s thought experiments. It turns out that the individual in question (SM-046) does experience fear in certain situations, but much less so than most “normal” people, so-called “neurotypicals.” The subjective experience of suffocation upon inhaling carbon dioxide in a controlled setting did indeed arouse panic (fear) in her. Panic, fear—close enough?
A further analysis is required to determine what parts of the interpersonal world—personal space, trust of other people, social skills—are impacted (and by how much) by damage to the amygdala. In no sense is SM “less human”; but there is something missing from her empathic repertoire. This missing capacity for fear seems to diminish her social skills and ability to relate. She does not experience vulnerability in situations that are dangerous or risky when most other people would do so, which could be problematic in avoiding injury due to everyday hazards. In that sense, she may actually resemble the simpleton-hero in the folktale, who is so impervious to what others would experience as fearsome or scary that he naively acts courageously and triumphs in the face of long odds against success.
SM does not spend three nights in a haunted castle, so her experiences cannot be compared to those of the protagonist in the folktale. Yet, in any case, physiological fear becomes a symbol of empathic, struggling humanity and its quest for self-knowledge.
The hero-simpleton tries so hard to experience fear that he is effectively defended against his own emotional life. It is ironic that the simpleton is guilty of over-intellectualizing, usually an occupational hazard of philosophers. The youth imagines that someone can tell him in a form of words what is fear as shuddering, visceral goose bumps.
This lack of feeling points to an underlying deficiency in the capability to empathize. Today we might say that this youth is “on the spectrum”—the autistic spectrum—in that he is emotionally isolated and struggles with the reciprocal communication of affect. In short, the youth has an empathy deficit.
As in all classic folktales, the youth has to go forth on a journey of exploration of both the world and of himself. He becomes a traveller on the road of life, which is the narrative of his emotional misadventures to recover his empathy—and his affective life—and become a complete human being.
This must be emphasized. The recovery of feelings is the recovery of his humanity. The youth’s journey into the world can be described in many way; but I urge that it is a journey to recover his humanity in the form of experiencing the full range of human emotions in himself and others, the basic paradigm of which is fear and the basic capacity for which is empathy.
The youth’s recovery of his ability to shudder, his emotions, and his empathy unfold as a running joke. After each increasingly creepy encounter with something most people describe as fearful, he complains, “I wish I could shudder.” This is repeated a dozen times just to make sure the audience gets the point.
As noted, the folktale, the Märchen, is a ghost story, to be told on dark October nights around Halloween. The empathy of the audience is aroused by increasingly gruesome images of dismembered bodies. The audience definitely shudders, getting the creeps, but not the protagonist. Meanwhile, the audience is taken through the three stages of overcoming over-intellectualization, overcoming resistance to empathy, and recovering his full humanity in a rich emotional life.
We retell the story, emphasizing the empathic and emotional aspects.
In the first stage of recovering one’s empathy, one must descend into the hell of one’s own lack of integrity and inauthenticities to regain access to and expand one’s humanity. The dogs and cats with red-hot collars and chains are images from hell. The assignment? One has to descend into the hell of one’s empathy breakdowns, misfirings, inauthenticities, blind spots, self-deceptions, and failures, in order to break through the refiner’s fire of self-inquiry with renewed commitment to empathy, relatedness, and community. One must clean up one’s own act, restoring integrity where it is missing in one’s own actions before carrying empathy forward to others; otherwise the attempt to recover and expand empathy is like putting butter cream frosting on a mud pie. It doesn’t work.
However, even if one cleans up one’s act, acknowledges one’s blind spots and inauthenticities, and commits to empathic relatedness, the risks of failure are significant. That one is committed to relating empathically can leave one vulnerable to the risks of burn out, compassion fatigue, or emotional fragmentation.
The second night in the castle is filled with images of dismemberment. The youth’s self is vulnerable to fragmentation.
None of the dismembered body parts matter to the youth in the way they would matter to an affectively, emotionally whole person. Ghouls and living corpses surround him, but, ontologically speaking, he is the one who is an emotional zombie. Without empathy, the individual is unrelated and isolated—emotionally dead.
The guidance of the folktale is to be persistent. Set limits with courage and humor. The youth rounds the egg-shaped heads in his turning lathe, the better to play at bowling with the now-rounded heads and the dismembered legs as pins. It works. The youth’s good sense of humor and fellow feeling serve him well in relating empathically to what would otherwise be a harrowing encounter with emotional fragmentation. The integrity of the self is sustained and expanded. Everyone has fun, and the ghouls depart with the body parts at the end of the game.
On the third night, in a scene that is really quite creepy (and in which the audience, if not the youth, learns shuddering), the coffin of his dead cousin is delivered. The youth gets into bed with the cold corpse of his cousin, charitable lad that he is, in order to warm it up—and, even more uncanny, succeeds in awaking it!
The emotions are not pleasant that have long lain dormant and “dead” and are brought back to life. The person is at risk of choking on them due to their intensity. Anger and narcissistic rage are the order of the day. The awakened corpse tries to strangle the youth, but the youth overpowers it using physical strength.
The old spirit, the old man with the long, white beard, shows up for the final struggle. The simpleton youth has a breakthrough in his intelligence. He cleverly catches the old man’s beard in his vice grip and starts wailing on him.
As noted, the old spirit yields, and, delivers the treasure-hard-to-attain—the hidden gold and the hand of the princess in marriage. But, though the missing empathy ought to have been recovered by now, for rhetorical reasons, the story continues in describing the youth as still complaining about not yet having learned how to shudder. The climax is complete; the dénouement is at hand.
The individual cannot recover his empathy—or his humanity—on his own. The other is required. A relationship with the other is indispensable. The youth has raised the curse from the haunted castle and won the hand of the fair princess, and he stops trying to shudder. That is key: he finally stops trying. He stops thinking about it—over-intellectualizing. He has a passive overcoming, letting matters be. Then the other teaches him shuddering at the first available opportunity.
The wife’s chambermaid teaches him shuddering in a pun that cleverly masks the physical and sexual innuendo, throwing the cold water and flopping gold fish, causing goose bumps, a visceral experience hard to put into words.
Now the youth is finally a whole, complete human being. The absence of the ability to shudder becomes a symbol for the absence of empathy, the ability to communicate affectively. This youth had no feelings—not even fear. Thus, in this story, in contrast to Dr Know-it-all, we are dealing with bottom up, affective empathy. The absence of the emotion of fear is an extreme paradigm, a negative ideal case, of an absence of the underlying, bottom up capacity for empathy.
Taking the interpretation up a level, the youth is ontologically cut off from the community, who share emotions empathically. Life is disclosed and matters to members of the community based on their affects and emotions.
In the narrative, empathy becomes conspicuous by its absence. This absence of empathy is equivalent to the absence of the individual’s humanity. It is only after the youth undertakes a kind of training program in recovering his empathy—and his humanity—by descending into the hell of his own blind spots and inauthenticities that he is able to experience the full range of human emotions—and, ending with a laugh, shuddering.
With the assimilation of these two pre-ontological documents, we turn to the less humorous but equally significant task of defining different methods and approaches to understanding and applying empathy. The philosophy of empathy engages with diverse philosophical methods that provide access to it.
[1] Anonymous. (1804). Dr Know-it-all, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, eds., trs. Margaret Hunt and James Stern. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972/1994: 456–457; translation modified.
[2] Anonymous. (1804). “The story of the youth who set forth to learn fear,” The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, eds., trs. Margaret Hunt and James Stern. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972/1994: 29–38; translation modified. This is a complete reworking of Lou Agosta. (1980). The recovery of feelings in a folktale, Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 1980: 287–297.
[3] See: R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, H. Damasio, A. Damasio. (1994). Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala, Nature. 372 (6507): 669–72. DOI: 10.1038/372669a0.
Image credit: Dr Know-it-all: Creative Commons: An old man in a top hat sitting in a wooden cart with wheels Wellcome V0020405.jpg
Image Credit: Otto Ubbelohde (artist) – Images of fragmentation: Märchen von einem, der auszog das Fürchten zu lernen (Public Domain)
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Review: Politics of Empathy by Anthony Clohesy
The Politics of Empathy by Anthony M. Clohesy is a compellingly original and innovative engagement with empathy in a political context.
[Anthony M. Clohesy. (2013). Politics of Empathy: Ethics, Solidarity, Recognition. Oxon, UK: Routledge. 160 pp.]
I begin by expressing my admiration and enthusiasm for Clohesy’s contribution. Encountering this straight up, occasionally understated, frequently dense, work was thrilling. For me it was a page turner, albeit in a scholarly way. I saw old things in new ways. This book changed my thinking. At the risk of a military metaphor, Clohesy’s work is like two inbound cruise missiles: the first blows off the door of conventional political thinking, the second, blows up the bunker. Not for the faint of heart.
Clohesy’s big idea is that empathy is about identity and similarity, but it is just as fundamentally about differences. Key term: empathy of differences. This provides a powerful angle on that vexing issue of empathy and ethics, which has the frustrating aspect of being a chicken and egg dilemma. Does empathy found ethics, which seems too “touchy feely”; does ethics found empathy, leaving us with the counter-intuitive sense that the “bad guys” sometimes use empathy; or do empathy and ethics develop separately, leaving us with a non-empathic ethics or a non-ethical empathy? The matter starts to spin.
Clohesy’s idea (continued): the challenging relation between ethics and empathy is that they both emerge
simultaneously in the encounter with difference – the encounter with the other individual – and the result is – politics.
I now try to motivate the discussion of this innovation of an empathy of difference and recognition from an eventual encounter with the other individual. Key term: the event of an encounter.
Speaking in the first person, when I encounter an individual who is different than I am, then I have an experience of otherness. However, every person I encounter, without exception, is different than I am, even if there are many similarities between us. The other is different. Period. And, here is the punchline, without the other individual there is no empathy. Empathy is born in otherness. Empathy is a function of otherness. Empathy emerges from and in otherness. Without the other individual there is only myself – oneself – all alone. Empathy is the one thing you cannot do all alone.
The empathy of differences emerges in encountering the other individual, who resists one’s spontaneity, initiative, and one’s action, pure and simple. This resistance creates a boundary between self and what is other. The attempt to traverse this boundary and overcome the resistance requires an expenditure of effort, force, energy. This dynamic of effort and resistance, strictly speaking, is different than violence, but resembles the “violence” of Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill (in the myth), only to have it slide down again.
