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Rhetorical empathy – a primer
The relationship between empathy and rhetoric has not been much theorized. At first, empathy and rhetoric seem to be at cross purposes. The speaker who lacks empathy cannot expect to be effective or persuasive; and empathic responsiveness needs to find its voice to be effective in making a difference. With empathy one’s commitment is to listen to the other individual in a space of acceptance and tolerance to create a clearing for possibilities of overcoming and flourishing. With rhetoric, the approach is to bring forth a persuasive discourse in the interest of enabling the other to see a possibility for the her- or himself or the community. In the case of empathy, the initial direction of the communication is inbound, in the case of rhetoric, outbound. Yet the practices of empathy and rhetoric are not as far apart as may at first seem to be the case, and it would not be surprising if the apparent contrary directionality turned out to be a loop, and arts of empathy and rhetoric reciprocally enable different aspects of authentic relatedness, community building, and empowering communications. Both empathy and rhetoric are as much arts as theories, in which the theories emerge from the practice(s). In both cases, practice is a basic part of the theory and vice versa.
Let us take a step back and use as a springboard to catalyze further analysis Lisa Blankenship’s Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy (Utah State University Press, 2019). The present commentary is not a proper book review, but if it were, the short version would be “two thumbs up!” I learned much from this short text and so will any reader.
Blankenship’s book has a throat-grabbingly powerful beginning. It quotes Eudora Welty’s imaginary account in The New Yorker (see July 6, 1963) of the assassination in 1963 of civil right leader Medgar Evers, in Jackson, Mississippi – from the shooter’s point of view. Welty’s fictional narrative was so compelling and lifelike that many readers took it to be the first-person account of the shooter. This is rhetorical empathy. It takes the other’s point of view. In this case, Welty creates a receptivity to an experience of the hatred (prejudice, racism, etc.) that motivated the shooter, but does so in such a way that the reader has a vicarious experience of the hatred. The reader does not actually become a hater, but gets a taste – a sample – a vicarious experience – of what it is like. It creates an understanding of the possibility – and in this case, actuality – that someone could be so motivated. This may be mind expanding to some – and disconverting to others – or both. And the story itself is an empathic response to the appalling crime that expands the reader’s power to cope with and engage the horror with a view to transforming it.
Blankenship contributes here to one of my own interests in the intersection of empathy and fiction, the rhetorical embedding of a fictional account in a factual one. This is not without its challenges to the integrity of the narrator, for no way exists to know “for sure” what went on in the conscious mind of the shooter – and, arguably, not even the shooter knew what went on in his unconscious mind. Welty’s story is narrated within the frame of a fictional account “as if” she were the shooter. Yet skepticism is not an option – or even required. Courts of law, historical monographs, and therapeutic processes, all ask and engage with the motives of human beings both as specific historical individuals and the ideal type, “human actor.”
A rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong about the feelings and thoughts of others, and such empathy seeks to check the validity of its empathy in a conversation with the other. Granted in a case such as this, the conversation might include a police interrogation. In addition to be a short story, Welty’s account is a proposal as to what motivated the perpetrator. To validate the account, one would have to talk to the perpetrator – as noted, even interrogate him – or peruse his diary or other (un)published communications. Indeed Welty’s bait of falsehood catches a carp of truth (as Shakespeare’s Polonius famously noted in another context). Given a firm anchoring in the factual details of the case, the way is opened to such alethic – “disclosive” – truths as learning to live with uncertainty, the conflictual dynamics of the human psyche, and acknowledging not knowing what one does not know.
In another context, Blankenship provides a moving narrative of “coming out” queer in a family of evangelical Christians. This is not for the faint of heart. One can’t top it, and I am inspired by it. This cannot have been easy, and shows that she has “matriculated in the college of hard knocks.” She is a survivor, and, as is often the case, survivors are able to make good use of the difficult, even traumatic, experiences they had to endure to inform an expanded empathic sensibility to the radical differences in experiences that empathy is committed to bridging. Blankenship’s other cases are hard-hitting, politically and factually relevant political advocacy for exploited workers, marginalized groups (e.g., LGBTQ), and teaching composition to undergraduates, the career challenging possibilities of which should not be underestimated. By the way, Blankenship capitalizes Other and uses “otherizing” [making into an Other] in a way that resonates with my own thinking.
Blankenship’s work contains and insists on an important caution, which hereafter my own work is committed to acknowledging. When the privileged and powerful call for empathic vulnerability, they must lead by personal example, not call for the powerless to be even more empathically vulnerable. This is obvious to common sense, but our own fractured political and cultural battlefields have long left common sense behind. Therefore, it is necessary explicitly to call out such things. Rhetorical empathy as such is not mere talk, yet it reverses the direction of our traditional understanding of empathy as listening, empathic receptivity, from inbound to the outbound direction of communication (speaking). There is precedent for it, for example, as President Obama’s speaking (and rhetoric) powerfully articulated the value of empathy for the marginalized and under-privileged, calling on the powerful and privileged to be more inclusive. That such a shift is not easy to bring about and is still a work in progress, makes it all the more urgent to further the shift.
Blankenship properly calls out the fundamental acknowledgement that Heidegger gives to Aristotle’s treatment of pathos (emotion, affect, passion) in Book II of his (Aristotle’s) Rhetoric. Her analysis is on target and penetrating. Yet I have one point of disagreement. She attempts to line up “empathy” with some particular pathos in Aristotle such as elos (pity) or clemency. This will not do, and it goes beyond what Blankenship proposes.
Empathy – the phenomenon, not the word – is not a particular emotion, but the form of the receptivity to and understanding of all the emotions – any arbitrary emotion – everything from sadness, anger, fear, and high spirits to subtler emotions such as guilt, jealousy or righteous indignation; and there is no word for that in Aristotle. Aristotle’s use of the term “empatheateros” (εμπαθέστερος) occurs in his treatise On Dreams(460b).[1] In this text, the term and its use do not mean what the tradition understands by “empathy” or what we mean by it today. Rather it means being in a condition of being influenced by one’s emotions. When in a state of emotional excitement, sense-perception is more easily deceived by the imagination than is normally the case. When excited by the emotion of fear, the coward is more likely to think that his enemy is approaching (though it is only a distant figure); or when excited by love, the amorous individual believes it is the beloved one approaching from a distance. This suggests that empathy without adequate interpretation is blind. However, projection is also operating here. The individual perceives the situation in line with his or her pre-given emotional set, and attributes to the object what is merely a function of the individual’s own affective condition. The distortion of empathy emerges along with the possibility of empathy.
At this point, my discussion goes beyond what Blankenship writes, though I believe it is consistent with her position. This discussion is less concerned with the struggle for social justice causes, worthy though it be, than delivering on a neo-Aristotelian account of rhetorical empathy in a way that makes sense out of both empathy and rhetoric.
As one might expect, an Aristotelian account of what is entailed in capturing and responding to the emotions relies on an analysis in terms of what are designated as Aristotle’s “four causes” – formal, final, efficient, and material. With the possible exception of the material cause, what one calls the formal, efficient, and final causes are redescriptions of the same underlying phenomenon in nature according to different aspects of causality. Yet Aristotle lived in a profoundly different world than we inhabit today. Vision consisted of rays reaching out from the eyes to grasp the visible object. As the gypsy and savant Melquiades said, “Things have a life of their own; it is just a matter of waking up their souls.” This can be particularly puzzling if one thinks of causal relations between events in terms used by David Hume, for whom the causality by which one billiard ball impacts another and causes it to move is invisible.[2] One sees the first ball hit the other and the other immediately jumps forward. Nowhere is a separate causal relation to be perceived. In contrast with the modern conception of causality, for Aristotle the principles of change (“causes”) are visible. For Aristotle, only one event is transpiring—a change in a total field of potentiality in which motion is actualized. The carpenter is the efficient cause of the cabinet as is the sculpture of the statue. Objects such as billiard balls are sublunary objects empowered to move at their own level, and are not significant problems requiring attention.
Now shift this analysis in the direction of the emotions. It may be a function of our primitive understanding of the emotions or the subtlety and power of Aristotle’s analysis, but the Aristotelian account of the emotions is a strong contender. In the context of the emotions, for example, the anger aroused by an insult is not separate from that insult, but is part of the processing of the anger in context. In addition to the physiological concomitants (material cause), one elaborates the occasions that arouse the anger (efficient cause), what one is trying to accomplish in expressing anger (final cause), and the process of being angry and expressing the anger (formal cause). One is dealing with the totality of a human interaction and situation.
According to Aristotle, “Anger must be defined as a movement of a body, or of a part or faculty of a body, in a particular state roused by such a cause, with such an end in view” (On the Soul, 403a: 25).[3] The emotion of anger involves “a surging of blood and heat round the heart” (403b: 1) as the material cause. Being in a particular state of emotional upset involving “a craving for retaliation” (403a: 30) is the formal statement of the essence, though the retaliation itself might be redescribed as the final cause, the end in view. It is almost impossible to describe the primary principle of change (“efficient cause”) without falling into a modern, sense of disconnected events such as those described by David Hume when two billiard balls impact, the first being the cause of the second’s motion. Granted, there are certain things which arouse our anger—various insults, slights, disdain, frustration with things and people, spitefulness—Aristotle understands these as being part of the activity of being angry. Nevertheless, if one encounters an person angry, there is no better way than to appreciate the efficient cause – or trigger – of her anger than to ask, “Who perpetrated a dignity violation against the person?” From the perspective of the final cause – the purpose – one’s anger has a certain end in view, a target, which is usually an action directed against a person, that for the sake of which the activity is undertaken, retaliation (“pay back”). So at least one thing is plain: Aristotle makes it clear that the understanding of emotion involves more than knowing what the other person feels like “inside.” Emotion is a complex human activity involving the possibility of redescriptions of the phenomenon of emotionality from the four perspectives of Aristotelian causality.
Having laid out an account of the emotions, we turn to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The power of the Rhetoric lies in recreating the listening of the audience in the oratorical performance of the speaker. “Recreating the listening of the audience” in the speaker means precisely that what the speaker utters expresses what the listener is experiencing, has experienced, or may usefully consider experiencing going forward. These are not necessarily consistent with one another, and some listeners are only willing to hear what they already believe or of which they are “certain”. That is whether rhetorical techniques and strategies – such as empathy – may be appropriate to persuade or get around defensive certainty to allow the communication to land in way that makes a difference.
Aristotle does not need to call out an explicit term for empathy because his method is informed by empathy from the start. The speaker’s character and how that character is shown in his speaking is responsible for how the speaker’s discourse is received – how the speaking “lands” – in the listening of the individual in the audience. Aristotle’s guidance to the empathic rhetorician is in effect to recreate the way in which the listener is listening to the speaking of the speaker.
© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Being an empathic (“good”) orator depends on being a certain kind of person rather than possessing a body of knowledge (see also Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (1994)). Persuading the listener means being a certain kind of person – having the depth of character to demonstrate one’s integrity, wholeness, leadership by example – rather than rhetorically providing the best syllogism (though sound and valid reasoning is also important). Providing a gracious and generous response to the listener (audience), the orator forms a vicarious experience that is subject to further empathic processing. In order for the other to be in enrolled in the orator’s speaking, does the orator then have to demonstrate to the listener (audience) that the speaker has listened? The speaker (orator) has to become an empathic rhetorician in the sense that she demonstrates in her speaking to the other that the orator has gotten or captured or understood what is of utmost concern to the listener (audience). This is inevitably complicated by the possibility that the individuals in the audience themselves do not fully appreciate what is that possibility.
This account of the emotions comes into its own in the place where Aristotle gives his most complete account of the emotions, Book II of his Rhetoric.[4] Aristotle’s account of the emotions in other context (e.g., On the Soul) calls out bodily effects such as “blood surging” and accelerated physiological effects. If Aristotle had known of mirror neurons (or a biological mirroring system), then he might well have marshaled these as part of his account of the material cause. As things stand, Aristotle gives his analysis in terms of just three aspects of the emotions in his Rhetoric. He distinguishes the disposition or frame of mind of the emotion, the person with whom or towards whom one feels the emotion, and the occasions which give rise to the emotion (Rhetoric, 1378a: 9-10).
This rational reconstruction of the role of empathy in Aristotle, who did not use the word “empathy” here, is guided by the hypothesis that a speaker without empathy is not going to be effective, persuasive, or successful. Empathy is the reenactment or recreation of the audience’s listening in the orator’s speaking. The choice of arguments and facts to be persuasive must be guided by the speaker’s empathy with the audience. Who are they and what possibilities, potential and actual emotions, and reactions are present in their listening? The speaker who can answer these questions will be most powerful and persuasive.
The really Big Idea here is that the speaker gets his humanness from the audience. Rhetorical empathy invites the audience’s empathic receptivity to the speaker only to give it back to them (the audience) in an empathic responsiveness that validates the audience’s own experience. It is not just that the audience confers on the speaker his (or her) social role as orator but, in the sense that by his character and who he is as a speaker demonstrates empathically that the speaker is part of the community, persuasively carrying the day by an example of leadership.
Consider now an exercise. One may well want to take this Aristotelian analysis a step further and raise a question that did not occur to Aristotle, namely, “What are the four [Aristotelian] causes of empathy?” This did not even occur to Aristotle because, arguably, he lived in an understanding of empathy that was a fundamental part of the dynamics of emotions in practical deliberation and speaking. A brief outline of the answer is worth considering, as a rational reconstruction of what Aristotle might have argued, though it goes beyond Aristotle’s text.
As the material cause of empathy, one may usefully focus on the way in which the betrayal of feeling in another individual arouses corresponding feelings in oneself. So someone yawns. Pretty soon one feels like yawning too. Laughter and tears can frequently be induced in this way as one’s “laugh lines” and “grief muscles” are activated by a kind of contagion at the level of one’s physical organism. The evidence of mirror neuron as a “common coding” scheme at the level of the organism also warrants recognition.[5]
If by formal cause or essence one understands Aristotle’s interpretation in the Rhetoric as disposition or frame of mind, then the subject of empathy would be in a particular state of receptivity or openness. But open to what? Open to different possible ways of being in the relationship to the speaker and the matter being addressed in the speaking. In everyday terms where communications are enacted and delivered through language, the audience would be listening receptively. But this also extends to the speaker. The speaker would be recreating the listening of the audience in his/her own speaking by being responsible for how the message “landed.” Thus, if the speaker was giving a funeral oration, he would be responsible for speaking in such a way as to call forth the loss and sadness of the listener. When ML King iteratively calls out “I have a dream,” describing black and white children holding hands in a community free of racial prejudice (which children of all races generally do anyway unless adults “teach” them prejudice), King’s speaking calls forth in the listener the possibility of overcoming prejudice (and related injustice). Yes, there is art and perhaps even artifice involved, technically called “anaphora,” repeating the same phrase to heighten engagement towards an emotional peak. One may say this form of empathic receptivity is not empathy at all but emotional contagion or infectious feelings, and there is truth to that statement. However, what is missed is that the same underlying function is employed in empathy as in emotional contagion and that a rigorous and critical empathy sets a limit to the contagion, further processing the emotion in empathic understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. In its rhetorical enactment, the empathic responsiveness, in addition to including acknowledgement and recognition of the listener’s struggle and humanity, usually includes a call to action. If one stops with emotional contagion, the result is unpredictable – one gets a riot. If one further processes the empathic receptivity, one creates a possibility – such as a peaceful demonstration, speaking truth to power, working on oneself and one’s own spiritual development, and so on.
Returning now to the traversal of the four causes, the final cause of empathy is the purpose or end in view of the speaker’s expression of emotion. For example, when Malcolm X, addressing a largely African American audience, says “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, the rock was landed on us!” – the applause, laughter, and exclamations of “Amen!” “Right, brother,” indicate the accuracy of the empathic gesture. (Malcolm used this line many time – one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Aq2Z0i8D6A .) The final cause of rhetorical empathy is to build a community between the speaker and the listener(s). Another way of saying this in Aristotelian terms is the speaker’s empathic response recognizes the listener’s humanness and recognizes the listener’s struggle or accomplishment. Acknowledgement and recognition are the final causes of empathy in general and empathic rhetoric in particular.
Finally, the efficient cause of empathy would be what immediately releases one’s empathy. This forms a whole that is indistinguishable from the context of emotionality, though, as indicated above, we moderns represent separate, disconnected events. Aristotle’s practical wisdom (phronesis) of the virtuous individual enables the speaker to recognize details of the situation that are suited to the situation (Nichomachean Ethics VI.5). This requires taking the other’s perspective and assessing what is relevant; and doing so with the appropriate emotions. The empathic speaker deploys language to present a case that arouses a vicarious experience of the situation such that the listener is touched by it and is enrolled in – “buys into” – the request for action made by the speaker. The request may be “consider the possiblity,” “let go of prejudice,” “commit to acceptance and tolerance in human relations,” “find the defendant ‘not guilty’,” “buy the product,” “marry me,” “hire me as an employee,” “elect me your representative in the assembly,” and so on. In rhetorical empathy, one tries to imagine what would make one behave, feel, speak or otherwise respond the way the other is behaving or one wishes him to behave. If one’s empathy is not spontaneously released by the here and now, the speaker (or listener) will try to reconstruct the other’s situation imaginatively in order to further his empathy (and vice versa).
Rhetorical empathy is not empathy as traditionally understood. Indeed rhetorical empathy invites the possibility that effective but unethical speakers may misuse empathic methods to control or dominate. This too is a possibility of empathy, available already at the start. The devil may (and does!) quote scripture. The fact that rhetoric can be misused for purposes of manipulation should not blind us to the consequences which Aristotle’s account of the emotions has for empathetic receptivity. This opens up a whole conversation, which cannot be completed here. However, the position of this speaker is that “empathy tells one what the other individual experiencing; one’s morals and good upbringing tell one what to do about it.” One cannot expect one’s empathic receptivity to encompass the depths of another’s emotions unless one lets one’s empathy be informed by the occasion, the object, and the disposition of the person. In a way, the introduction of empathy into the context of rhetoric requires a transformation of the function of the rhetorical speaker into that of the listener. One not only strives to arouse and guide emotions, but rather permits one’s own emotions to be aroused by what the other (the audience) is experiencing, what one would like the audience to experience, what imaginatively one believes the audience is likely to be experiencing, and a rigorous and critical combination of all of these. It is a further challenge to manage or control a rigorous and critical empathy once it is explicitly called forth and that is – the art of rhetorical empathy.
[1] Aristotle, “On dreams” in Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle VIII: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, tr. W.S. Hett, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936: 348f.
[2] Jonathan Lear. (1988). Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988: 31.
[3] Aristotle, “On dreams” in Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle VIII: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, tr. W.S. Hett, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936: 2f.
[4] Aristotle, “Art of Rhetoric” in Loeb Classical Library: Aristotle ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, tr. J. H. Freese. London & Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann &Harvard University Press, 1926: 169f.
[5] Philip L. Jackson, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Jean Decety. (2005). “How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy.” Neuroimage 24 (2005). See also J. Decety & P.L. Jackson. (2004). “The functional architecture of human empathy” in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, Vol 3, No. 2, June 2004, 71-100; V. Gallese. (2007). “The shared manifold hypothesis: Embodied simulation and its role in empathy and social cognition” in Empathy and Mental Illness, eds. T. Farrow and P. Woodruff, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 452f. [Editorial note: this material duplicates that cited below in the context of Hume – one of the occurrences should be deleted, assuming the material on Aristotle goes forward.]
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Historical empathy, guns, and the strict construction of the US Constitution
I am sick at heart. This is hard stuff. All those kids. Teachers and principals, too, dying trying to defend the children. Everyone cute as button. Just as bad, I have to re-publish this article, since the needed breakthrough has not yet occurred. What to do about it? My proposal is to expand historical empathy. Really. Historical empathy is missing, and if we get some, expand it, something significant will shift.
Putting ourselves in the situation of people who lived years ago in a different historical place and time is a challenge to our empathy. It requires historical empathy. How do we get “our heads around” a world that was fundamentally different than our own? It is time – past time – to expand our historical empathy (Kohut 2020). For example …
Brown Bess, Single Shot Musket, standard with the British Army and American Colonies 1787
When the framers of the US Constitution developed the Bill of Rights, the “arms” named in the Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms” referred to a single shot musket using black powder and lead ball as a bullet. The intention of the authors was to use such weapons for hunting, self-defense, arming the nascent US Armed Forces, and so on. No problem there. All the purposes are valid and lawful.
One thing is for sure and my historical empathy strongly indicates: Whatever the Founding Fathers intended with the Second Amendment, they did NOT intend: Sandy Hook. They did not intend Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine, Buffalo, NY, Tops Friendly. They did not intend some 119 school shootings since 2018. They did not intend a “a fair fight” between bad guys with automatic weapons and police with automatic weapons. The Founding Fathers did not intend wiping out a 4th grade class using automatic weapon(s). They did not intend heart breaking murder of innocent people, including children, everyone as cute as a button.
Now take a step back. I believe we should read the US Constitution literally on this point about the right to “keep and bear” a single shot musket using black powder and lead ball. The whole point of the “strict constructionist” approach – the approach of the distinguished, now late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away on Feb 13, 2016 – is to understand what the original framers of the Constitution had in mind at the time the document was drawn up and be true to that intention in so far as one can put oneself in their place. While this can be constraining, it can also be liberating.
Consider: No one in 1787 – or even 1950 – could have imagined that the fire power of an entire regiment would be placed in the hands of single individual with a single long gun able to deliver dozens of shots a minute with rapid reload ammo clips. (I will not debate semi-automatic versus automatic – the mass killer in LasVegas had an easy modification to turn a semi-automatic into an automatic.)
Unimaginable. Not even on the table.
This puts the “right” to “bear arms” in an entirely new context. You have got a right to a single shot musket, powder and ball. You have got a right to a single shot every two minutes, not ten rounds a second for minutes on end, or until the SWAT team arrives. The Founding Fathers did not intend the would-be killer being perversely self-expressed on social media to “out gun” school security staff who are equipped with a six shooter. Now the damage done by such a weapon as the Brown Bess should not be under-estimated. Yet the ability to cause mass casualties is strictly limited by the relatively slow process of reloading.
The Founding Fathers were in favor of self-defense, not in favor of causing mass casualties to make a point in the media. The intention of the Second Amendment is to be secure as one builds a farm in the western wilderness, not wipe out a 4th grade class. I think you can see where this is going.
Let us try a thought experiment. You know, how in Physics 101, you imagine taking a ride on a beam of light? I propose a thought experiment based on historical empathy: Issue every qualified citizen a brown bess musket, powder, and ball. What next?
Exactly what we are doing now! Okay, bang away guys. This is not funny – and yet, in a way, it is. A prospective SNL cold open? When the smoke clears, there is indeed damage, but it is orders of magnitude less than a single military style assault rifle weapon. When the smoke clears, all-too-often weapons are found to be in the hands of people who should not be allowed to touch them – the mentally unstable, those entangled in the criminal justice system, and those lacking in the training needed to use firearms safely.
More to the point, this argument needs to be better known in state legislatures, Congress, and the Supreme Court. All of a sudden the strict constructionists are sounding more “loose” and the “loose” constructionist, more strict. It would be a conversation worth having.