Clohesy does not use the term “resistance” and he may not agree with it, but I find I need to get to the key role in Clohesy of “violence,” which is not standard violence. This expenditure of effort, energy, or reaction to resistance, is experienced as a kind of violence.
As I read Clohesy – and he is extremely subtle on this point – the encounter with otherness inevitably turns violent in some metaphysical and even mystical sense. Or more precisely was already violent. The encounter with otherness thus entails a struggle with otherness. Otherness shows up as resistance to my will.
Clohesy denies that he uses “violence” in the ordinary sense of the word as to kill someone: “My use of the term “violence” should not be misunderstood. It does not refer to how we kill and oppress each other [….] Rather, it refers to how the fragile interiority of our lives is constituted and sustained by power” (p. 85).
Clohesy writes: “My central claim is that empathy is important, not because it can eradicate our inherited capacity for violence and cruelty, or reconfigure the deep structural forces that inhibit a transition to a more ethical world, but because it can make us more aware of our violence and cruelty. Thinking of empathy in this way is important because it allows for the emergence of a space in which more ethical relationships between us can develop” (p. 67).
I agree and align: empathy expands our awareness. But if that is all, then we are in even more trouble than we imagine because we humans are an aggressive species, highly territorial, intermittently over- or under-sexed, now armed with weapons of mass destruction. Heavily armed. Absent an intervention, this is not going to go well – indeed it is not going well. Where to go from here?
Clohesy comes into his own with an empathy of recognition. With an empathy of difference, instead of identity politics, we get a politics of recognition. Though we are different, our interests, experiences, and aspirations as human beings are recognized. Our possibilities converge instead of conflict. Our opportunities align instead of clash. We are able to cooperate instead of obstruct one another. We are able to build instead of tear down.
Talking a walk in the other person’s shoes yields an empathy of differences. One discovers the otherness of the other. The shoes rarely fit right. One discovers where the shoe pinches – but the other’s shoe almost inevitably pinches at a different spot than it pinches one’s own foot, because the other foot is slightly different – longer or shorter than one’s own.
Clohesy traces the empathy of identity and difference (recognition) through nature, religion, and culture. He invokes and critiques “otherising”: the act of essentializing the identity of others. He cites Kathleen Taylor: we are hardwired for contamination – to experience contamination or a sense thereof from contact with the othered other (p. 8).
According to Clohesy, empathic experience of difference allows us to recognize others. This is the encounter with difference: feeling into the life of another person as culture (p. 30).
On a good day, the way we engage with “others” is sufficiently empathic to understand the reasons why their values, norms and practices are often so different from our own. Clohesy is clear that “understanding” is not confused with “condoning” or “agreeing” or “approving.” We must deploy a rigorous and critical empathy that challenges practices and values with which we have issue or divergences.
Nature brings with it an empathy of identity – essentializing differences which makes them difficult if not impossible to overcome.
With nature, the shadow of tribalism falls over politics – and empathy. The empathy of identity is ultimately that of proximity to family, tribe, local community. There is nothing wrong with that. It is excellent. We would be less than human without it. But it is ultimately derivative and incomplete without an empathy of difference.
Empathy of identity gives us communalism, which provides a strong internal empathy towards family and friends and those near and dear, but does not recognize the otherness of those remote – does not acknowledge the otherness of those not proximal (those who are remote) – they are not other – they are invisible – pre-other – we may think of them but we think of them in the way of not thinking of them
Clohesy properly cites evolutionary psychology as to how our first instinct is to favor those of our own tribe, those we see as ‘our own’ (p. 47). Yet when seen in the context of empathy, the violence of nature requires that we humans must engage with strangers in a spirit of recognition and solidarity, rather than distancing ourselves from them. Clohesy does not cite Martin Luther Kind but I do: “Learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” Easier said than done.
Perhaps religion can help. Regarding transcendence, Clohesy’s argument is that we can and should recognize the importance of religion without necessarily having conventional beliefs about it. He makes good use of Karen Armstrong: Religion “works” when it is appreciated in the context of myth or when it is seen in the context of unknowing. Logos could not undo, assuage, or cure human grief or find meaning in life’s suffering. For that, people turned to mythos or myth.
What then of myths? Clohesy’s is a slim volume with limited word count, but the religious and political myths are legion – mostly as echoes and allusions. The time of the mythical violence of Hobbes’s “war of all against all” or Rousseau’s State of Nature or Rawls’ Original Position. The struggle of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Freud’s band of brothers murdering the tyrant father and inventing an early version of the blessed Eucharist, Cain and Abel, are one-and-all echoed mystically.
Then there is the matter of The Event. One needs an encounter with The Other to get empathy started. This encounter takes on the quality of a logical reconstruction and even mythical Event. It is like the Big Bang in cosmology. It does not make sense to ask what happened before this Event, because the before/after distinction itself did not exist prior to the Big Bang, which is when time itself emerged, time being the source of the before/after distinction. Clohesy has a lot to say about the Event in the context of empathy and politics (cosmology does NOT come up, but maybe it should).
It’s not like there is a temporal sequence at this point. The other already has always been a synchronous aspect of oneself. If there is a myth, it is that human beings are unrelated. We are always already related. Definitely.
At this point, we (and Clohesy) are in mystical or metaphysical time (as near as I can figure out). Empathy is one thing one cannot an individual cannot do all alone. One may be the creator of one’s entire universe – life is literally but a dream – until one encounters the other – then one wakes up to the reality of the resistance of the other – the otherness of the other. I would rewrite certain passages using “resistance” rather than “violence,” but I do not claim this is the truth with a capital “T.”
For many people, life is experienced as pushing a boulder up a hill at which point the boulder slides down and has to be pushed up again (think about Camus and the Myth of Sisyphus). One works all month to put food on the table for the family and pay the rent, then next month one has to start over and do it again. For people who are born rich life is easier, and yet at some point everyone has the experience of pushing that boulder up the hill.
When pushing the boulder up the hill, it is hard to empathize with the boulder. It is easy to hate the boulder. But that hatred is already a form of negative empathy with the boulder. But in a mythical context one might discover that the boulder was made by the other or is itself the ultimate other.
Though Clohesy does not explicitly say so, I believe he would agree that empathy is the foundation of community, that is, the political community. But it is an empathy of difference, not one of identity. If you go with an empathy of identity, the result is tribalism. “I get you, man, and you get me, bro, because we are [mostly] alike.” But then there are all these different tribes – Democrats, Republicans, Progressive, Conservatives, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Quakers, all 193 member nations of the United Nations – not to mention the Chicago Cubs Baseball team.
Once again, though Clohesy does not explicitly say so, tribalism itself sets in motion a dialectic whereby each individual can belong to multiple tribes with multiple identities and affiliations. Even you get enough tribes and enough overlap between tribal identities, the notion of identity starts to dissolve into a kind of melting pot of multiculturalism or ecumenical spirituality or market place of competing political ideologies. Even if the melting pot never completely melts, it can at least become a colloidal suspension – cosmopolitanism – where the identities and differences are fine-grained enough not to subvert individual diversity or the aspiration to universally shared values.
But absent such a dialectic – for example, in traditional societies or insular communities – the empathy within the communal group works well enough but breaks down at the boundaries.
Clohesy’s response to the breakdown of the empathy of identity? He asserts that the protection of culture and the recognition of difference require an account of cosmopolitanism (informed by an empathy of difference). In turn, cosmopolitanism “is able to subvert essentialist conceptions of difference … the most toxic enemy of the politics of recognition” (p. 43).
Clohesy endorses a cosmopolitanism that recognizes others as equals and opposes committing arbitrary violence against others in a context of values disclosed to us by the empathic experience of difference (p. 44). Presumably non–arbitrary violence would be a police man stopping a home invasion by the bad guys. Presumably non-arbitrary violence would align with Max Weber’s definition of the state as having a monopoly over the legitimate use of force.
The mythico-metaphysical ontological aspects of Clohesy’s contribution emerges with his innovative application of Alain Badiou’s distinction of the Event, itself perhaps inspired by Heidegger’s Vom Ereignis. “Or, to put it differently, our constitution as ethical subjects requires experience of an Event in the form of the empathic encounter with difference” (p. 92). “…[E]mpathy is important in this respect because the experience of difference it makes possible to give form to our ethical lives by allowing us to emerge as beings aware of our finitude, but also aware that we are condemned to commit violence to realize that which is impossible” (p. 93). What could be clearer or more transparent?
Since this is not a softball review, it msut be said, this is as clear as mud – and yet there is something extremely original and powerful going on here. I can make some sense out of it in terms of a rational reconstruction of the encounter of the self and other, in which the other offers resistance to the self thereby bringing the intersubjective world of conditional possibilities and impossibilities into existence.
Another word of caution: Clohesy’s is work of significant scholarship, and merely well-educated readers without an academic background may find parts of it to be a challenging read, though a valuable one. I think Clohesy has read everything – okay, almost everything, relevant to politics and empathy. An impressive accomplishment.
My most significant concern is with his use of the term “violence.” As quoted above, Clohesy does not mean “killing” – I believe he means a kind of struggle or resistance or encounter with the otherness of the other than deteriorates into the violence that creates what Hegel called the butcher bench of history.
Clohesy writes of arbitrary violence. Presumably when Cain slays Abel it is arbitrary violence, but when David slays Goliath that is nonarbitrary? When Pharaoh or King Herod slaughter the First Born that is arbitrary violence? But when Yahweh takes the first born Egyptians that is non arbitrary? How about when Burnham Wood come to Dunsinane, and McDuff kills Macbeth, the tyrant? How about when the posse chases down the John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, and burn down the barn in which he is hiding?
In this regard, Clohesy might have done well to deploy Hannah Arendt’s fundamental distinction between violence and power. When political power of a state or regime goes down, then out come the riot police, the tear gas, the rubber (and lead) bullets. “Power down, violence up” – Arendt’s proposal – is as predictable as night following day.
In conclusion, Clohesy asserts his use of empathy opens the articulation of an account of politics that promotes and reflects a sustainable vision of the good life. He claims that the relationship between empathy and politics can and should be understood in the context of reciprocity or as elements within a virtuous circle. Clohesy further claims that, because empathy provides use with a sense of our duties to others, it allows us to see politics as something that is enabling, necessary, noble and ethical (102).
References
Anthony M. Clohesy. (2013). Politics of Empathy: Ethics, Solidarity, Recognition. Oxon, UK: Routledge. 160 pp.
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Review: Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past by Thomas A. Kohut
Review: Thomas A. Kohut. (2020). Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past. London and New York: Routledge: (Taylor and Francis).Routledge (Taylor and Francis). (155 pp.)
Thomas A Kohut’s book is an important one, even ground breaking, for several disciplines including history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychology. However, the book is an even more important one for – empathy.
Kohut’s book is a small masterpiece. It is penetrating, incisive, well-argued, wide ranging, thorough, scholarly, and ground breaking in its validation of empathy as a practice relevant to historical studies and research. History writing will never be the same after this work, which is why it needs to be better known.
Though this reviewer is not a historian, I have published widely on empathy, and Kohut’s is the book I wish I had written. Empathy is no rumor in Kohut’s Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Past. Empathy lives in this book, and those who engage with it will be enriched historically and empathically.
Kohut properly begins by calling out the suspicion and skepticism of historians in relation to empathy. Empathy is fraught. Debates about the meaning of the term itself are legion.
In the face of these issues, Kohut’s definition of empathy is a rigorous and
critical one. Empathy is a mode of observation that gives one access to the thoughts and feelings of other human beings as subjects. Key term: subjectivity. Empathy is the foundation of intersubjectivity and that intersubjectivity has a temporal horizon extending from the past into the future.
In Kohut’s overview of the many definitions and debates about empathy, he distinguishes three approaches. They are: Theory of mind, simulation theory, and phenomenology of the Husserlian (and Edith Stein) flavor plus an admixture of Max Scheler. Without going into the details here, Kohut makes good use of the debate around the discovery in the mid-1990s of mirror neurons in monkeys and the implications of a parallel neurological mirroring system in humans, even if it is not exactly mirror neurons.
Kohut, the historian, is a trained but not currently practicing psychoanalyst. He learns from psychoanalytic practice in a historical context by deploying vicarious introspection – a short version of the definition of empathy. More on that shortly.
The innovation: Empathy is not only empathy of identity and similarity but even more importantly empathy is an empathy of differences. As the historian encounters otherness or alterity, the differences in experience call forth empathy. Empathy has a profound impact on historical thinking and experience, and, in a space of presence to humanity, enables a translation of meaning of affect and thinking. Ultimately this empathic engagement with other individuals and communities expands our historical understanding of humanity and deepens our own humanity.
Human beings are complex. They are notoriously self-deceived. We humans have blind spots about what are our motivations and incentives – Marx’s false consciousness, Sartre’s bad faith, Freud’s unconscious.
This means that even if the historian (or psychoanalyst) has access to another individual’s consciousness through their free associations (not available to the historian), journal entries, expressions in historical documents, art, artifacts, and traces of human life, as historians we may really be knowing how these individuals and groups have deceived themselves subjectively, not what authentically motivated them or how they experienced their life and predicaments intersubjectively. Yet such subjective and intersubjective data are of the essence. History often consists precisely in engaging with the unanticipated consequences of self-deception.
Individuals and entire communities and nations subscribe to ideologies and interpretations that are breathtakingly inaccurate, of questionable morality, or just plain confused, with profound consequences for their neighbors and historical successors. While not a therapeutic practice in the narrow psychoanalytic sense, the study of history humanizes – it expands and deepens our humanity. This is so even if it sometimes appalls and disappoints us as to what human beings are capable of perpetrating.
Kohut’s innovation is to assert that “empathy…recognizes and appreciates difference, even while attempting to know and understand it” (p. 41).
Since both empathy and ethics emerge simultaneously out of the differences of the encounter with other individual and groups, empathy can be used for both good and evil. Empathy tells me what the other person is experiencing; ethics tells me what to do about it. Thus, the Nazis attached sirens to their dive bombers, the better to get inside the heads of the innocent civilians they are bombing and terrify them.
The good news is that for the most part, civilized human beings use empathy to create a clearing of acceptance and tolerance for compassion, generosity, and prosocial affects to come forth and empathy training can expand such a clearing; but there is nothing intrinsically prosocial about empathy as such. At least, such is the position of Kohut the historian and psychoanalyst, as I read him.
Kohut has many fellow travellers and teachers in empathic history writing. Elizabeth Lunbeck and John Demos deserve mention for their empathically attuned history writing. Kohut endorses Dominick DaCapra’s distinction of “empathic unsettlement,” which is “the historian’s pervasive experience of difference even while attempting to know and understand it” (p. 43).
At another level, the authority of the past over us in the present is a strong motivator for Kohut’s approach. Kohut answers to the postmodern historian’s critique of Eurocentric history, is direct. High political history and dead white male leaders (p. 18) may have monopolized the empathic conversation, but it need not be that way. Marginalized peoples and oppressed individuals who make an empathic claim on us – as historians – to engage, articulate, and call out the experiences of alterity and otherness.
The use of empathy in cultural history is pervasive and provides further evidence that the role of empathy requires rehabilitation and extension.
But what of history written from the so-called objective observational perspective, which tends to emphasize broad trends and sweeping generalizations about politics and society – Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Modernity, the Nuclear Age, post Modern Society – in which individuals and entire countries are caught up?
Kohut acknowledges that such history is wide spread and is a paradigm that contributes to historical understanding. What it does not do is give us a sense of what it was like to be alive in such times. When done badly, such writing is little different than reading a rail road time table, and, even at its best, entails the risk of sending us down a deterministic labyrinth that produces problematic narratives. When done well, such sweeping, broad historical panoramas can and do enrich our humanity, but precisely by deploying and applying empathic methods. And that is a point that Kohut drives home: historians are unwittingly – and thus uncritically and rigorously – employing empathy and they may usefully take their method up a level and do so explicitly, rigorously, and critically.
I do not know if Kohut would agree with me, but I was inspired by him to assert that there are at least two kinds of non-empathic history writing. Non-empathic history can be a chronology. Names and dates. This is important and a foundation, and not a trivial matter, to be sure, yet not ultimately what makes a difference in terms of meaningful human understanding and development.
Alternatively, if one is unambiguously committed to deterministic trends in history such as in certain caricatures of Marxism, then one goes down the causal dead end as determinism is regularly refuted by experience when the inevitable deterministic outcome fails to show up. History has come to an end so many times only then to demonstrate in the ongoing course of events that the ending of one individual or group’s history is the beginning of another’s.
The third alternative is that, yes, such sweeping, broad trends may indeed be significant, even indispensable, but if you read the historical text carefully, empathy is richly present intermittently and all-too-often on a scattershot basis. But that is what makes the text come to life. Perhaps not present on every page, but there is inevitably a report of an individual or a personal anecdote or an imaginative experiment by the historian; and it is precisely those moments and passages that act like a lightening rod to bring vitality and aliveness to the narrative. The sweeping history of historical trends without empathy lacks vitality and human significance. It is empty of humanity. It is like plate tectonics or geology – nothing wrong with plate tectonics as such – but as a model of history writing, it lacks relatedness to human meaning or value.
This speaks directly to Kohut’s point that historians frequently use empathy but they use it implicitly and unconsciously. It is wroth repeating: Kohut’s intervention is to urge that the historians must take their practice up a level and be explicit about when they are deploying empathy or not. Under Kohut’s skillful treatment, empathy becomes a rigorous and critical empathy.
Meanwhile, the shadow of the tribal falls over the historical. The use of empathy that seems to affirm structures of domination and false consciousness (e.g., Foucault) only gets traction if one’s definition of empathy is restricted to that of an empathy of identity. Though not called out by Kohut, Ian Hacking’s notion of historical ontology belongs here, inspired as it is by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Willard Quine. However, if one allows for an empathy of differences, empathy is the encounter with the other individual or community who is different than I am and who one grasps in the other’s alterity [othrness], then the objection of tribalism fails to get traction and falls way.
This speaks directly to Kohut’s point that historians frequently use empathy but they use it implicitly and unconsciously. It is wroth repeating: Kohut’s intervention is to urge that the historians must take their practice up a level and be explicit about when they are deploying empathy or not. Under Kohut’s skillful treatment, empathy becomes a rigorous and critical empathy.
Meanwhile, the shadow of the tribal falls over the historical. The use of empathy that seems to affirm structures of domination and false consciousness (e.g., Foucault) only gets traction if one’s definition of empathy is restricted to that of an empathy of identity. Though not called out by Kohut, Ian Hacking’s notion of historical ontology belongs here, inspired as it is by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Willard Quine. However, if one allows for an empathy of differences, empathy is the encounter with the other individual or community who is different than I am and who one grasps in the other’s alterity [othrness], then the objection of tribalism fails to get traction and falls way.
Since this is not a softball review, I suggest that Kohut bends so far backwards to accommodate tenuous objections to empathic practices that he sometimes unwittingly ends up underestimating and being unfair to the powers and importance of a rigorous and critical empathy.
Kohut is generous and gracious in addressing every imaginable objection – possibly from some hair-splitting reader or editor – generous to a fault. Yet once a thinker (not Kohut!) embraces a Cartesian fragmentation of human relatedness by locking the historical individual up in the warm room with Descartes sitting alone by fire, yet without relating to him, all the paradoxes about how to build a bridge back to the other consciousness come forth.
One point that is flat out missing from Kohut’s is a treatment of retrospective grasping or understanding (Nachträglichkeit) – “afterwardness” – a key distinction in Freud and the understanding of the past. This is important because empathy is needed to grasp the change of meaning between what the event meant in the past and what it comes to mean at a different, later time.
For example, a child of tender age is exposed to adult sexuality, whether accidently seeing the parents engaging in such or through a boundary violation such as molestation. The child does not grasp what happened, and does not like it, but is not traumatized. Years later the child becomes an adolescent, remembers the incident, and then falls ill with hysteria or an obsessional neurosis. Did the child experience the boundary violation in the sense that the child was present in the room? Yes. Did the child fall ill at that time. No. What happened? Retrospective understanding!