The larger question is what is the relationship between arbitrary advances in technology and the US Constitution. The short answer? Technology is supposed to be value neutral – one can use a hammer to build a house and take shelter from the elements or to bludgeon your innocent neighbor. However, technology also famously has unanticipated consequences. In the 1950s, nuclear power seemed like a good idea – “free” energy from splitting the atom. But then what to do with the radioactive waste whose half life makes the landscape uninhabitable by humans for 10,000 years? Hmmm – hadn’t thought about that. What to do about human error – Three Mile Island? And what to do about human stupidity – Chernobyl? What to do about unanticipated consequences? Mass casualty weapons in the hands of people intent on doing harm? But wait: guns do not kill people; people with guns kill people. Okay, fine.
There are many points to debate. For example, guns are a public health issue: getting shot is bad for a person’s health and well-being. Some citizens have a right to own guns; but all citizens have a right not to get shot. People who may hurt themselves or other people should be prevented from getting access to firearms. There are many public health – and mental health – implications, which will not be resolved here. There are a lot of gun murders in Chicago – including some using guns easily obtained in Texas and related geographies. The point is not to point fingers, though that may be inevitable. The guidance is: Do not ask what is wrong – rather ask what is missing, the availability of which would make a positive different. In this case, one important thing that is missing is historical empathy.
Because the consequences of human actions – including technological innovation – often escape from us, it is necessary to consider processes for managing the technology, providing oversight – in short, regulation. Regulation based on historical empathy. Gun regulation . Do it now.
That said, I am not serious about distributing a musket and powder and ball to every qualified citizen in place of (semi) automatic weapons – this is an argument called a “reduction to absurdity”; but I’ll bet the Founding Fathers would see merit in the approach. There’s a lot more to be said about this – and about historical empathy – but in the meantime, I see a varmint coming round the bend – pass me my brown bess!
Additional Reading
Thomas Kohut. (2020). Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past. London: Routledge.
PS Please send a copy of this editorial to your US Congressional representatives in the House and Sensate.
Review: Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person by James Jardine
The occasion for James Jardine’s engaging and complex book is the publication of the critical edition of Husserl’s drafts for Ideas II, edited (separately) by Edith Stein and Ludwig Landgrabe as Husserliana IV/V [Hua]. Jardine notes:
“I draw upon a forthcoming volume of Husserliana which, for the first time, presents the original manuscripts written by Husserl for the project of Ideen II (Hua IV/V), a now-finished editorial task which was carefully pursued for several years by Dirk Fonfara at the Husserl-Archiv in Köln” [Jardine 2022: 4].
For this substantial scholarly contribution, we, the academic reading public, are most deeply grateful. We are also grateful for James Jardine’s penetrating and dynamic engagement with the cluster of issues around empathy, ego, embodiment and community raised in Husserl’s Ideas II. This is also the place to note that like many academic books, the pricing is such that individuals will want to request that their college, university, or community library order the book rather than buy it retail.
Empathy is a rigorous and critical practice. The commitment is always to be charitable in reviewing another’s work, and this is especially so when the topic is empathy. An empathic review of a work on empathy requires – sustained and expanded empathy. Any yet is not a softball review and Jardine’s work presents challenges from logical, phenomenological and rational reconstruction perspectives. It is best to start by letting Jardine speak for himself and at some length:
“I motivate and explore in detail the claim that animate empathy involves the broadly perceptual givenness of another embodied subject as experientially engaged in a common perceptual world. Interpersonal empathy, which I regard as founded upon animate empathy, refers by contrast to the fully concrete variety of empathy at play when we advert to another human person within a concrete lifeworldly encounter” [Jardine: 5].
“ […] [O]nce we recognise that the constitution of a common perceptual world is already enabled by animate empathy—without an analysis of the latter being exhausted by our pointing out this function—this allows us to render thematic the specific forms of foreign subjectivity and interpersonal reality that are opened up by interpersonal empathy, which involves but goes far beyond animate empathy” [Jardine: 88].
The key distinction is clear: “animate empathy” is distinct from “interpersonal empathy.” This distinction is widely employed in empathy scholarship, even if not in these exact terms, with many varying nuances and shades of meaning. This distinction roughly corresponds to the distinctions between affective and cognitive empathy, between empathic receptivity and empathic understanding, and, most generically, between “top down” and “bottom up” empathy. Arguably, the distinction even corresponds to that between the neurological interpretation of empathy using mirror neurons (or a mirroring system just in case mirror neurons do not exist) and the folk definition of empathy as “taking a walk in the other person’s shoes (with the other’s personality)”.
I consider it an unconditionally positive feature of Jardine’s work that he does NOT mention mirror neurons, which are thoroughly covered elsewhere in the literature (e.g., V. Gallese, 2006, “Mirror Neurons and Intentional Attunement,” JAPA).
From a phenomenological point of view, Jardine succeeds in showing that Husserl is a philosopher of empathy – animate empathy. Even if Maurice Merleau-Ponty does carry the work of phenomenology further into neurology and psychology, having inherited Jean Piaget’s chair, Husserl is already the phenomenologist of the lived experience of the body. The human (and mammalian!) body that one encounters after every phenomenological bracketing and epoché is a source of animate expressions of life. A pathological act of over-intellectualization is required not to see the body as expressing life in the form of sensations, feelings, emotions, affects, and thoughts. There are dozens and dozens of pages and lengthy quotations devoted to this idea. Here are a couple of quotes by Husserl that make the point:
“We ‘see’ the other and not merely the living body of the other; the other itself is present for us, not only in body, but in mind: ‘in person’” (Hua IV/V 513/Hua IV 375, transl. modified [1917]).
“The unity of the human being permits parts to be distinguished, and these parts are animated or ensouled (beseelt) unities (Hua IV/V 582 [1916/1917])” [Jardine 2022: 78].
Animate empathy LIVES in Husserl’s Ideas II. In addition, the shared space of living physical bodies creates a clearing for the intersubjective perception of natural (physical) objects in the common world of things and events. In that sense, empathy is at the foundation of the shared intersubjective world of thing-objects (as Heidegger would say “present to hand”).
However, the big question – for Husserl, Jardine, and all of us who follow – is does Husserl’s version of empathy found the intersubjective world of conscious human beings with intentional perceptions, emotions, actions, and personal engagements?
After nearly three hundred pages of engaging, useful, and lengthy quotations from Landgreb’s and Stein’s drafts of Ideas II, closely related texts of Husserl, and Jardine’s penetrating and incisive commentary, this reviewer was still not sure. In addition to my own shorting-comings, there are significant other reasons and considerations.
Jardine’s work is an innovative train-wreck, rather like Leonardo’s fresco the “Last Supper” – even at the start, da Vinci’s masterpiece was a magnificent wreck as the underlying plaster of the fresco did not “set up” properly. In this case, the underlying plaster is Husserl’s “work in progress” of Ideas II. (I acknowledge “work in progress” is my description, not Jardine’s.)
As is well known, Husserl himself withheld the manuscript of Ideas II from publication. He was not satisfied with the results, having been accused of succumbing to the problematic philosophical dead-end of solipsism, the inability to escape from the isolated self, knowing only itself. Will empathy solve the problem?
It is a further issue (not mentioned by Jardine) that everything without exception that Husserl actually published in his life about empathy after he published Ideas I (1913), makes “empathy [Einfühlung]” nonfoundational in relation to the givenness of the other individual, displacing it “upstairs.” For example, Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations:
“The theory of experiencing someone else, the theory of so-called ‘empathy [Einfühlung],’ belongs in the first story above our ‘transcendental aesthetics’” [Husserl 1929/31: 146 (173); see also Agosta, 2010: 121].
Now strictly speaking, Jardine could reply that quoting Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations is out of scope for an engagement with Ideas II, and that is accurate enough as it stands; but what is not out of scope is the challenge of solipsism with which Husserl was wrestling philosophically throughout his career. As noted, at the level of the Cartesian Meditations (which Jardine does occasionally quote when it suits his purpose (but not the above-cited quote!)), empathy belongs to the first story upstairs above his “transcendental aesthetics,” as Husserl writes, quoting a Kantian distinction.
Thus, we engage with Jardine’s implicit reconstruction of Husserl’s repeated attempts to navigate the labyrinth of phenomenological experience, joining and separating the subject/self and other individual.
Jardine follows Husserl from the solipsistic frying pan into the fire by quoting Husserl accurately as saying the self and other are separated by an abyss:
“Husserl calls out a “series of appearances (…) are exchanged, while each subject yet remains ineluctably distinct from every other by means of an abyss, and no one can acquire identically the same appearances as those of another. Each has his stream of consciousness displaying a regularity (Regelung) that encompasses precisely all streams of consciousness, or rather, all animal subjects (die eben über alle Bewusstseinsströme bzw. Animalischen Subjekte übergreift)” (Hua IV/V 254–255/Hua IV 309, transl. modified [1913])” [Jardine: 134 (emphasis added)].
Husserl tries a reduction to absurdity to escape from the solipsistic world of this abyss between self and other, supposing the world really were mere semblances. One will eventually encounter a person who is a non-semblance. This other individual who transforms the mere semblance into actually appearance awakens one from the dream of solipsism If it could be shown or argued that this other individual is necessarily given/presented/encountered, then all one’s previous solipsistic experience would be like hallucinatory madness. With apologies to Hilary Putnam, this is Husserl’s “brain in a vat” moment [Jardine: 126]:
“…[A]ny intersubjective “apperceptive domain”, Husserl claims, it is conceivable that, in the solipsistic world, “I have the same manifolds of sensation and the same schematic manifolds,” and, in as much as functional relations hold between such manifolds, then it may be that “the ‘same’ real things, with the same features, appear to me and, if everything is in harmony, exhibit themselves as ‘actually being’” (Hua IV/V 295 [1915]; cf. Hua IV 80). And yet, if other human living bodies were to then “show up” and be “understood” as such, the feigned reality of our experienced ‘things’ would be called into question:
Now all of a sudden and for the first time human beings are there for me, with whom I can come to an understanding [. . . .] As I communicate to my companions my earlier lived-experiences an d they become aware of how much these conflict with their world, constituted intersubjectively and continuously exhibited by means of a harmonious exchange of experience, then I become for them an interesting pathological object, and they call my actuality, so beautifully manifest to me, the hallucination of someone who up to this point in time has been mentally ill (Hua IV/V 295–296/Hua IV 79–80, transl. modified [1915])” [Jardine: 126].
This is a remarkable passage from Husserl, and we are indebted to Jardine’s scholarship for calling it to our attention. The thing that is missing or must be rationally reconstructed in Husserl is the necessity of the givenness of the other; but then, of course, the hermeneutic circle closes and the problem of solipsism is undercut, does not arise, and the character of phenomenology shifts. As is often the case, the really interesting work gets done in a footnote:
“For Husserl, this insight, that a phenomenological treatment of the constitutive relation between subject and world would have to address the (co-)constitutive role played by intersubjectivity, raises issues which cannot be addressed by a single analysis, but which rather demand a rethinking of the entire project of phenomenology” [Jardine: 127 (footnote) (reviewer’s embolding)].
There is nothing wrong with Jardine’s argument, yet, as noted, since this is not a softball review, there is something missing. The distinction “reconstruction” or “rational reconstruction” may usefully be applied to Husserl’s description and/or analysis of empathy. Jardine attempts to cross the abyss by means of interpersonal empathy. To that purpose, Jardine marshals the resources of narrative and of Alex Honneth’s distinction of “elementary recognition.”
To his credit, Jardine holds open the possibility that Husserl’s use of “empathy” does provide the foundation, at the time of Ideas II (1915 – 1917 and intermittently in the 1920s as Stein and Landgrabe try to “fix” the manuscript). Yet Jardine pivots to Alex Honneth’s (1995) key distinction of recognition (“elementary recognition,” to be exact) to provide the missing piece that Husserl struggled to attain. I hasten to add that I think this works well enough, especially within the context of an implied rational reconstruction of empathy within Husserlian/Honnethian dynamics and Husserl’s verstickung in solipsism.
However, this move also shows that Husserl did not quite “get it” as regards empathy being the foundation of interpersonal relations or community. As noted, Husserl is quite explicit in his published remarks that empathy gets “kicked upstairs” and is not a part of the foundation but of the first story above immediate experience, which as those in Europe know well is really the second story in the USA.
As noted, Jardine makes the case for bringing in supplementary secondary, modern thinkers to complement the “work in progress” status of Ideas II as a “messy masterpiece” (Jardine’s description, p. 4). I hasten to add that I do not consider Edith Stein a secondary thinker as her own thinking is primarily and complexly intertwined with that of Husserl. Likewise, Dan Zahavi is an important thinking in Jardine’s subtext and background, whose (Zahavi’s) contributions on empathy and Husserlian intersubjectivity (Husserliana XIV – XV) align with my own (2010) and are not an explicit part of the surface structure of the Jardine’s text.
Relying on the good work that Jardine initiatives, the reconstruction of Husserl’s relationship to empathy can be done in three phases. Husserl first attempts straightaway to connect the subject/self and the other individual person using empathy in Ideas I (1913). This results in the accusation of solipsism. The accusation “has legs,” because arguably Husserl fails to clarify that the other is an essential part of the intentional structure of empathy, even if the noematic object is inadequate or unsatisfied in a given context. Husserl then tries different methods of crossing the “abyss,” including Ideas II and the animate empathic expressions of the lived body. Husserl himself is not happy with the result as it does not quite get to what Jardine properly calls “interpersonal empathy.” At the risk of over-simplification, “interpersonal empathy” what happens we when “get understood” by another person in the context of human emotions and motivations.
The engagement with the critical edition of the second and third volumes of Ideas, provides extensive evidence that for Husserl, the world of experience is dense with empathy. But at the level of Ideas II (and HuaIV/V), there is an ambivalence in Husserl whether he wants to make empathy a part of the superstructure or infrastructure of the shared, common intersubjective world (especially non-animate things in that world). This can be tricky because, as Jardine makes clear, animate empathy is enough to give us intersubjective access to a world of physical objects and things. However, that is still not intersubjectivity in the full sense of relating to other selves who are spontaneous separate centers of conscious emotional and intentional acts.
I have suggested, separately (Agosta 2010, 2014) that Husserl steps back in his published works from embracing the intentional structure of empathy (in all its aspects) as full out foundation of intersubjectivity. However, in the Nachlass, especially Hua XIV and XV, empathy is migrating – evolving – moving – from the periphery to the foundation of intersubjectivity in the full sense of a community of intentional subjects.
Meanwhile, Husserl attempts to constitute intersubjectivity along with empathy (the latter as not foundational) by reduction to a “sphere of ownness” in the Cartesian Meditations (1928/32). The debate continues and Husserl later elaborates the distinction lifeworld (Lebenswelt), arguably under the influence of Heidegger, Scheler, and others, which lifeworld, however, is applied to nature not social human community. Husserl’s Nachlass, especially volumes Hua XIV and Hua XV demonstrate in detail that Husserl was moving in a hermeneutic circle and empathy was evolving from the periphery to the foundation of intersubjectivity (Zahavi 2006; Agosta 2010, 2014).
In lengthy quotations for the Cartesian Meditations and Phenomenological Psychology, Jardine validates that Husserl engages with personal character in the sense of personality. Jardine is on thin ice here, for though Husserl calls out “autobiography” and “biography” – and what are these except “self writing” and “life writing,” yet that is a lot to justify that Husserl goes more than two words in the direction of narrative.
Of course, one can build a case for a rational reconstruction of Husserl’s subtext as a hermeneutic phenomenology of narrative or the other as oneself and vice versa. And it results in the work of – Paul Ricoeur! That Husserl is not Paul Ricoeur – or Levinas or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty or Sartre or Hannah Arendt, or, for that matter, Donald Davidson – takes nothing away from the innovations contributed by Husserl. It is rather a function of Jardine’s noodling with the interesting connections between all these. Nothing wrong with that as such – yet there is something missing – Husserl!
Therefore, the guidance to the Jardine is to let Husserl be Husserl. The author really seems to be unable to do that. There is nothing wrong with what Jardine is doing – from sentence to sentence, the argument proceeds well enough. But the reader finds himself in a discussion of “narrative” in the same sentence as Husserl and Ideas II. I hasten to add that I appreciate narrative as a research agenda, and have seven courses by Paul Ricoeur on my college and graduate school transcripts. And yet, once again, there is something missing – one can read Husserl against himself and maybe Jardine thinks that is what he is doing – but it is rather like what The Salon said about the paintings of Cezanne – he paints with a pistol – paint is splattered all over the place – the approach is innovative – but we were expecting impressionism and get – Jackson Pollack! We were expecting phenomenology and got – Donald Davidson or P.F. Strawson or Honneth – all penetrating thinkers, everyone, without exception.
In reading Jardine, I imagined that the transition from animate to interpersonal empathy could be facilitated – without leaving the context of Husserl’s thinking – by the many passages in which Husserl describes the subject’s body as being the zero point and the other’s as being another zero point.
Allowing for an intentional act of reversing position with the other, does this not provide an ascent routine to the folk definition of [interpersonal] empathy of “taking a walk in the other’s person’s shoes” [or, what is the same thing, the other person’s zero point]? Unless I have overlooked something, I do not find this argument in Jardine, though it might have been made the basis of a rational reconstruction of interpersonal empathy sui generis in Husserl without appeal to other thinkers. Thus, Jardine describes the “here/there” dynamic in Husserl:
“Accordingly, we can say that for a subject to empathetically grasp another’s living body she must comprehend it as a foreign bodily “here” related to a foreign sphere of sense-things (to which foreign “theres” correspond), where these are recognised as transcending – but also, at least in the case of “normality,” as harmonious with – my own bodily “here” and the sense-things surrounding it [. . . . ] Husserl suggests that, when the materiality of the other’s body ‘over there’ coincides, in its “general type,” with my own lived body ‘here’ in its familiar self-presence, “then it is “seen” as a lived body, and the potential appearances, which I would have if I were transposed to the ‘there,’ are attributed to as currently actual; that is, an ego is acknowledged in empathy (einverstanden wird) as the subject of the living body, along with those appearances and the rest of the things that pertain to the ego, its lived experiences, acts, etc.” That is, alongside the perceptible similarity of my lived body and the other’s [. . . ], this empathetic apprehension of a foreign sphere of sense-things also rests upon a further structural feature of perceived space; namely, that each ‘there’ is necessarily recognised as a possible ‘here,’ a possibility whose actualisation would rest solely upon my freely executing the relevant course of movement’” [Jardine: 131].
Jardine performs engaging inferential and speculative gyrations to save Husserl from so much as a hint of the accusation of inconsistency instead of emphasizing that Husserl’s use and appreciation of empathy develops, evolves, is elaborated. Husserl gets more intellectual distance from and closeness to empathy as he learns of Max Scheler’s work on the forms of sympathy and Heidegger’s work on Mitsein (which, I hasten to add, are in Jardine’s extensive and excellent footnotes and references).
Another approach to crossing the abyss between self and other is a transcendental argument. This goes beyond anything Jardine writes, but if offered in the Husserlian spirit and if it helps to put his project in the broader context, then it warrants consideration.
The argument informally: The distinction between self and other is not a breakdown of empathy; the distinction is the transcendental requirement, the presupposition, for empathy. If I lose the distinction between self and other, then I get emotional contagion, conformity, projection (Lipps), or communications that get lost in translation. Only if the distinction between self and other stand firm, is it possible, invoking aspects of acts of empathic intentionality, to communicate feelings (sensation, emotion) across the boundary between self and other; relate to the other individual as the possibility of reciprocal humanity; take a walk in the other’s shoes with aspects of their personality; and respond empathically to the other with performative linguistic acts of recognition. We do not merely express recognition; we perform it, thereby, instituting mutual dignity.
Husserl’s blind spot in this area and – do I dare say it? – perhaps Jardine’s as well is a function of remaining at the level of a single subject phenomenology, at least until the elaboration of the distinction, life-world (Lebenswelt). Until we explicitly get to the lifeworld, what would a multisubject phenomenology look like? The short answer is Heidegger’s Mitsein, Levinas on the fact and face of The Other, Ricoeur on oneself as other, or Sartre on the gaze of the other bestowing individuality and identity on the one.
Along these lines, Jardine usefully identifies the text where Husserl credits the other with constituting the social self of the self. The other gives me my humanity and without the other’s constitutive activity, one does not get to be a human being. Here Husserl comes closest to acknowledging that the one individual gets her/his humanity from the other individual. This is Jardine directly quoting Husserl:
“I arrive at the construal of myself as a human being (in the sense of mind) by way of a comprehension of others, i.e., insofar as I comprehend them as centres not only for the rest of their surrounding world but also for my lived body, which is for them an object of their surrounding world. It is precisely thereby that I comprehend them as construing me similar to the way I construe them, thus as construing me as social human being, as comprehensive unity of living body and mind. Therein is rooted an identification between the ego that I encounter in direct inspection – as ego which has its lived body over and against it – and the ego of the other’s presentation of me, the ego that the other can understand and posit, at one with my living body as, for the other, present “externally,” in acts which I for my part attribute to the other. The comprehensive presentation others have, or can have, of me is of service to me as regards the construal of myself as social “human being,” hence the construal of myself totally different from the way I apprehend myself in direct inspection. By means of this construal, with its complicated structure, I fit myself into the human family (Menschheitsverband), or, rather, I create the constitutive possibility for the sense of this “family.” I can now say “we,” and then for the first time do I become “I” and the other precisely another” (Hua IV/V 218–219 [1913]; cf. Hua IV 325, 242)” [Jardine: 227].
This is one of the most innovative things Husserl ever wrote – too bad it is such a bad fit with a one-person phenomenology. As Husserl famously puts the point in the Cartesian Meditations, the verifiable accessibility of others, and with this their existential character for me, consists exactly in their original inaccessibility (Hua I: 144) [Jardine: 81]. Two steps forward; one backwards?
However, even within a one-person phenomenology, one can rationally reconstruct an extension of Husserl’s thinking, going beyond Husserl and Jardine here, that dialectically mediates original and nonoriginal experience as allowing a third term – vicarious experience.
Phenomenologically what is missing is the distinction “vicarious feeling” or “vicarious experience.” Max Scheler elaborated such a distinction as Nachfühlen or Nachleben, and Jardine notes Scheler in the footnotes without, however, making the phenomenological connection to an intermediate form of experience between originally owned and nonoriginal. A vicarious experience is my original experience of another person’s original experience. So is it original? My experience is by definition original, but the other’s original experience is nonoriginal to and for me. So, the distinction between original and nonoriginal breaks down and is mediated by vicarious experience, an experience of the other that is mine own without my being the other. Hidden in plain view? (For further details on Scheler see Agosta 2014a.)
Another path to intersubjectivity that Husserl calls out but that both Husserl and Jardine leave undeveloped is that of joint intentionality. Key term: joint intentionality. There is very little new under the sun, but Michael Tomasello (2008) and R. Peter Hobson (2005) have separately and innovatively elaborated this distinction, “joint intentionality.”
Consider an example. The placement of the parenthesis is key: “I see the cathedral.” “You see the cathedral.” “I see you (you see(ing) the cathedral).” Once my intentionality includes yours, we have a non-solipsitic relationship. Solipsism is undercut and cannot become a serious issue. My intentionality in relating to another can be inadequate or unsatisfied, but an inadequate or unsatisfied relatedness to an other is still relatedness.