Likewise, in history, the Nazis systematically and with malice of forethought exterminate – slaughter – murder – some six million Jewish people, including some homosexuals, gypsies, handicapped, socialists, and so on. Years later one of the architects of the genocide, Adolph Eichmann, is captured, put on trial, and executed for the crime. The killing of the six million is redescribed as the Holocaust during and shortly after the trial. Were the people killed? Yes. Did “Holocaust” exist as a distinction in language or reporting before Eichmann’s trial? Not as far as we know. What happened? Nachträglichkeit! The description is grasped and validated retrospectively.
Meanwhile, as noted by Kohut, the result of “cultural Cartesianism” (p. 119) is that the shadow of tribalism falls upon the historical. Consciousness encompasses but is not reducible to its expressions such as historical documents, works of art, architecture, and traces of all kinds of peoples’ marks upon the land.
Anything that qualifies as an expression of the life of a human subject and gets embodied in a fixed form and survives in a transmittable form becomes the raw material for empathically processing the thoughts and feelings that are embodied in the resulting historical narrative. The result is a narrative that imaginatively enlivens the artifacts with empathic vitality and evokes the world that generated them.
Kohut’s is a slim volume (a pervasive problem in publishing in this post hard copy era), and he does not have the word count to lay down his obvious commitment to rigorous historical practice in any detail. He repeatedly suggests that those who go to the archives may usefully [must] bring their empathy with them. That is one of Kohut’s recurring themes: Explicitly bring your empathy. Archives, documents, ruins, artistic artifacts, archeological digs, etymological traces in language, dusty old bones with hatchings in museums, and all manner of expressions of human life, form the basis for the historical narrative and interpretation that becomes the rigorous study of history and humanity.
Anything that qualifies as an expression of the life of a human subject and gets embodied in a fixed form and survives in a transmittable form becomes the raw material for empathically processing the thoughts and feelings that are embodied in the resulting historical narrative. The result is a narrative that imaginatively enlivens the artifacts with empathic vitality and evokes the world that generated them.
Kohut’s is a slim volume (a pervasive problem in publishing in this post hard copy era), and he does not have the word count to lay down his obvious commitment to rigorous historical practice in any detail. He repeatedly suggests that those who go to the archives may usefully [must] bring their empathy with them. That is one of Kohut’s recurring themes: Explicitly bring your empathy. Archives, documents, ruins, artistic artifacts, archeological digs, etymological traces in language, dusty old bones with hatchings in museums, and all manner of expressions of human life, form the basis for the historical narrative and interpretation that becomes the rigorous study of history and humanity.
Empathy is called forth by the expressions of human life whether in the presence of a person in the same room just now or the artistic and documentary artifacts left behind. It is a tactical advantage in the theory of knowledge (epistemology) that one can ask such a present person, “What do you mean by that?” However, absent a four-year psychoanalysis, she is not going to have any better access to her blind spots, self-deceptions or ambivalences than the person writing in her diary a century ago. Extra data is remarkably useful; yet sometimes more data is just more data. Empathic interpretation is needed to bring it to life and make it speak and contribute to our understanding.
Kohut is the professional’s professional. He relegates to the footnotes his disagreement with Rudolf Makkreel, whose monumental (re)construction of Wilhelm Dilthey’s “Critique of Historical Reason” relies on an innovative reading [Makkreel’s reading] of Kant’s Third Critique. But, once again, since this is not a softball review, I have no such constraints (or footnotes).
Notwithstanding Makkreel’s substantial contribution, he is the one who is responsible for throwing empathy “under the bus” in the context of Dilthey, denying an entire generation of scholars an appreciation of Dilthey’s highly empathic methods. Though, admittedly, Dilthey never uses the word “Einfühlung [empathy],” Dilthey is a preeminent historian and philosopher of empathy, and Kohut properly treats him that way.
Curiously “Einfühlung [empathy in German]” is now an English word. German historians and self psychologists having translated “empathy” back into German as Empathie. Curious also the vicissitudes of translation: the process of translation itself becomes a metaphor for empathic relatedness. The point is that Kohut’s command of the intricacies of translations (from the German) is second to none and his clarifications are penetrating and incisive.
Dilthey’s invocation of Nacherleben [vicarious experience] and Nachleben [vicariously experience life or vicarious life] capture the process of empathic receptivity while Dilthey’s commitment to Verstehen [(human) understanding] do the work of [cognitive] empathic understanding as opposed to causal explanation [erklären]. So much for Makkreel, who seems to have forgotten to read Max Scheler.
Kohut makes the case that our relationship to the past is a dynamic one, and the dynamo – the driver – of the dynamic is empathy. The historian brings his methods and requirements to the past, but the astute historian soon realizes that the past also has requirements of him. Under the skillful treatment of Kohut, history becomes a kind of psychological transitional object or selfobject, infused and imbued with the shared humanity that connects us across time as psychoanalytic transference calls forth the meaning of the past for the present. Though Kohut properly plays it close to the vest, I think we have more than a little of that here.
Kohut provides many examples of empathic history writing including his own work with the history of the Weimar Republic, the Wannsee Conference of the Nazis as well as John Demos’s research on witches, being kidnapped and raised by native Americans, and more. In every case, the facts are the facts, the trends are the trends, the debates are the debates, but it is empathy that brings to life the moving and frequently shocking realities of futures past and past futures.
By the way, Kohut makes good use of Reinhart Koselleck’s (1974) distinctions of the horizon of experience and horizon of expectations [of the past]. Tom also makes good use of the ground breaking work of his father, Heinz Kohut, MD, who I would describe as a towering practitioner of empathy and who put empathy on the map and in the psyche of entire generations of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, humanists, and thinkers, but not historians – until now. It is often not easy to be the offspring of an individual who invents an entirely new discipline, Self Psychology in the case of Heinz. For example, consider the struggles of Freud’s children and grand children – but Tom Kohut seems to have done just fine, thank you, to his credit – and Heinz’s.
History writing sometimes lacks empathy or is ambivalent about its empathy. However, without rigorous and critical empathic practices, as endorsed by Kohut (Tom), history goes off the rails as an anachronism – attributing to the past distinctions and ideas (e.g., childhood) that did not exist and could not even be imagined by the peoples of past times.
Likewise, the past had distinctions (e.g., witchcraft) that we do not have or, more precisely, do have without experiencing the distinction similarly, and we have distinctions that were unknown in the past. Historical peoples had distinctions that we now know only as an abstract concept empty of the influence and experience the distinction had for inhabitants of the past world.
Empathy comes into its own as an essential method in accessing a world lit only by fire (to recall William Manchester’s empathically attuned title), in which demons and spirits were abroad in the land, impacting everyday life in ways we can hardly imagine. With Kohut’s Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past, the reader’s imagination – and empathy – are expanded in his stimulating engagement with the uses of empathy for historical understanding.
References
Reinhart Koselleck. (1974). Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr, and intro., Keith Tribe. Columbia University Press, 2004.
Lou Agosta. (2015). A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, Recovery. London and New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis), 2015.
Empathy in the context of love
The idea is that what people really want more than anything else is to be gotten for who they are – i.e., people want empathy. This is an unexpressed and undeclared commitment; and something of which most adults are only dimly aware until they get some and discover, “Oh, that’s really cool. It seems to work. May I have another?”
You know how in the world of high fashion grey is the new black? Well, empathy is the new love. This is not an exclusive either-or choice; and people still want to be loved too. Just not quite as much as they want to be gotten empathically.
People can get love from Hallmark Cards or from the Internet. There is really a glut in the market for this kind of love, and many issues remain with quality. Like any mass product, the quality is questionable. Really fine love remains a scarce commodity in the final analysis. Empathy is a relatively even rarer capacity in the market – though, truth be told, it is common to every mother (or care-taker) and a newborn child, every business person with satisfied customers, every educational student-teacher encounter, and every neighborly encounter in the community. An example of the intersection of love and empathy will be useful.
Bull Durham, the movie, is one my favorite Valentine’s Day shows of all time. This is because it succeeds in bringing together love and desire, affection and arousal, silly valentine style sentiment and sexual satisfaction. Also, it has a happy ending. It is not really about baseball, though you would not be crazy for thinking it is. A guilty pleasure? Perhaps. However, much more than baseball, this movie demonstrates powerfully that empathy is the new love.
In Bull Durham, the heroine, Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), explains that she believes in the Church of Baseball. There are 108 beads in a Catholic Rosary and 108 stitches in a baseball. Can this be a coincidence? She “chooses” one guy, a baseball player, with whom to consort—that is, hook up–during each minor league baseball season. Suffice to say, it makes a good adolescent fantasy.
The top two “hook up” candidates are Nuke LaLoosh and Crash Davis, the latter played by Kevin Costner. Crash is a talented catcher who never broke out from the minor leagues. He is given an extension and asked to play for one more season to “bring along” Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, who, it seems, is destined for the major leagues – The Show, as it is called. Nick named “Nuke LaLoosh,” for his powerful fastball, Nuke lacks control, and his 90+ miles an hour pitch is depicted as “beaning” the Big Bird type Mascot of the team. Funny.
The nick name, “Nuke LaLoosh” expresses an empathic understanding of who the person is and induces an experience with which the person leaves the viewer—powerful like nuclear energy but perhaps a tad out of control and about to blow up. Crash asks Annie: “Why do you get to pick?” Before making her choice of LaLoosh over Crash, Annie’s answer nicely outlines a position close to mine if one includes that she is choosing:
“Well, actually, nobody on this planet ever really chooses each other, I mean, it’s all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction, and timing. Why, there are laws we don’t understand that bring us together and tear us apart. Uh, it’s like pheromones. You get three ants together, they can’t do dick. You get 300 million of them, they can build a cathedral.”
There’s something for everyone in this film. Suffice to say, Nuke desires any woman he can get his hands on. He is a real “Lil’ Abner” type. He does definitely not have the distinction “desire of desire,” and women are as opaque to him and he is opaque, period.
Annie provides the empathy lessons. Nuke lets himself be tied up by her up, tightly, as he is a big guy, in anticipation of a sexual adventure—and she paints his toe nails! Nuke doesn’t really “get it,” but he kinda likes it. This puts a certain “spin,” more like a slider than a fastball on female empowerment. The lesson includes learning to wait—presumably his fastball gets more controlled along with his bedside manner.