We can misunderstand one another, which means we can clarify the misunderstanding and reach an understanding. This would give us what Jardine calls interpersonal empathy. Thus, Jardine identifies “joint intentionality” in Husserl (without, however, identifying it as such):
“As Husserl notes, if I am looking at a cathedral and I notice another standing by me, ‘his gaze directed at this cathedral, then I understand this without any further ado. His seeing, which I experience through empathy, is equally an immediate having-over-against: the object is immediately given’ (Hua IV/V 510–511/Hua IV 373, transl. modified [1917]). While we normally only take human others to see a cathedral as a cathedral—in that this sense is one generated and sustained by human experience and social praxis—Husserl’s claim that we would empathetically take the other to immediately see the ‘colossal black thing’ (which is a cathedral for us) surely holds with regard to some non-human animate others too” [Jardine: 140].
Once again, a powerful approach, if not a complete answer, is “hidden in plain view.” In a sense, it is a scandal that we still lack a thorough intentional analysis of empathy. So here it is: The other and the other’s intention are a fundamental part of the structure of empathy. Empathy aims at and includes the other. Without the other, empathy is not empathy. It is emotional contagion or conformity or projection or misunderstanding.
Another consideration. Is the distinction between animate and interpersonal empathy exhaustive? Is “sustained empathy” different than “interpersonal empathy”? This would be analogous to the difference between a snapshot – a single instance – and a video – a series of instances across time (for more on “sustained empathy” see Goldberg, 2015: 89 – 98). Like a video as opposed to a snapshot, sustained empathy opens up possibilities, emergent properties, and a depth of engagement, that is at a qualitatively different level than an isolated encounter. One has to listen to another person and respond to them empathically over a period of time and get to know them in order to appreciate not just that (for example) the person is angry and what triggered the anger, but the motivational, development, historical, emotional, and even the future context in depth. When interpersonal empathy is sustained across time and numerous encounters with the other person, then a network of empathic relatedness, empathic responsiveness, and authentic human relations based in empathy opens up.
Never underestimate Husserl. Never underestimate empathy. Never. Jardine quotes Husserl as describing sustained empathy (the term is not used). It remains unnamed, but, I submit, it is not reducible to animate and/or interpersonal empathy. This begins a new thread and perhaps a new book. It is best to let Husserl have the next to last word [Jardine: 266]:
“ …[W]e can now see why Husserl regards fully understanding another person as an infinite task, and maintains that reaching its ideal form would require me to relive the other’s personal live in extenso, and to comprehend the developmental contours of her personal character by situating them within an infinitely detailed narrative (Hua IV/V 458 [1916/1917]). A deep understanding of another person’s actions, emotions, and beliefs can always be informed by familiarising oneself with their personal character and the history of its coming-to-be, and on the other hand, such an understanding is exactly a way of acquiring and developing such a familiarity (Hua IV/V 579 [1916/17]; see also Hua IV/V 312 (HuaIV 104) [1915]). Consequently, our ability to envisage and understand the motivational context of another’s actions is best seen as embedded within ongoing personal relationships, in which our acquaintance with the other person’s character has gradually developed through repeated empathetic contact, as well as through communicative engagement and, more generally, through participating with the other in a common human world.”
Having urged “let Husserl be Husserl,” I have a final thought about what is missing from the entire discussion of empathy in Husserl, Jardine, and the philosophical handbooks of empathy, and this is so even if one includes “sustained empathy” as having been implicitly engaged (even though I would maintain that is not the case). When a person receives empathy, when a person “gets a good listening,” when a person is responded to empathically, when a person experiences authentic relatedness to another – regardless of the form – then the person often experiences an opening in what is possible in the person’s life, choice, and situation. The person is empowered by the empathy to inquire into what is available and accessible for him- or herself that goes beyond mere psychology into a fundamental inquiry that transforms possibilities of knowing and acting. Something in the person’s way of being and relating changes, shifts, transforms. The person shifts out of stuckness and into action that makes a profound and positive difference. How does that come about? Now that is something worthy of further inquiry.
References
Review: Empathy, Embodiment, and the Person: Husserlian Investigations of Social Experience and the Self by James Jardine. Chaum, Switzerland: Springer Nature. ISSN 0079-1350 ISSN 2215-0331 (electronic). ISBN 978-3-030-84462-2 ISBN 978-3-030-84463-9 (eBook). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84463-9
Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press.
Michael Tomasello. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Arnold Goldberg. (2015). The Brain, the Mind and the Self. New York: 2015.
V. Gallese, 2006, “Mirror Neurons and Intentional Attunement,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
R. Peter Hobson. (2005). What puts the jointness into joint attention. In Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds, eds. Naomi Eilan et al Oxford, UK: Oxford (the Clarenon press): 185 – 204).
Edmund Husserl. (1929/31). Cartesian Meditations, tr. D. Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970.
_________________. (1929/35). Husserliana XV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935. Ed. I. Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973
_________________ .(1921/28). Husserliana XIV. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928. Ed. I. Kern. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973
_________________. (Forthcoming). Husserliana IV/V. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur
Konstitution und Wissenscahftstheorie. Ed. D. Fonfara. Cham: Springer.
Alex Honneth. (1995a). The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, tr. J. Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lou Agosta. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. London: Macmillan (Palgrave).
_________. (2014a). Rewriting empathy in Max Scheler. In A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 83 – 96. DOI:10.1057/978113746534.0009.
_________. (2014). Husserl’s rewriting of empathy in Husserl. In A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 97 – 118. DOI:10.1057/978113746534.00010.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy versus bullying: Part 3: Recommendations for students, parents, teachers and administrators
Listen to podcast on Spotify (via Anchor): https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-versus-Bullying-Part-3-Recommendations-for-students–parents–and-educators-e17j1ts
Bullying: Recommendations for students
If one is being bullied, some guidelines are useful.; though no single, easy answer is available.
[Note: even though these recommendations directly address the “student,” they are intended to provide guidance to the parent or responsible adult on how he or she is to address the student regarding bullying. They are intended to inform the grown up, adult’s speaking and listening in the matter of bullying as the grown up engages with their student.]
First, these recommendations are about getting back your power—or at least some of your power—in the face of bullying. Sometimes that looks like making a tactical retreat, much as one might dislike doing so, in order to reestablish boundaries and integrity. The idea is to de-escalate the potential confrontation. What de-escalation looks like is different according to the situation.
Second, this is not happening to you—the target of bullying—because you did anything wrong. Stop the negative self-talk (devaluing comments directed at oneself) about being to blame for the bad behavior of bullies. Such negative self-talk results in two problems, the bullying and your own negative self-talk.
Previously there was only one problem, the bullying. Now two problems exist, the bulling and the negative self-talk. Reduce the problems by 50%; stop the negative self-talk. If you cannot seem to stop the negative self-talk, then get help from a parent or professional with doing so.
Many different kinds of bullies exist—see the above typology—and it is not your job to be the bully’s therapist or policeman.
There is probably no reply to the bully that is so powerful that the bully cannot transform it by using a sing-song, condescending tone of voice.
Even if one says: “Thank you for respecting my privacy,” a statement that makes a great quotation in any subsequent police or administrative report, the risk is that the reply is going to come back at you like yet another confrontation. It might be worth a try, but no guarantees.
The bully is behaving the way he does to “get a rise” out of the target. The intention is to make the target upset. That is a “pay off” for the bully. That is not to say that one should not shout back if shouted at or push back if one is pushed. That is a judgment call based on the situation and one’s sense that fighting back—otherwise know as “self defense”—may make a positive difference in establishing or maintaining a boundary.
However, if one is out-numbered or the bully is physically larger and one’s power is diminished, engaging the bully in a back-and-forth exchange is not going to work. If one can maintain some measure of composure or equilibrium, then the process of escalation on the part of the bully may be short-circuited or at least moderated. The bully is “getting off” on upsetting the target, so, tactically speaking, being boring to the bully is a valid defense. You will be “less fun” for the bully, and he will move on to the next target.
Another thing that is done—and is potentially life saving—is to keep a “bully log,” noting in writing, once one escapes, the occasion on which one was bullied and what exactly was said or done. In the case of cyber bullying, this includes print outs, with URLs and time stamps, or screen shots of devaluing comments from email, Facebook, social media, or text messages.
I know, I know. The last thing that a kid stressed out by bullying wants to think about is documenting what is happening precisely so that one can escalate and get one’s power back. But that is what is required. One may prefer to forget about it all, but keeping a log with dates and times and names (or descriptions if one does not know the name) and what exactly was said or done, is going to be an important part of getting one’s power back in the face of bullying.
Civic and spiritual leaders such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King have famously pointed out that “no one can diminish you without your consent.” That remains true; and it is always a good reminder to oneself in the face of bullying. However, King and his followers actively trained and role-played non-violent resistance prior to engaging in demonstrations, civic actions, marches, protests, and sits-ins, in which they confronted bullying, hostility, and out-and-out violence.
Civil rights activists practiced with colleagues, who pretended to be racists, hurling insults and ketchup at the would-be demonstrators in role playing. In turn, the would-be demonstrators practiced not responding with counter-aggression; and all this prior to their actually engaging in anti-segregation sit ins, public protests, civil disobedience, and so on.
One should not have to undertake training in non-violent resistance in order to survive the ride on the bus to school or the school lunch room, and the fact that we are now discussing such a scenario means that something has already gone seriously off the rails. Attempting to transform a culture of segregation and colonialism as King and Gandhi did—or a culture of bullying—is not for the faint of heart.
A group of middle or high school kids are not the KKK or the British Empire (though they may seem like it at times), and such kids cannot be forced to include an “outsider” when they really decide not to be inclusive. Thus, the coaching to the outsider is to keep looking for a group that is welcoming. Once again, it takes courage—and a support system—and is always easier said than done.
People need friends, and, for people in middle and high school, relating to friends is an important part of the fun. It is a part of growing up and the non-academic learning that occurs. If you are with a group of people—also called one’s “peers”—and their behavior and speech towards you leaves you feeling “less than” or “upset,” then you may need to look at your understanding of what is a friend. If your inquiry to your “friends” as to what is really going on seems to elicit more of the same upsetting and “less than” behavior—then you need to re-examine their status as “friends.” I hope you will not shoot the messenger: it is time to move on and seek friendlier friends.
One bullied LGBT teen made a difference by trying to join a Gay-Straight Alliance group activity at his high school. But there was one catch. Before he could join the alliance, he had to create it. It became a significant project, and a path to engagement for him and numerous fellow students both gay and straight. Never underestimate the power of one person with the courage to stand up and say “Enough—there’s got to be a better way!”
Friends may argue. Friends may disagree. Friends may engage in drama over boy or girl friends. Friends may even decide to stop being friends and go their separate ways. But if one finds so-called “friends” treating one like an outsider, using de-valuing language towards one, or being mischievous in ways that are cruel, mean, or aggressive, then it is time to find new friends. If one’s peer group lets one down, then it is time to seek a new peer group. Once again, this is not easy to do when one is struggling against bullying. However, if one is unable to take action in the direction of finding new relationships because one is so paralyzed by the upset, then it may be because one is anxious or depressed, and the intervention of a caring third party is warranted. But where to turn?
If you have a good relationship with one or both parents, that is a good place to start. Here “good relationship” means that you can talk with him or her. It means the parent has the ability to empathize with your predicament and listen to your concerns. It also means you are not going to come away from the conversation feeling bullied. Older siblings can also be useful if one has a good relationship.
The idea is not to have a grown up “fix” the problem for you, but to find a “trusted advisor” to work with you on what can be done to get back your power—or at least some of it—in the face of bullying. Though the analogy is imperfect, this is a tad like getting tutoring in geometry or science. Do not expect the tutor to do your homework for you; but together you work to acquire the skills, so you can not only survive the lunchroom or school bus ride, but also even have fun and prosper.