For Crash, the empathy lesson is that Annie is the ultimate unattainable object. She plays hard to get in the most authentic possible way. By freely withholding her desire—even though one suspects the desire lives in her. Crash knows he’s desirable—hey, he looks just like Kevin Costner. But she won’t give in, and unless she does so freely, it may be a power trip or a notch on someone’s pistole, but it’s not authentic sexual satisfaction. It’s barely even sex.
In addition, Crash’s challenge is that he has standards. Yes, he desires Annie, but more than that he desires her desire, which, unless freely given, just does not get the sexual satisfaction job done for him. When asked what he believes, he gives one of the great soliloquies on empathic love:
“Well, I believe in the soul, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe I long, slow deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”
Such kisses require empathy. Crash is frustrated in his desire because he longs to unite his desire with his affection for Annie and receive hers and her desire in return. I tell you, you cannot “get” this movie without the distinction “desire of desire,” which it so eloquently exemplifies. So when Crash does finally unite desire and affection in uniting with Annie and her desire of his desire, it makes for a happy ending. Everyone in the film reconciles desire and affection, and Nuke gets control over – premature ejaculation – oops, I mean, his fastball.
If empathy is the new love, what then was the old love? A bold statement of the obvious: the old love is akin to a kind of madness. The one who is in love is hypnotically held in bonds by an idealization by the beloved. In one way, love presents as animal magnetism, a powerful attraction; in another way, in a quasi-hypnotic trance, love idealizes the beloved, and, overlooks the would-be partner’s shortcomings and limitations.
According to Nobel Prize winning novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, love is akin to a physical illness, cholera. In Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), also a major motion picture, the mother of Florentino Ariza treats his love sickness for the inaccessible Fermina Daza with the kinds of herbs used to relieve the diarrhea of cholera. Key term: inaccessible. The inaccessible object—whether the mother who is already married to the father or the girl next door whose family is feuding with one’s own—arouses one’s desire to a feverish pitch.
Note that in Spanish and English cólera and choleric, respectively, denote an emotional upset, expressing irritability and a kind of manic rage, hooking up with Plato’s definition of love as madness. In a diverging register, in Saint Paul, love is God, love is community, and love is neighborliness. According to Bob Dylan, now also a Nobel Prize winner, “love is just another four letter word.” No sublimation here. Just hormones all the way down; though, to Dylan’s credit, he did not claim or publish the song as his own after Joan Baez made it famous.
According to Freud, love is aim-inhibited sexuality. When sexual desire is unable to attain its goal, which, by definition, is sexual satisfaction, the desire undergoes a transformation. The desire turns away from reality and expresses itself in fantasy. The desire becomes articulate. It learns to speak. It expresses symbolic statements of romantic dalliance and even love poetry. It lives on in the hope of recovering the erotic dimension as when, in Cyrano De Bergerac, Roxanne invites Christian to mount up the balcony to get a kiss. Cyrano is in love, and his love makes him blind – as in the stereotype – to the spoiled-princess-like behavior of Roxanne and the arrogant narcissism of Christian.
The celebrated Athenian “bad boy,” Socrates (c. 470 BCE – 399 BCE), famously said, “I know that I know nothing”; but then it turned out that he did know something after all, though only as a kind of myth (but what kind of knowledge is a myth?), and he distinguished four kinds of madness, the last of which is love:
“And we made four divisions of divine madness corresponding to four gods: to Apollo we ascribed prophetic inspiration, to Dionysus mystic madness, to the Muses poetic afflatus; while to Aphrodite and Eros we gave the fourth, love-madness, declaring it to be the best” (Phaedrus: 265).
The Symposium, a drunken party with Socrates and friends, as told by Plato, painting by Anselm Feuerbach
Due to a sin of pride, the gods punished these spherical humans by dividing them into two—which results in the present predicament of separate male and female human beings, as we know them today. The two halves are incomplete; and each wants to be reunited—and completed—by the other half.
We speculate that the division into male and female is not the only division. The separation of desire and affection is also a source of struggle, but about that Aristophanes has nothing to say.
The novelist Stendhal (1743–1842) said that beauty is the promise of happiness, but he got the idea from Aristophanes. Beauty is the promise of happiness experienced as the felt attraction between the two halves of the original spherical creatures. Thus, fast forward to the current predicament of humanity (and Match.com) with the two parts running around trying to hook up like crazed weasels, or, at least, attempting to get a date with that “special someone.”
In summary, the old love is a kind of madness; it makes a person blind, and causes somatic distress. So far the old love is indistinguishable from tertiary syphilis!
Let us be clear that no one is proposing an either/or choice between love and empathy. These two phenomena have existed and coexisted together since the beginning and will continue to do so. Granted that in the English language the history of the distinction “empathy” was covered by diverse meanings of the word “sympathy,” but, in any case, it goes way back.
My proposal is that love contains an empathic core in its stimulating and exciting aspects and that which is the “love sickness” part is due, well, to the struggle to unite affection and desire. In particular, that which is the “love sickness” is due to a breakdown in empathy.
The goal in love is to erase, at least temporarily, the boundary between the self and other. Merger of both mind and body with the other mind and body is the result. In contrast to love, empathy navigates or transgresses the boundary between self and other such that the integrity of the self and other are maintained. One has a vicarious experience of the other—but the difference and integrity of the self and other are maintained. So love emerges as a breakdown in empathy—from the perspective of too much or too little engagement with the other. It is love versus empathy. Yet in love, empathy lives.
In the examples of Annie and Crash Davis, the love-madness described by Socrates, the connection between Aristophanes’ spherical halves, the attraction, is a kind of magnetism—animal magnetism, to be precise.
In attraction Jeopardy, “animal magnetism” is the answer; what then is the question? How does a vicarious experience of someone else’s desire show up? A desire of desire? If we let our empathic receptivity inform our experience, stage one of the intersection of empathy and love can be redescribed as animal magnetism.
Simply stated, such animal magnetism is what you get when two lovers stare semi-hypnotically into one another’s eyes. Speaking from the guy perspective, to really turn on a woman, a guy has to get in touch with his inner female. He does not have to tell his softball buddies about this, but in the language of the Kama Sutra such a guy turns out to be worth his weight in diamonds. This is especially so if he sees value in getting in touch with his inner female, by practicing cooking and changing diapers.
When empathic receptivity shows up, can empathic understanding be far away? In this case, the empathic possibilities are rich and rewarding, but since this is not a book on sex tips and techniques, the reader is referred to resources for empathic possibilities in the above-cited realm of the sexual expression of love that are more eloquent—and better illustrated—than I could possibly provide here. Same idea with empathic interpretation, in which role-playing is a significant opportunity.
We feel chemistry with some people and not others because our empathic receptivities, understandings, and responses are aligned. We are able to fit the other person into the narrative we tell ourselves about what we are seeking in a partner.
The other person fits into our imagination in a role we assign, imaginatively, and the person is a good enough fit that they are willing and able to play the role assigned. Notice this means that the “love” part is the aspect that is the most problematic. If she “gets it” that he is good “boy friend” material—he has a nurturing side that will make him a good father—but this turns out not to be accurate, because he is a spoiled child himself, then it was love’s idealizations and wishful thinking, a breakdown of empathy into projection, not authentic empathy. On the other hand, if the initial empathy is accurate, it paves the way for love and empathy to enhance each other mutually in creating the community called a family.
The empathy lesson is that people are sometimes what they appear to be, but that sometimes appearances are misleading. This explains the common sense lesson that you need to talk to someone and listen to them before making serious commitments of the heart, of one’s finances, or of one’s time and effort. People come in all different shapes and sizes. Aristophanes’ joke gets the last word and lives on because the original spherical beings were in all different shapes and sizes before they were cleaved in two. People complete one another in different ways. After all the categories, labels, diagnoses, arguments, and projections are removed; empathy is being in the presence of the other spherical being without anything else added.
References
Ron Shelton, (1998), Bull Durham, the movie.: https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/bull-durham/ratings.htmlquote checked on 02/13/2021. Staring Susan Sarandon, Kevin Costner, and Tim Robbins.
Lou Agosta, (2018), Chapter 9: Empathy Application: Sex, Love, Rock and Roll – and Empathy in Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pairs Press. Order book here: https://shorturl.at/agCY9
The Limits of Empathy in Politics
If freedom of expression and free speech are flourishing, but no one is listening, then empathy becomes a tree that falls in the forest when no one is present. Empathy does not make a sound – or a difference.
Even in politics empathy is always empathy. However, politics brings along a whole new set of questions, issues, and challenges by with which empathy is confronted and to which empathy gets applied. The political becomes personal, unsettlingly so at times.
What then is the limit of empathy in politics? This is the limit: the practice of empathy does not work well with bullies, sociopaths, psychopaths, QAnon style delusional thinkers, the criminally insane, and [some] autistic children.
The prevalence of bullying in the school playground and politics is widespread and toxic; and one should never underestimate the power of empathy. Never. Yet, if your political opponent is behaving like a bully, empathy is not going to be enough. You will need to find supplementary methods – empathy alone will not work on her or him. These hard cases literally will not “get it.” They will not perceive the empathy. They will not experience your empathy.
Worse yet, some bullies and psychopaths will accept your empathy and turn it against you, the better to control, manipulate, and dominate you. If the practice of empathy is not the way forward, how then does one deal with bullying without becoming a bully oneself?
The answer is direct: set limits. Set boundaries. Thus, far and no further! Stay in your own lane. Get back into your own corner. Stay in your own space. Keep your hands to yourself! In so far as empathy is all about firm yet flexible boundaries between the self and the other, a rigorous and critical empathy is engaged here; but until the boundary is reestablished, empathy cannot come into its own. Indeed once boundary violations occur and safety or security is at risk, the issue is no longer an empathic one – call for backup, implement self-defense measures, or escape and continue the struggle on another day.
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 Hostage Negotiator” (WSJ.com 06/14/2020) [https://on.wsj.com/3ajoYon]. Law enforcement gets empathy. Bad guys watch out. Once again, never underestimate the power of empathy. Never.
In so far as empathy is all about respecting the boundaries between self and other, one group and another group, boundary setting is relevant to politics and empathy. So if one can reestablish a boundary, then empathy can be reintroduced, gradually, to guide us in how to cross back and forth across the boundary without submitting to bullying, provoking a temper tantrum, or getting stuck in breakdown.
Yet the shadow of the tribalism falls over empathy in politics. Empathy gets a bad rap because empathy is often limited in contemporary political debates to empathy of identity. However, empathy – and that is the innovation here – empathy is also empathy of differences. Key terms: empathy of identity and empathy of difference.
With an empathy of differences, in addition to identity politics, we get a politics of recognition.
Empathy shows up when one person encounters the other person and recognizes his or her differences. I hasten to add no one is asking anyone to give up or devalue his or her identity. The suggestion is that the Empathy of Differences lets identities flourish in a space of acceptance and toleration created by empathic recognition. The empathic recognition in turn creates a political arena where people can debate and compromise and get things done.
Talking a walk in the other person’s shoes yields an empathy of differences. One discovers the otherness of the other. The shoe rarely fits exactly right. One discovers where the shoe pinches – but the other’s shoe almost inevitably pinches at a different spot when it pinches one’s own foot, because the other foot is slightly longer or shorter than one’s own.
Though we are different, our interests, experiences, and aspirations as human beings are recognized.
Our interests and aspirations have areas of overlap – for example, we want our children to flourish; we want to be able to make a contribution to the community; we want to be secure in our private lives and preference. With goals pursued along different paths, our possibilities converge or diverge without conflict. Our opportunities align in parallel or intersect at right angles instead of clashing. We are able to cooperate and embrace workability instead of obstructing one another. We are able to build instead of tear down.
Once again, there is nothing wrong with the empathy of identity, but something is missing. What is missing is difference. The empathy of identity is ultimately that of proximity to family, tribe, and local community. As noted, there is nothing wrong with that. It is excellent. We would be less than human without it. But the empathy of identity is ultimately derivative and incomplete without an empathy of differences.
If one is limited to an empathy of identity, the result is tribalism. “I get you, man, and you get me, bro, because we are alike.” No one is proposing to try completely to abolish tribalism, but tribalism is definitely limiting and constraining.
All these different tribes sets in motion a trend, which arguably is tribalism’s own undoing, dissolving its identity – Republicans, Democrats, Progressive, Conservatives, Libertarians, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Quakers, all 198 member nations of the United Nations – not to mention the Chicago Cubs Baseball team. So many identities – so many tribes. If one gets and belongs to enough of them, identity starts to dissolve.
Tribalism itself sets in motion a dialectic whereby each individual can belong to multiple tribes with multiple identities and affiliations. If you participate in enough tribes and enough overlap between tribal identities, the notion of identity starts to dissolve into a kind of melting pot of multiculturalism, communalism, or ecumenical spirituality, market place of competing political ideologies. Even if the melting pot never completely melts, it can at least become a colloidal suspension – cosmopolitanism – where the identities and differences are fine-grained enough not to subvert individual diversity or the aspiration to commonly shared values.
But absent such a dialectic of dissolution into a melting pot of identities– for example, in traditional societies or insular communities – the empathy within the communal group works well but breaks down at the boundary at which one encounter the other individual and group and their differences.
The innovative point here – to emphasize once again – is that empathy is about identity and similarity, but it is just as importantly about differences.
Speaking in the first person, when I encounter an individual who is different than I am, then I have an experience of otherness. However, every person I encounter, without exception, is different than I am, even if there are similarities. The other is different than I am. But without the other individual there is no empathy. Empathy is born in otherness. Empathy is born in the difference. Empathy is born in the difference of otherness and in the otherness of difference.
If that starts to spin, enjoy the ride. At least you are not alone – as the practice of empathy is the one thing you cannot do all by yourself. Empathy is a function of otherness. Without the other individual, there is only myself – oneself.
Solipsism is the philosophical position – the illusion – there the entire universe consists of oneself very alone – hence, solus ipse. One is the creator of one’s entire universe – life is literally but a dream – until one encounters the other – then one wakes up to the reality of the resistance of the other – and the resistance of the other emerges from differences – the otherness of the other. You need an other – and the other individual’s differences – to get empathy started.
Being open to the other person’s feelings, affects, experiences, beliefs, and resonating in tune with the other individual, yields inevitably both the similarity and differences of those feelings, affects, experiences, and beliefs. That is the empathic moment: I realize we are different and that difference lives and becomes accessible in the space of acceptance and toleration between us.
This brings us again to the limit of empathy in politics. Thus, the fundamental political question for a rigorous and critical empathy in politics is what to do politically with individuals and groups that one cannot stand.
What to do with individuals and groups who arouse a visceral dislike and antipathy that are acknowledged to be irrational? What to do with individuals and groups with whom one disagrees on policy, practices, perspectives, procedures, customs, or spiritual practices? The tribalism of the empathy of identity is not going to get you of this impasse.
The reduction to absurdity of the empathy of identity is humorist Tom Lehrer’s satirical song, “National Brotherhood Week”: “Shake the hand of someone you can’t stand.”
Humor and empathy are closely related. One crosses a boundary between self and other in both cases. In humor one crosses the boundary with aggressive or sexual innuendo; in empathy one crosses the boundary with gracious permission and generosity.
Lehrer predictably succeeds in being wickedly funny, though deeply cynical, as he sings an upbeat tune: “…The rich folks hate the poor folks and the poor folks hate the rich folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks – it’s American as apple pie! But during National Brotherhood Week – Sheriff Clarke and Lena Horne are dancing cheek-to-cheek.” Note that Clarke was a notoriously committed racist and segregationist during the early Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s and Lena Horne was a celebrated African-American singer of romantic smoky ballads – not a likely match up on anyone’s dating site.
While shaking the hand of one’s sworn opponent (or an elbow bump in a pandemic) is always a good start, it is ultimately incomplete. Unless an empathic context of toleration and acceptance is established for the hand shaking, the risk of shaking hands with someone you can’t stand is that one will end up despising the other even more.
Lehrer’s song ends by expressing the unexpressed elephant in the room “…[Be] nice to people who are inferior to you / It’s only for a week so have no fear / Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.”
As the song implies, absent additional training in and work on empathy and critical thinking, the hypocrisy and prejudice live on. The practice of empathy becomes the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy.
The disciplined practice of a rigorous and critical empathy is on the path to well functioning political community and successful engagement with one’s political opponents and rivals. A rigorous practice of empathy requires critical thinking to guide it, and, in turn, critical thinking requires empathy to open the space of relatedness, acceptance, and toleration of differences.
This rigorous and critical empathy includes critical thinking. Critical thinking includes such skills as questioning in the sources of one’s facts and beliefs, examining and questioning one’s assumptions, assessing conflicting reports in the media, looking for hidden assumptions and biases, examining one’s own for conflicts of interest, recognizing one’s own mistakes and cleaning them up at once, basic listening skills, taking turns, and seeing if one’s conclusions are actually implied by one’s facts and reasoning from these facts. These are all important. But the number one skill of critical thinking is putting oneself in the place of one’s opponent, competitor, or colleague and considering the alternative point of view – cognitive empathy. Such empathy becomes a priority in a political context.
In conclusion, when empathy becomes a rigorous and critical empathy, then the limits of empathy in politics are the limits of politics, not the limits of empathy.
References
Tom Lehrer, National Brotherhood Week [performed]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIlJ8ZCs4jY
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy, Brain Science, Stress Reduction – the Video
Here is the short, half day course on Empathy, Stress (Reduction) and Neural Science delivered at the Joe Palombo Center for Neuroscience at the Institute for Clinical Social Work. The image depicted is the punchline to a Richard Feynman (physicist) joke about the cosmos – “It’s turtles all the way down” – in the case of neuroscience “It is neurons all the way down!” Granted that the joke is not funny if one has to explain it, the video provides all the background you need to laugh (one way or the other!)
You can also watch directly on Youtube by cutting and pasting into your command line without the dash
-https://youtu.be/bdZo5EaweJc
A famous person once said: “Empathy is oxygen for the soul.” So if one is feeling shortness of breath, maybe one needs expanded empathy! This course will connect the dots between empathy and neuroscience (“brain science”). For example, empathic responsiveness releases the compassion hormone oxytocin, which blocks the stress hormone cortisol. [This is an over-simplification, but a compelling one.] Reduced stress correlates to reduced risk of such life style disorders as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, weak immune system, depression, and the common cold.
The session engages each of the following modules in the discussion segment, including suggested readings. Except for the first two topics, we can take them in any order and the participants will get to select:
- This is your mind on neuroscience – mirror neurons: do they exist, and if not, so what?
- Sperry on the split brain: the information is in the system: how to get at it
- The neuroscience of trauma – and how empathy gives us access to it
- MRI research: as when Galileo looked through the telescope, a whole new world opens
Image: The punch line is “turtles – all the way down” – well, likewise – “neurons – all the way down.”
Presenter: Lou Agosta, PhD, is the author of three scholarly, academic books on empathy, including A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, Recovery (Routledge 2015). He has taught empathy in history and systems of psychology at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University and offered a course in the Secret Underground Story of Empathy at the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Education. He is an empathy consultant in private practice in “on the forward edge in the Edgewater Community” in Chicago. If you need some empathy and want to get a good listening, talk to Dr Lou.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Top 10 Empathy Trends for 2021
“The Year 2020 in review: One Star – definitely would not recommend!” Good things to say about 2020? As Dave Barry quipped, nobody got killed by the murder hornets. Many of my empathy trends for 2020, prepared in December 2019, were blown up on the launch pad by February 2020 as the pandemic accelerated. “Empathy interrupted!” I acknowledge that I did not see it coming.
The year 2020 was not an ordinary year in any sense. Obviously. The really tough thought gradually dawns on us: “Ordinary” will never mean the same thing again in quite the same way.
The fundamental meta-trend of trends is to process that there is no going back to the way things were in exactly the way they were in December 2019.
I ask your understanding, dear reader, in that the pandemic features prominently in the first few trends, but since this is in the nature of a top ten list and the pandemic touches almost everything indirectly, significant trends stronger than the immediate pandemic issues get pushed towards the bottom of the list leading up to #1. So feel free to scan and skip ahead.