If you do not have the kind of empathic relationship with a parent that makes you think the parent can help to improve the situation, then look for a trusted teacher at school with whom one has a relationship. (But see the caution below about teachers and staff being school-bullying-mandated reporters.) Once again, this should be someone who you believe will listen to you—use her or his empathy to appreciate you—and work with you to improve the situation. If neither your parents nor a trusted teacher at school can be mobilized to intervene, then you should look for someone in the community such as a coach at the art or sports center, a pastor at church, or coordinator of the LGBT group in the community with whom you enjoy a relationship of empathy and trust.
If you are being harassed online, request that the web site take down the content, since the harassing comments violent the rules of most web sites. If the site is Facebook, report the abuse immediately via the dropdown item “this picture is of me and I don’t like it” [or words to that effect]. Facebook says that it is committed to taking the word of the reporter (you) about harassing comments. Print out the cruel or mean content or make a screen shot. Put all such stuff in a folder. You need to show others in authority what is happening. It is almost never useful to respond to the perpetrator. If you find yourself compulsively checking back for mean content, take a time out. Power down. Pull the plug. It is not worth it. It might be better to give online activity a break and drop out for awhile. Good friends will be able to reach you by phone or in person.
Another word of caution is needed. If you approach someone in school—a teacher or member of the staff—then this person may be required by law to report the bullying to the school administration. This might be okay if the school has a program in place to deal with bullying. This is also where your written record detailing bullying that has occurred over the past period can be useful. I wish I could say that this would not result in further bullying with accusations of being a “snitch” occurring. But the risk of escalation is real and must be considered prior to taking action.
If the reputation of the school is one of having a culture that seems to permit a certain amount of aggression and discourtesy, whether towards teachers or one’s fellow students, then the risk expands. Retaliation on the part of bullies for complaints about their bullying can become as significant an issue as the bullying itself.
Once the school administration is involved, the process can take on a life of its own. The administration must (is mandated to) open an investigation, and the requirement to gather evidence of bullying can make you feel like you are inside the “hall of mirrors” at the carnival without, however, anyone having any fun.
Grown ups are notoriously unable to distinguish adolescent drama from out-and-out bullying. This is sometimes due to grown ups’ lack of empathy, but not always. If the tweens and adolescents cannot tell these apart, why should the grown ups necessarily be able to? What seemed open-and-shut to the target of bullying can take on disturbing nuances once people are interviewed “on the record.”
Trying to sort out a bullying report can become an exercise in forensic investigation with conflicting testimony full of “he said” and “she said.” Are witnesses denying an alleged episode of bullying—note the legalese “alleged” shows up—because they don’t want to be regarded as “snitches” or because the episode never occurred?
The school system itself—no matter how empathic and well-intentioned—can seem to work unwittingly to punish all participants—or at least use all the time and effort of all implicated in a given incident in filling out forms, processes, procedures, and attending meetings. The process of determining what happened = x has now become something to survive—a potential breakdown in empathy and a breakdown in community. Ready or not, one has matriculated in the “college of hard knocks.”
However, if the student is being physically assaulted or harassed to the point where the student’s school work is suffering (grades and so on), then it is best to “bite the bullet,” fill out the formal report—including the police report if appropriate—try to take charge of the escalation, share the suffering, and learn the lesson in community building.
No one should have to suffer in isolation in the face of bullying. Part of the abuse consists precisely in the bully’s attempt to isolate the target. So the best outcomes are those in which one is able to take action to break out of one’s isolation: finding new and welcoming friends, martial arts lessons, founding a gay-straight alliance at the school, chess or science club, and so on. Once again, this is easier said than done, but it must be both said and done.
If you are someone who is caught up in drama and you are tempted to bully someone, it is time to take a time out. Take a look at your own behavior. Do you really want to be known as someone who is mean or a bully? While “put downs” or “one liners” might seem like auditioning for a role in a reality television show, hit the pause button. There are better ways of getting into show business. Go out for theatre or sign up for an improvisation class. All the world is a stage, and an important part of the training for theatre—and for success in life—is role playing. Indeed acting is precisely role playing. Try taking a walk in the other person’s shoes. There are other, better shoes—and choices—than to bully or be bullied.
Bullying: Recommendations for parents
If your child comes to you with an upset about bullying or you see that she or he is upset about something and the story sounds like bullying, then what should a parent do?
This is where empathy goes a long way. Start by listening. Your job as a parent is to support your child and to help your child regulate the child’s feelings and behavior. Your job is to help the child regain an emotional equilibrium in the face of life’s vicissitudes, including bullying.
Parenting is about setting boundaries. Empathy is about navigating boundaries, and bullying about violating boundaries. Therefore, empathy is about restoring boundaries in the face of bullying.
Be empathically receptive and responsive: “That’s really gotta be a concern.” “Try to tell me exactly what happened.” “Then what happened?” “Say more about that.” “Okay, but help me understand.” “He said what?!” Ask about the details in a concerned, empathic way. “Johnny is a jerk” may be true; but it is an interpretation. That Johnny said “You are a loser” while pointing at his forehead with his fingers in the shape of an “L” is a report of a devaluing comment. Do not be dismissive. It’s not “nothing.” Note it. Be concerned. Avoid finger wagging or moralizing. Though you are obviously “on the side” of your child, do not assume she or he is an angel. Likewise, if the child is known to have a “devilish” streak, do not assume he or she is the devil. A single example is not bullying in itself, but repeated instances start to form a pattern of concern.
One word of caution to parents at this point. One issue that should not be overlooked is how the adult is inevitably confronted with his or her own fate as a child in the face of bullying. In short, if you had a bad experience in bullying that is still unintegrated as an adult, it is going to be there when your child comes to you. If you have unresolved issues around bullying in your own history, when your child comes to you about bullying, a challenging situation becomes all the more challenging for you. You have to distinguish the child’s problem from your own in order to do your job. As a parent, your priority is to solve the child’s problem, not your own.
Now this does not mean the parent has precipitously to go back into therapy (though nothing is wrong with that as such), but that one must be prepared to identify and use one’s own experiences around bullying as a resource. These experiences, long past, will come up. Promise. This is where parental peer support can be essential. Consult with other parents with whom you have a relationship of empathy and trust. It is crucial this be a person to whom one can relate without moralizing or finger pointing.
If one does have an unresolved issue around bullying, then acknowledge it, so that one can gain some distance and objectivity about bullying today. In a deep sense, bullying and human aggression have not changed, though they now have online technology at their disposal; but parenting norms, schools, school administrators, and community standards have shifted significantly since Baby Boomers and even Gen-Xers have struggled with bullying in a different world.
If, when you were a kid, the guidance from your parent was “just hit him back,” and it worked, then you are going to be inclined to provide such guidance. If, when you were a kid, you told his mom about his bullying behavior, and it worked (as unlikely as that may seem), then your initial inclination is going to be to provide such advice. Even if you wished that you had “just hit him back,” but were not able to do so, you are also going to be inclined to provide such guidance. You see the dilemma?
Our empathy for our children in the here and now is a function of our own fate as a child in what was (and is) not always the most empathic of worlds. If one is at a party for five year olds, tweens, or adolescents, then one is inevitably going to be present to one’s own experiences as a five year old, tween, or adolescent. That is a risk and an opportunity. Such experiences from one’s own childhood or teen years can be a useful resource and should not be overlooked. However, such experiences of surviving bullying are most likely to make a positive difference within the context of an empathic listening to the child currently being bullied, not the context the parent had to overcome long ago. [i]
The point is to appreciate the distinction between your own experiences and those of your child. An outgoing or extroverted parent may have a shy or introverted child—or vice versa. Yes, certain kinds of bullying are such that a child may properly be expected to handle them on his or her own. However, if the child who used to enjoy school now dreads it, if grades are suffering, or if a once flourishing child is now floundering, and it is not clear what is going on, then intervention is required.
A substantial part of the challenge for the parent is to re-create the context on the school bus, at school, in the lunchroom, or on the sports field. What seems at first to be an open-and-shut case of meanness or cruelty can turn out to be a complex example of drama, pseudo-sibling rivalry, or bad manners. Debates quickly emerge about “Who started it!?” or “he said” and “she said.” Try to determine who said what to whom and then what happened. You may quickly find yourself asking, “Is there a single fact here?” This, however, does not mean that bullying did not occur. As a parent, you want to document what you have learned, and you want to keep open the lines of communication with your child. Is there a pattern?
In order to be useful in supporting your child, you must have a thorough grasp of what is going on. Get the entire narrative. If what is happening really is bullying, you will want to be as specific as possible in order to make a report to the authorities if the problem persists.
This is where the difference between handing the child a fish and teaching him or her how to fish is the lesson. Even if the student is an adolescent, the student’s request may be to “fix” the problem and make the bully go away. Wouldn’t it be nice? Rarely is that practical. If the bullying is occurring on the way to or from school, and if one can take a different bus or route, by all means, do so. Band-Aids have their uses. Tourniquets are essential. Buy some time to figure out what is really happening.
The tough job of parenting occurs at four levels: (1) providing guidance to one’s student on how to fend for oneself; (2) providing explicit training in self-defense or assertiveness if the student can be enrolled in the value of doing so; (3) reaching out to the parents of the alleged bully if there is any chance they are responsive people, who are able to have a civil conversation; (4) intervening with school authorities (or law enforcement) as a last resort if no other solution can be found.
(1) Share with the student the above-cited coaching in “Recommendations for Students” about the dynamics of bullying. Even if you have reason to believe that your child has been provocative and is engaging in drama, begin by asking, “What happened?” “Who said what to whom?” “What happened next?“ Do not begin by asking, “What did you do to cause this?” That can seem like blaming the victim. Do not be dismissive. Trust—but verify empathically.
Providing empathy means that one should provide examples of proper behavior on the part of “friends” and peers; friends do not use devaluing, hurtful, bad language or engage in aggression against one another; and broach the difficult subject that maybe one needs to find new friends or a suitable, different, extra-curricular activity if one is being harassed. One should provide assurances to the child, who is blaming himself, that the child did not do anything to deserve such treatment.
(2) Time was when “bullying” meant physical aggression. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” We now know that devaluing names, too, are hurtful. This is especially so when the name calling occurs persistently across different environments—at school, on the bus, online after school, and so on. I know—I know. Why is it that parenting usually seems to require ever-increasing commitments rather than less? Yet intervention on the part of the grown ups is important., especially if the meanness is escalating.
If a student, who is being physically assaulted, sees value in boxing or Asian martial arts lessons, the parent may pick up the extra expense and effort of chauffeuring him or her. It may be worth it. Self defense remains a fundamental right.
However, if the individual is up against a group or the size differential is substantial, such lessons might be good for one’s self-esteem (and the value of such a contribution is not to be underestimated), but it is of limited practical value in surviving an altercation. For some shy or socially awkward kids explicit training in social assertiveness is useful.
(3) If one is part of a community where one has communications with other parents, then it may be worth the risk to reach out to the other parents. It is important to do so in a way that does not land like an incoming accusation or reproach. That such a conversation would initially be uncomfortable is no reason not to try.
If you can work with the other parents, it provides an example to all the children of how to resolve conflict in a mature, adult way that benefits all involved. Such a lesson is worth its weight in gold—or at least an associate’s degree in counseling. However, if the parent turns out to be troubled or a part of the problem, then one has perhaps discovered the source of the bully’s misbehavior. One has to move on. Encourage one’s child to leave alone a “friend” who is making his life miserable.
(4) If one has exhausted individual coaching to the child or outreach to other parents, and one still has concerns about the child’s safety or the impact of bullying on a child’s academic results, then it is necessary to approach the school authorities. Remember that these may be harried individuals.