(10) It’s gettin’ crowded under the bus – make room for your neighbor. Empathy as a practice and as a distinction is knocked back on its heels by the pandemic, fights back, and recovers – gradually. We confront the paradox of “embracing” our socially distanced neighbor. There is something about humans that makes us want to breathe on one another. Empathy? Don’t try and hold your breath – even though expanding neighborliness is the ultimate empathy trend.
Any trends, activities, practices that required getting close to another person physically were under stress if not banned in 2020: breaking bread together in person, hugging your grandma or neighbor, hug therapy [there actually was such a thing – before the pandemic], shaking hand(s) with someone you can’t stand [as Tom Lehrer quipped in his satirical song “National Brotherhood Week”], engaging with the kindness of strangers, dating, occupying the middle seat (or any seat?) on an airplane or bus, participating in person in artistic or sporting activities, in short, breathing with people in close quarters, sharing oxygen with them. All these and more were unceremoniously thrown under the bus in 2020 by the requirement for social distancing. The thing is – it’s getting crowded under the bus.
Any action, behavior, or practice that takes into account the dignity or well-being of the other person or community expands and empowers empathy. A silver lining: empathy is already “action at a distance,” as I know the experience of the other person because I too experience the experience.
Empathy in the age of Covid-19 really does mean wearing a mask, practicing social distancing, getting the vaccine (subject to availability). To quote Noah Lindquist: “Wear a mask – think of someone other than yourself, it’s all we ask – get your head out of your [bleep] – no, the mandates aren’t malicious; your conspiracies are fictitious; try not to be so grouchy have some faith in Fauci!” – to be sung to the tune of Disney’s “Be my guest” from The Beauty and the Beast. The part about “thinking of someone other than yourself” is the cognitive empathy moment, which is especially challenging in the face of pandemic fatigue.
The New York Times (https://tinyurl.com/y9tczw8c) points out that, as President Trump’s trade war with China escalated, the administration all but eliminated the public health partnership with Beijing that had begun after the debacle of the SARS epidemic and was intended to help prevent potential pandemics.
By pulling out, current and former agency officials say, Washington cut itself off from potential intelligence about the virus, and lost an opportunity to work with China against it. President Trump is voted out of office, while Mr Chairman Xi of China is handing out bonuses and deciding which scientists stay under house arrest.
As my friend David Cole astutely observed, “If you live mostly by yourself in the country, you can afford think about yourself a lot; if you live in the big city, you are forced to think about others.” He did not say “presumably because some of the others might be muggers,” but maybe he didn’t have to. Granted that thinking about others is top down, cognitive empathy, not the full package, still it provides useful training in perspective taking of different points of view and walking in the shoes of others, even if the others can be decidedly un-neighborly.
In terms of creating and expanding inclusive communities, the pandemic has been a significant set back. Empathy is all about being inclusive – take your in-group and reach out to outsiders and include them. The pandemic has made doing that problematic. It is hard to distinguish between being inclusive and a super spreader event such as we in the USA saw over the summer of 2020 with the ten day Sturgis motor cycle rally, which reportedly spread contagion across the upper Midwest. The recommendation is review Robert Pirsig’s influential Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance prior to the next event.
(9) Empathy continues to expand its political footprint. Empathy inhabits politics, even when empathy is conspicuous by its absence. Regardless of what one thinks of the individual candidates or economic platforms, the messaging of decency and cooperation reliably gets more votes than bullying and chest thumping.
The bridge between the political present and a seemingly impossible-to-imagine future is empathy. The empathic moment is an act of imagination. That is the engaging thing about empathy. It may seem like a dream; but the dream lives. It is inclusive. It is consistent with social distancing. Nor does it require agreement.
Different viewpoints are available with regard to anyone’s action, including that of the one with whom one is least likely to agree. This is not the narrow psychological mechanism of empathy in which one simply reverses perspective with another person. Political engagement is the attempt to take on the multiplicity of standpoints represented in a given community. Historical empathy is trending, too (see Kohut 2020).
The greater variety of perspectives that one has present in one’s mind on the present and past while one is engaging a given issue, and the better one can imagine how one would think and feel if one were in their place. This brief note to point to more discussion in the coming year.
The politics of rage are abroad in the land. When people are spoken to using ethnic or racial insults, they get enraged. When people feel their values and commitments are not respected, they are aggrieved – and they get enraged. Dignity violations are experienced as breakdowns of empathy – and that causes people to get angry; and the anger often escalates into rage. It gets worse – and more ambiguous.
Demagogues tell their constituents that other groups do not respect them, are out to get them. Demagogues take advantage of people’s sometimes legitimate grievances. The result is that the rage is displaced onto those groups. This becomes especially problematic when the dignity violation is imaginary such as a non-existent Pizzagate Conspiracy.
The emotional contagion that precedes mob action is a demonstrable breakdown of empathic receptivity. The communicability of negative emotions such as fear, anger, and panic are aroused and the humanity of one’s neighbors is denied. The comparison of the intended victims to insects is a distressing symptom of the denial of empathy, followed by dehumanization, followed by violence.
The first step in eliminating any natural inhibitions on violence is to deny empathy to the intended victims that accompanies their humanity. Wherever one’s opponent is described in devaluing and dehumanizing language, the red flag is out. Get ready for human rights violations.
Once called forth, rage can be channeled in a number of different directions. If it is channeled into burning down one’s own neighborhood, that is the self-defeating response to breakdowns in empathy. If it is channeled into a lynch mob, it is an appalling human rights violation that must rally people everywhere to the cause of justice. If it is channeled into righteous indignation and civil disobedience, that is an approach with potentially better outcomes.
The empathy lesson? An empathic response on the part of the authorities will deescalate the rage and interrupt the potential for violence. People in the community use their empathy as a way of data gathering to determine if the authorities initial empathic responsiveness is the real deal or just more propaganda.
(8) “USPS, yes!” from a song by The Bobs entitled “Drive by Love.” Add logistics and supply chain genius to the list of “unsung heroics” of empathy. It takes something to “get” that on-time delivery is actually a form of empathic responsiveness.
Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor dead of night – nor pandemic – stopped the US Post Office from delivering the mail – which included many mail-in ballots. Hats off to the unsung heroes – there are so many of them – in this case, the logistical accomplishments of forwarding the US mail. What happened once the mail got there is – predictably – more politics.
Yes, of course, the nurses and doctors and first responders are eminently worthy of our recognition. Of course they are heroes – heroes of restoring health and well-being, cheating death, and survival, even as we also acknowledge that the need for so many heroes is a troubling sign that significant social systems are in breakdown. So do not forget to add to the list the unsung heroes of the solution to the pandemic – the supply chain men and women – the logistics guys. I do not just mean the actual delivery folks driving the trucks as in the song “UPS, yes!” I mean the logistics required to distribute two shots of the first approved vaccine at – what? – 90 degrees below Fahrenheit. No trivial accomplishment.
(7) Empathy is distinguished from simulated empathy (again). People will continue to try to listen to one another, and, by practicing listening, will make progress in distinguishing simulated (“fake”) empathy from empathy – gradually. The matter is complex – and troubling.
Social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook in its current form (Q1 2021)) are unmasked as the ultimate training ground for simulated empathy, a synonym for fake empathy and un-listening.
In the section late in Shoshana Zuboff’s book (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hachette Press)) on “Homing to the Herd,” Zuboff writes:
“[Facebook’s] operations are designed to exploit the human inclination toward empathy, belonging, and acceptance. The system tunes the pitch of our behavior with the rewards and punishments of social pressure, herding the human heart toward confluence as a means to other’s commercial ends.”
I would spit hairs and say, “simulated empathy.” However, the basic point is valid. The user ends up “over sharing” personal information in a kind of tranquilized state of semi-hypnotic psychic numbing similar to that induced in gambling casinos by blinking lights and bells. On FB, you are not the customer – you are the product.
As bad as that may be, it gets worse. The damage to one’s humanity is already done when one’s personal experience is treated as raw material for the surveillance capital’s revenue model. Facebook and Google users – you and me – are not customers; we are the raw material. The customers are the advertisers, corporations with services and goods, whose selling requires a guaranteed outcome. Machine intelligence operating on big data at hyper-scale has within view behavioral modification the results of which B. F. Skinner, wizard of operant conditioning, can only have dreamed. You do not so much search Google as Google searches you. With that in mind, the next up trend is –
(6) Big brother is overtaken by Big Other without, however, decisively expanding empathy. Empathy scores [some] points against Big Other’s fake news, alternative facts, dangerous half truths, total nonsense, and simulated empathy, but the back-and-forth continues.
The opponent is no longer “Big Brother” (as in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984) but “Big Other” (first identified by S. Zuboff in her book (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hachette Press)). Millions of Americans and their representatives in the US Congress subscribe to the fake news promoted by Big Other that the 2020 election was “rigged”; but millions more reject alternative acts, dangerous half truths and total nonsense.
While fake news is perhaps as old as the Trojan horse in Homer’s Iliadand the warning about Greeks bearing gifts, social networking takes the risks and damage to a new level. Fake news aligns in detail with surveillance capitalism (see Zuboff cited above), because fake news maximizes social conflict, controversy, and most importantly – clicks.
Big Other is itself a Trojan horse appearing to be free search and free digital services. However, without advance in listening skills – i.e., the “free-ness” is illusory. It is more like the first settlers handing out blankets that were used to swaddle small pox patients to the indigenous peoples.
Just as the science of physics and engineering enabled industrial capitalism to master nature, a vision of socialphysics (Alex Pentland’s book of the same name features prominently) is being implemented in big data and machine intelligence to implement behavior modification. Thus Zuboff: “Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the ‘others,’ especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging, and inclusion.”
Big Other can mimic empathy, all the while capturing and aggregating the responses such that the predictive modeling can suggest targeted advertisements. Freedom of speech and self-expression continue to flourish. No one is listening.
As noted, social media provide the appearance of connectedness and intimacy – a simulated empathy – while actually perpetrating the equivalent of gossip, social climbing, narcissistic self promotion, and out-and-out deception. Ultimately the idea is to get you to engage in a transaction to buy, use, and consume Big Other’s product or service.
The proper function of education is to promote training in perspective taking (empathy), critical thinking, argumentation, distinguishing fact and fiction, assessing the reliability of reportage in the media, assumption questioning, and how to quote facts in context. These get traction in 2021 and play an expanded role in the school curriculum(s), even as in-person learning makes an all-too-slow comeback.
(6a) True Believers (TB) are moved by empathy, not the facts, to abandon their illusion(s). The illusion/delusion holds the personality together; sp it is impervious to facts or arguments. Try some empathy? The story that one tells to other people is nothing in comparison with the story that one tells oneself. (Here “story” equals “belief system” or even “fiction.”)
You know the TB as the one who Doubles Down on his illusion when things do not go his way. Key term: Double Down. For example, when the space ship does not arrive from Alpha Centauri to take the TBs to the promised land (or your candidate does not win the election), does the TB inquire: Maybe I was mistaken about some of my facts? Maybe I made a wrong assumption? Or perhaps my messaging was a tad off? No! The TB doubles down. “We musta bin cheated!” “We was robbed!”
No marshaling of facts, no amount of logical argument, whether overwhelming or debatable, makes a difference. It does no good – it makes no difference – to take the belief system away from the True Believer. The True Believer is not engaging any alternative point of view. Why not?
The answer is direct: the story, belief system, or ficiton is what is holding the True Believer’s self, his or her personality, together. Take away the belief system and the personality falls apart. The person experiences emotional fragmentation, anxiety, and stress. This is why the True Believer becomes angry, starts to shout, escalates to rage in the face of countervailing arguments and facts. The TB experiences a narcissistic injury that threatens the coherence of the TB’s personality.
The secret of empathic relating to the True Believer is not agreeing or disagreeing, undercutting or sidestepping, antidepressants or antipsychotics, the secret is the relationship the empath has to his own inner True Believer. If you can find an area in which you really are a True Believer, then it is likely you can relate to a True Believer in a conversation for possibility in which both individuals are left in integrity, whole and complete. It does sometimes happen that when the True Believer gets the empathy he or she needs to feel whole and complete, the TB is able to “stand down,” “back away from the ledge,” and rejoin the diverse space of acceptance and tolerance of multiple points of view. It happens, but it takes a lot of work.
(5) Empathy goes online – and stays there. This is one of the few trends from 2020 that were on target – and the trend continues. Here “empathy” refers to the gracious and generous listening that occurs in therapeutic counseling, behavioral health, life coaching, and empathy consulting, to individuals and organizations.
In particular, while nothing can substitute for an in-person conversation for possibility to shift out of emotional stuck-ness, after two people get to know one another, an online conversation is a good option in case of relocation, bad weather, unpredictable scheduling dynamics – or an especially infectious pandemic. The genie of online therapeutic conversations is out of the bottle, and not going back in.
Psychotherapy invokes a virtual reality all of its own – even without cyber space. This is especially the case with dynamic psychotherapy that activates forms of transference in which one relates to the therapist “as if” in conversation with a past or future person or reality, the latter not physical present. Indeed, with the exception of being careful not to step in front of a bus while crossing the street on the way to therapy, we are usually over-confident that we know the reality of how our relationships work or what people mean by their communications
Think about it: Those who complain about the lack of reality in a conversation over Zoom may usefully consider the amount of fiction and fantasy in any psychodynamic conversation, full stop. Never was it truer that meaning – and emotions such as fear – are generated in the mind of the beholder.
(Note: This trend is in part an excerpt from: Lou Agosta’s article “Empathy in Cyberspace: The Genie is Out of the Bottle” in Theory and Practice of Online Therapy: Internet-delivered Interventions for Individuals, Groups, Families, and Organizations edited by Haim Weinberg and Arnon Rolnick. London and New York: Routledge: To learn more about the complete book, click here: Theory and Practice of Online Therapy [https://tinyurl.com/yyyp84zc])
(4) Empathy in law enforcement. The police struggle with policing themselves – succeeding in many cases, failing dramatically in others – and, as a result, we all struggle. I acknowledge the dedication, commitment, and hard work of first responders. And yet the police [need to] do a better job of policing themselves. Expanded empathy training gets traction.
The trend to train the police in empathy to deescalate potentially violent situations continues to get traction – and is making a positive difference in many communities – but the list of people of color that end up dead after an encounter with the local constabulary also continues to grow. Disturbing – verrry disturbing. More progress is needed.
This is definitely a “hot button” issue. A coherent position is hard to find amid the shouting. I am a radical moderate. I am an extreme centrist. If my house is being burglarized or on fire, I am definitely not going to call a hippie. Heck, a couple already live there [okay, a bad joke].
However, the trend is to promote accountability – and prevent defending – I almost said “defunding” – and in the case(s) of a few “bad apples” by eliminating organizational obstacles. It lacks credibility that a police union would never expel one of its members for violating the human rights of a citizen according to the union’s own code of police conduct. The union has a code of conduct that aligns with promoting human rights, right? I acknowledge: The problem is that one person’s bad apple is another’s dedicated professional. However, when unarmed civilians end up taking bullets fired by the police, I assert that we can all tell the difference.
This is not primarily a public relations problem – it is a human rights one. The police struggle to police themselves, and so, absent expanded empathy in the community with the community for the community, we all struggle.
Communities will benefit from expanded empathy on the part of the law enforcement. However, there is another reason that indicates this trend has traction. The public does not always hear about the multi-million dollar financial settlements that municipalities are required to pay for wrongful death or excessive use of force, because these agreements come with rigorous confidentiality clauses.
Police who lack training turn out to be extraordinarily expensive to the taxpayers. In this context, “lack of training” does not mean insufficient time taking target practice. It means the need for practice in putting oneself in the other person’s shoes and considering possibilities for conflict resolution, de-escalation, and community building. In short, empathy is an important part of the gear deployed by law enforcement as the warrior cop, who will still be needed in extreme situations, gives way to community policing. Really, is there any other kind?
(3) Expanded empathy in the struggle against domestic violence. Men will find their voice and speak out even more loudly and provide leadership against domestic violence to those of their own gender who just do not get it. Victims and survivors of intimate partner violence face expanded risks if they have to “shelter in place” in the pandemic with the perpetrator(s).
This is grim – beyond grim. Once again, this is not new news but has been just beneath the surface and underreported because it is so confronting. While women have provided the leadership and will continue to do so, powerful men will step up and provide guidance to their fellow about proper boundaries and respect for them in relationships. This is ongoing. What is new: powerful men step up and speak out and provide leadership among men in establishing respect for boundaries in creating communication, affection, and affinity.
For data- and empathy-based innovations that have occurred in the past year in the fight against domestic violence see No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Some sixty percent of domestic violence (DV) victims are strangled at some point during an abusive relationship (p. 65): Big red flag that the perpetrator is escalating in the direction of homicide/Femicide.
Turns out that only some 15% of the victims in one study had injuries visible enough to photograph for the police report (p. 66). Most strangulation injuries are internal – hence, the title. Good news/bad news: The Fatality Review Board is an idea that is getting attention with law enforcement and the local states attorney function. More progress and action is needed in this area.
(2) A rumor of empathy in Big Pharma. The rumor is validated. After the debunking of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) completed by Chris Lane (2007) and the disappointing DSM 5th edition (2013), Big Pharma has a real opportunity to redeem itself in the eyes of the community. There is probably no other group of organizations on the planet that can do it. A crash project. High risk. Utterly urgent. The Covid-19 vaccine gets into people’s arms. Vaccine deniers say: “Oh, how I wish I were already experiencing the minor side effects of the shot!”
No, not a new psychotropic intervention for shyness, social anxiety, or hording. A vaccine(s) against Covid-19. The stakes are high, and it actually required [procedural] innovations at the FDA, CDC, and the US Congress (a high bar indeed) to enable treatments to be trialed without the usual ten-year plus long protocols (which are usually appropriate but not in this case). Fingers crossed (as of this writing 12/2020). Seems to be working – albeit gradually. Here me say it again (tongue in cheek): Don’t be so grouchy; have faith in Fauci! We are all most beholden’.
(2a) Empathy intersects with the struggle over climate change. 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.
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
(1) Remove the obstacles to empathy such as cynicism and bullying—and empathy comes forth. Remove the resistances to empathy and empathy naturally and spontaneously expands. Most people are naturally empathic and they an expanding appreciation of empathy suffuses the community.
The one-minute empathy training is trending: Eliminate the obstacles to empathy and a space of acceptance and toleration spontaneously emerges.
Most people do not sufficiently appreciate this: people are born with a deep and natural capacity for empathy, but they are also born needing to learn manners, respect for boundaries, and toilet training. Put the mess in the designated place or the community suffers from diseases. People also need to learn how to read and do arithmetic and communicate in writing. But there is a genuine sense in which learning to conform and follow all the rules does not expand our empathy or our community. It does not help the cause of expanded empathy that rule-making and the drumbeat of compliance are growing by leaps and bounds.
The work at hand? Remove the blocks to empathy such as dignity violations, devaluing language, gossip, shame, guilt, egocentrism, over-identification, lack of integrity, inauthenticity, hypocrisy, making excuses, finger pointing, jealousy, envy, put downs, being righteous, stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, cynicism, censorship, denial, manipulation, competing to be the biggest victim, insults, injuries to self-esteem, and narcissistic merger—and empathy spontaneously expands, develops, and blossoms. Now that is going to require some work!
Teaching empathy consists in overcoming the obstacles to empathy that people have acquired. When the barriers are overcome, then empathy spontaneously develops, grows, comes forth, and expands. There is no catch, no “gotcha.” That is the one-minute empathy training, pure-and-simple.
Selected Bibliography
Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For the Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs (Hachette).
Tom Kohut. (2020). Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past. London: Routledge (T&F).
Louise Snyder. (2019). No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Lou Agosta. (2012). A Rumor of Empathy at Apna Ghar, the Video: https://tinyurl.com/y4yolree [on camera interview with Serena Low, former executive director of Apna Ghar about the struggle against DV]
Lou Agosta. (2015). Chapter Four: Treatment of Domestic Violence in A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative and Recovery in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge.
Lou Agosta and Alex Zonis (Illustrator). (2020). Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide. Chicago: Two Pairs Press.
Okay – have read enough and want to order the book Empathy Lessons to learn more about expanding my empathy: I want to order the book HERE.
Lou Agosta, Ph.D., Listening With Empathy 