School authorities already have a long list of academic, administrative, and educational responsibilities. The state legislature has just mandated compliance with rules that schools take on the task of managing and improving a situation in which 10% of a school population (say) of 1,000 students is either a bully or a target of bullying over a given period of time. A budget increase to support the mandate is still pending, meaning doing more with less is again demanded.
A parent may have a right to stand up in a school board meeting and express concern or even accuse officials of being indifferent to bullying.
However, it does put one in mind of Dale Carnegie’s dictum: if you want to gather honey, do not kick over the bee’s nest.
Rather identify an educator or administrator who has the empathy to hear your concern about your child’s emotional and academic well-being and its urgency. In a time sensitive situation, specific steps can be taken such as allowing the child to keep a cell phone with him at all times to call for help; a designated safe room (say next to the nurse’s office) that the child can go to in case he feels unsafe; a special hall pass or permission to arrive two minutes before class to avoid the bully; or assigning a grown up to accompany her or him through the hallway. It is important that all the relevant teachers and staff know about this or it will just become another breakdown, punishing the victim as the phone gets confiscated, and so on.
In the case of cyber-bullying of tweens, parents may appropriately have access to the online passwords. Parents may usefully know what sites the children are visiting. Even if one has a phobia for technology, it is imperative for the parents of kids using computers to have a minimum of computer literacy to supervise the kids’ involvement with electronic media. It is a tad stealthy—but I would not rule it out—to have the child train you with her email or Facebook account, and then use what you have learned to monitor theirs.
You would not simply give the kids the car keys and tell them, “Hey, keep in touch!” Funny. The Internet is different than the open road, but hazards and risks exist in abundance in cyberspace, too. Since no parent has enough time to monitor the totality of anyone’s online activity—it would be crazy to try—start out like the wise teacher who begins with strictness but eases up thereafter based on proper behavior and feedback.
Manage by exception. Trust but verify. If spending time engaging online becomes an upset to the child, then an empathic inquiry as to what is happening is needed. Expectations for online behavior should be made clear: Just as one would not use devaluing language, ethnic or racial insults in person, so too one should not do so online. If one is the target of such behavior, then it must be documented, monitored, and neutralized through appropriate interventions.
Why is it that people forget you can turn off the computer or not go to certain sites? Parents’ good examples of laying aside electronic devices and relating in person to other persons speak volumes to kids. So does any behavior that demonstrates a parent’s commitment to drama or using social media to drive personal conflicts. Business people and politicians now have a rule about email and comments on social networks (even if they do not always follow their own good guidance): Write every electronic comment or communication so that it could be published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal without creating an embarrassment. The reason? Because the communication will eventually migrate there! This is an essential rule of thumb going forward.
Such is especially the case after the US election of 2016 where a seemingly endless stream of hacked emails—containing ambiguous and devaluing comments about the sender’s colleagues—got published periodically. In some cases, no hacking was required, since the candidate published the comments intentionally using Twitter.
As this book is being published, reports are emerging that Russia—you know, the sovereign state or a clandestine unit thereof—has attempted to influence the US 2016 election by purchasing ads on social media that attempted to aggravate racial, social, and economic divisions, thereby driving voters towards one Presidential candidate rather than the other.[ii] A lesson for us all? The ability to think critically and for oneself has always been an essential foundation of any democracy or any middle school kid’s emotional well-being. Now more than ever.
There is also a rule—at the level of Sir Isaac Newton’s ironclad Laws of Motion—that naked or compromising photos taken by a person migrate inevitably in the direction of social media. So don’t take any; and delete any that might already exist now—before it’s too late!
The expectations of privacy are such that online communications can no longer reasonably be expected to be private. Perhaps they ought to be private. Perhaps the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution against unreasonable search and seizure still holds sway in courts and halls of justice in the USA. I hope it does. I believe it does. But cyberspace just does not work that way any more. Facebook is designed so that people are given incentives to broadcast their personal and private data. As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is supposed to have said: “Privacy is no longer the norm,” implying rather that publicity is. Here take my personal data—please! Here—see what I am eating, who I am befriending, who I am dating, what I am wearing (or not), what I am reading, where I am checking in geographically, what I like, what I don’t like, what I am thinking—and at all times. [iii]
If you really need to have a private communication, send a letter by US Mail. It does put one in mind of Miranda Lambert’s country western song: “If you had something to say—you’d write it on a piece of paper—then you put a stamp on it—and they’d get it three days later—before everything became—automatic.” Words to live by.
This may sound a tad nostalgic; and I am not sure that I could explain it to an eleven year old. So, if your eleven year old is citing the 4th Amendment to you as reason for not handing over his password, congratulations! You have a Clarence Darrow for the defense in the making. I hope you can afford law school. But you then get to explain that “probable cause” creates an exception—and a parental search warrant. Hand the password over, buddy—or hand over the device!
Bullying: Recommendations for teachers and administrators
The media provide sensational, even tragic, reports about bullying, but they less frequently provide useful guidance or actionable information. We have to separate bullying from conflict and “drama” between peers of roughly equal power. Attention grabbing headlines have provided a “call to action” for educators in middle and high schools (and for state legislatures), who had been distracted by other priorities and looking the other way.
A few dramatic, high profile suicides, and many low profile emotional breakdowns, not to mention major litigation from outraged parents, have persuaded school administrators of the importance of intervening on behalf of the most vulnerable, bullied members of the community.
Yet it is also important to realize that grown ups are not the only source of relief from tween and adolescent bullying. In no way is it blaming the victim that the targets of bullying sometimes need to take crucial actions on their own behalf to improve the outcomes of unwanted assaults.
The first empathy lesson for administrators is that empathy is on a spectrum that extends from being firm about boundaries all the way to “tough love.” As every administrator knows, education is impossible if a school that is “out of control” surrounds the class room. A school is a system, and the hallways and class room must be calm in order for education to work. Before we turn to the details of how empathy plays in this context, some background is useful.
In December 1982 three elementary school students (10 to 14 years old) killed themselves near Tromsø, Norway. All three had been bullied. For example, one had been called a “leper” because of his measles scars, an insult, frankly, that I had not previously heard. These tragedies galvanized Norway.
Previously, bullying had been regarded as something that kids had to work out for themselves on the street. These tragedies provided evidence that the most vulnerable members of the community required intervention.
Dan Olweus, who had studied bullying extensively in nearby Sweden, but who was without popular support there for his research recommendations, was invited to come next door to Norway to help out. He surveyed 130,000 students. Some 15% were involved in bullying either as perpetrators or targets.[iv]
Olweus’ research challenged many assumptions. It challenged the assumptions that upper class high school students were less frequent bullies than their underclass peers or that urban kids were more likely to bully than their countryside fellows. Bullying was an equal opportunity issue. The targets of bullying were significantly weaker physically and more vulnerable to anxiety; but, for the most part, they did not look or dress significantly differently than others in the group. Space does not permit a comprehensive review of Olweus’ bullying prevention program; but its focus is on transforming the culture of the entire school, providing authoritative and positive role models, improved overall supervision, and intervention in individual cases. In the initial pilot, eight months after the program was introduced, there was 50% less bullying; but also significantly less vandalism and theft.
Olweus’ approach anticipated the crime fighting approach of reducing major crimes by fixing the broken windows in abandoned buildings and arresting the petty turn-style jumpers on public transit. These are individuals who might escalate to more serious offenses, if they are allowed to get away with mirror ones. They are halted early in the course of their boundary-violating careers. Their relatively minor criminal behaviors get cut short before they can advance to more serious misdeeds.
Norway devoted significant resources to the issue of bullying. Here in the USA legislative compliance mandates ordering schools to solve the problem of bullying without providing resources or money are taking the easy way out. And mandates to comply often do not work—precisely because a mandate without resources is at best a well-intentioned, but empty, gesture. To be sure, the indifference of some school administrators has been a cause for concern regardless of the (in)action of state legislatures. But the commitment of many, if not most, administrators is a cause for hope—and engagement.
Emily Bazelon reports on a case study—a school, Old Mill North, that had a reputation for roughness and was demonstrably spiraling downward. But it was pulled back from the brink and turned around by a program inspired by Olweus. This is not a one size fits all narrative, but numerous lessons exist that can be generalized.
No matter how inspiring or talented the individual teacher, education is impossible if a school that is out of control surrounds the class room. The hallways and class rooms must be calm in order for the process of education to get the traction it requires to produce educated students.
Bullies are put on notice that teachers and administrators are decidedly not happy about their behavior. Such individuals have been poorly socialized, and it is going to catch up with them. They need to get in touch with their inner jerk—have a conversation for possibility about recognizing one’s peers as peers—and learn how to respect boundaries. They can do better. If one can get the peer group to validate the language of respect for boundaries, courtesy, an optimum measure of toleration, and empathy, then their behavior eventually catches up with the rhetoric of respect and improves.
As noted, empathy is on a spectrum that extends from being firm about boundaries, but nice about it, all the way to “tough love.” Some students are not interested in respecting the boundaries that mark a commitment to education, and they really do not belong in school. Some 52 kids were expelled from Old Mill North. Likewise, the teachers were assessed. If they were not committed to transforming the culture of the school in the direction of excellence in education, they were encouraged to seek positions at other schools in the system. They were not expelled, but were counseled out. Some 22 out of 66 left the school.
How shall I put it delicately? This was no longer business as usual. At Old North, a significant minority of the student body was still more than a tad rough around the edges by the time they got to middle school. Some students literally did not know what to do when one student bumped into another student passing in the hallway. They needed to be taught to say, “Excuse me!” or “Pardon me,” instead of telling the other person, “Drop dead, loser!” Similarly, with common courtesy in the cafeteria. At Old North a broad intervention with the students provided explicit guidance in what was expected of them by way of behavior. Thus, the students were drilled in social skills such as acknowledging the feelings of others, making eye contact, and conflict management skills such as making a request, saying “no,” or agreeing to disagree. In short, they were trained in empathy.
Some bullies are indeed thugs, and need to be removed from the community to protect the community from them; but other bullies are themselves survivors of abusive situations (e.g., at home). They exhibit mental health issues, have a diagnosable cognitive impairment, and require intervention.
That is no excuse—there is never an excuse for bullying behavior. However, it does mean that to prevent repetition of the bullying after a suspension has been served, these individuals need guidance. Many need treatment. Whether such treatment is full-blown dynamic talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, bullies may usefully undertake an inquiry into their own abusive behavior in order to shift out of a pattern that is creating misery around them. It is worth repeating: If it’s mean, intervene.
However, intervention is not the same as automatic discipline. Suspension and expulsion should be used only when the immediate concern is safety; and followed up with evaluation for the individual for depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, other emotional issues, or problems at home. Extrinsic motivation was also applied at Old North.
Using Positive Behavior-Based Interventions and Support (PBIS), along with the Pledge of Allegiance, the school day began with reciting the school commitment: “Be respectful, responsible, and on task.” That means: say “please” and “thank you”; do your homework; and participate in class.
An internal currency of courtesy was introduced. “Patriot passports” were blue slips that teachers handed out when students were identified as doing something well. The teacher meant it as a recognition and statement: “I liked the way you did that.”
A gimmick? Perhaps, but the underlying value was in building a positive relationship between student and teacher. Instead of handing out detention slips, getting into an adversarial role, teachers were in a friendly role of recognizing students for a job well done. Those teachers who used up all their blue slips got a gold star on their door—and more slips. The slips could be redeemed for PTA sponsored school supplies, ice cream at the social, a school movie, or getting to the head of the line in the cafeteria.
One word of caution. Peer mediation is not a good method for dealing with bullying. Peer mediation makes sense when the two kids are of roughly equal power. However, putting a bully and a target in the same room together is a bad idea. This is so even if a grown up is present to help mediate. Bullies are skilled at saying the right thing in the moment, and then retaliating later. If the students are roughly equal in power, and the infraction involved drama (not bullying), then peer mediation may perhaps make sense. But otherwise, it is just putting the fox to guard the chickens. Things are not going to go well.
Once a measure of calm was restored to the hallways at Old North, then those students who continued to be disrupters tended to stand out. They could be provided with the services they required to gain control over their behavior and emotions instead of missing even more academics by being sent to the principal’s office or suspended.
Instead of being given a suspension and sent home, the disrupters were given confidential psychological assessments for depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and self-esteem. They were required to watch videos about bullying, and consider their own behavior in relation to what they saw. Teachers who were chronic yellers were trained in other methods of de-escalating conflict with students who were disrespectful or difficult. This was not a two week effort.
Six years into the program, scores on standardized achievement tests had improved enough for the school to introduce the International Baccalaureate Program to further drive academic excellence. Reducing bullying is good for academics.
In summary, schools that support such efforts find that bullying of all kinds is reduced, not merely that directed at kids who are eccentric, socially awkward, new to the community, or LGBT. Of course, if the school’s grown ups are still struggling ineffectively with their own homophobic issues, then survivors must look for alternative communities outside of school. These alternatives outside of school run the gamut from sports to book clubs. It is not blaming the survivor to say, “Hey, it’s gonna take something from you, too, in building a community that works for everyone.” Martial arts and boxing are powerful compensatory activities for people who tend to be shy; but such people have to overcome their own introverted tendencies even to sign up. The very behavior that is stopping them is also part of the behavior that is leaving them vulnerable to bullying. The breakthrough is already present in stopping procrastinating and taking action to get such training.
In conclusion, the lesson is that empathy builds community; and communities demonstrate empathy by being inclusive. Yet rare is theindividual who transforms the authenticity and integrity of an entire community in order to join a community with integrity and authenticity. What would an anti-bullying club even look like? It might look like a LGBT alliance; but it might also look like a jogging, biking, or history club. Don’t just be “anti,” as proper as that is in the case of bullying; but be “pro” engagement, inclusion, and community.
As Daniel Burnham said in different context: “Make no small plans.” Empathy is the foundation of no small community.
[i] Christine Olden. (1953). On adult empathy with children, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8: 111–126.
[ii] See “The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation,” https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039 [checked on Sept 27, 2021]; see also (now “ancient” history): Mike Isaac and Scott Shane. (2017). Facebook’s Russia-linked ads came in many disguises, The New York Times, Oct 2, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/technology/facebook-russia-ads-.html [checked on Oct 15, 2017].
[iii] Bernard E. Harcourt. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 90–93.
[iv] Olweus 1973/1993 in Bazelon 2012. Dan Olweus. (1973/1993). Bullying in School: What We Know and What We Can Do. London: Wiley/Blackwell; Emily Bazelon. (2012). Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. New York: Random House. This post and the corresponding chapter in Empathy Lessons rely significantly on Bazelon’s journalistic synthesis of the literature and her incisive interviews; see also James Garbarino and Ellen deLara. (2002). And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence. New York: the Free Press (Simon and Shuster).
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy versus bullying: The biggest bully in my life
[This is the first in a series on bullying and empathy.]
Listen to this podcast on Spotify (via Anchor): https://anchor.fm/lou-agosta-phd/episodes/Empathy-versus-bullying-The-biggest-bully-in-my-life-e16v57j
The biggest bully in my life
The biggest bully in my life was a member of my family, my father. Most of the time, he was a nice guy, a good neighbor with a lot of social skills. However, he had a nasty temper that would go off unpredictably.
Dad would lose his tempter in unpredictable times and unpredictable ways about three times a year, and then there was hell to pay. I would get hit, pushed, knocked down, and called devaluing names. Over a period of ten years, between seven and seventeen years old, that adds up. A bold statement of the obvious: it was unpleasant.
Persons (and therapists) who later heard about my struggles would ask: “Did he drink?” No, he just had a nasty temper that got triggered by what he (and apparently only he) perceived as narcissistic slights or injuries. His bad behavior satisfied the criteria of bullying in that it was verbal and physical aggression, occurring repeatedly, and in a context where the individuals were significantly unequal in power.
I have documented the recovery process without describing my father’s behavior explicitly as bullying in an earlier book, A Rumor of Empathy (2015). As part of my recovery, I even published a book chapter on empathy and the treatment of domestic violence.[i]
The new information disclosed here is that Dad’s behavior improved significantly when, at the age of seventeen, having finally grown up physically, I hit him back. Just one punch. Well placed, it gave him a bloody lip. A technical “knock out.” It had a calming effect on him, and I never got hit again. The fight was called in my favor, by mutual agreement. However, do not make too much of it. I was heading out the door and off to college, never to look back, with my academic scholarships.
Dad only bullied members of his own family. To the neighbors and his colleagues at work he was a friendly, even wonderful guy. In years of dynamic psychotherapy beginning when I escaped to college, I explored a process of treatment that included recovery from domestic violence.
I now believe that the triggers to Dad’s bullying outbursts were some slight provocations—real or imagined—to his narcissism. This means that he was not your typical school yard bully. The school bully may “go off” if one bumps into him in the play ground, but the school yard bully is both strategic and opportunistic in his aggression. With my Dad, he seemed to lack emotional regulation once his sense of self was knocked out of kilter—dis-equilibrated—by a real or imagined narcissistic injury. Dad was at the effect of his rage. He did not seem to be having fun. The people around him were definitely not having fun.
Dad had a narrative about teaching me a lesson as he lashed out and described me with devaluing names. This was a self-serving narrative at best. Whatever distorted lessons might have been intended, they were not empathy lessons. His bad behavior was in the service of venting his emotions and restoring his own equilibrium. Everyone else around him was dis-equilibrated. As a boy, I was trying not to cry any more in order not to be given more of “something to cry about.”
In those days, a college student on summer vacation could still get a relatively well paying job in a factory or working construction, and I never returned home. Dad and I patched things up years later. However, the years of misbehavior had taken their toll. There was neither a sentimental reconciliation nor a truth and reconciliation commission to frame the encounter between perpetrator and survivor. Dad never thought of asking for forgiveness and, near as I could tell, he never told the truth about how violently he had behaved. It seemed not to occur to him.
Forgiveness is over-rated, thought I, at the time; though I eventually came to endorse Desmond Tutu’s approach and bought Tutu’s book based on its title alone—No Future Without Forgiveness. It is about a formal truth and reconciliation commission. The perpetrators have to stand up, face the survivor(s), and tell the truth about what they did to the victims (who did not survive) and to the survivors (who did) in such a way that they agree it is the truth. The perpetrators have to acknowledge what happened in such a way that the survivors recognize it. The process creates a set up—provides a clearing—to build a case for forgiveness. The survivor then gets to say whether he or she accepts the representation of what happened and whether the survivor chooses to grant forgiveness.[ii]
Self-forgiveness is an entirely different matter. Sometimes the hasty forgiving of others is a clumsy way for survivors to get to self-forgiveness, which is a worthy goal. The survivor may usefully forgive himself for incorporating the devaluing descriptions of the bully into the survivor’s low self-esteem. This is an important step, which, speaking personally, years of therapy helped me to attain. The benefit is to empower the survivor to put the past back in the past and create a clearing for positive possibilities going forward into the future.
In comparison to Dad, any school bullies that I encountered were “boy scouts” (with apologies to the Boy Scouts). Any bullies that I encountered at school were more like jumping in reverse back from the fire into the relative coolness of the frying pan. They were physically bigger, but I had other sources of power including humor, a rapier wit, a sharp tongue, and, most importantly, an ability to run amazingly fast over short distances. It worked well enough.
I was still physically small in middle school; and I had potential as a target of bullying. However, I would speak out of turn in class, playing the class clown, so the tough kids were amused, even entertained.
The tough guys saw that I spoke truth to power—or at least was not afraid to get an occasional punishment exercise from the teacher for trying to be funny.
I gained a certain kind of reputation—not exactly popular, unless you consider the notorious outlaw Jesse James to have been popular. Think of “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters at the post office. So the tough kids—and there definitely were some in my pubic middle school—didn’t mess with me. By the time I got to high school proper, I was still below average in size for my age, but it was a private, all boys school. That was the main challenge.
Virtually without exception every kid at my high school was so afraid of the teachers, who were mostly Jesuits, that even the meanest of one’s fellow students seemed like an alter boy in comparison. There was no talking in the corridors between classes; and if one did talk, a teacher, who had been lurking quietly behind you out of sight, would suddenly emerge and bang your head against the lockers, which lined the hallways, making a formidable hollow sound. The locker, not the head, that is.
Most classes in my high school would begin with the Our Father (the prayer)—nothing wrong with that—but you knew that The Lord—along with big brother (those were the Jesuits who were not formally ordained as priests)—were watching. If the tactics were to put the fear of The Lord into everyone’s head, creating an atmosphere similar to boot camp in the armed forces, then it seemed to have worked. This raises the delicate question whether the teachers were actually the bullies; and I am sorry to report that, yes, some were.
Sadly, it was not empathy but a common oppressor (the teachers) that helped to build solidarity among the student body. I hasten to add that the majority of the teachers were humane and caring, indeed many were talented educators, creative and engaging. Many had a sense of humor, which sometimes extended to sadistic hijinks. Most would simply give one a week’s worth of detention for daring to talk out of turn.
The boot camp atmosphere had a tendency to displace the bullying from school itself onto the school bus or the athletic field. I did see a couple of kids bullied on the school bus, and I am ashamed to say, I was not enough in touch with my courage to intervene. Indeed at one point a couple of the mean boys seemed to notice me, and hurled a couple of insults in my direction. I was anticipating a rough time; but then, without explanation, the bus route was changed, and the bullies simply disappeared—to another bus.
Thinking back, I now believe that the rambunctious kids were motivated by the draconian atmosphere in the school to express their extra adolescent energies by participating in sports (which was perhaps the intention); or going home and raiding their well-to-do parents well-stocked liquor cabinets (not an option for me—Dad did not drink, he was just a bully); or seeking solace for their lack of social skills in their studies. The last was my favored approach. I did find someone to hang out with in the cafeteria—the food was so unpalatable that I further stunted my growth by not eating lunch for four years, though I ended up being an average height.
After reviewing the research on bullying in depth, I have reached the conclusion that if kids have enough time for interpersonal drama and conflict, the latter often as practice for out-and-out bullying, then the kids have too much time on their hands. They are not nearly busy enough. They would benefit from more homework and extra-curricular activities. Note, however, that this implies the school has the resources to offer the extra-curricular activities, which is not always the case. Unlike Hollywood films of the depression era with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, many schools do not have the resources or organizational skills to say “Hey, let’s put on a play to raise money for the orphanage!” The kids are already the “orphans.”
Empathy is the antithesis of bullying
Empathy is the antithesis of bullying. Where empathy lives, bullying is rare. Where empathy lives, bullying has no home.
In environments where empathy is taught and practiced, bullying does not get traction. Situations in which empathy is valued are situations in which bullying is devalued. One might say exactly the same thing about common courtesy.
In communities—whether middle school or high school or, for that matter, the US Armed Forces—where common courtesy gives way to disrespect in relationships, bullying expands and spreads; but where common courtesy holds sway in relationships, bullies head for the exit or at least hold their (lack of) peace.
The point? Empathy and courtesy have in common a careful treatment of boundaries in relationships. What empathy and common courtesy share is recognition and respect for the boundaries between individuals in relationships.
Another bold statement of the obvious: every bulling remark is a breakdown of courtesy—and of empathy. Every bullying gesture is some kind of a boundary violation. We have to be careful with words like “every,” “all,” or “never,” but in this instance they fit. “Please” and “thank you” and requesting permission are discarded. Pushing, shoving, and devaluing language are front and center.
Empathy is about moving back and forth across the boundary between self and other in relating to other persons, and doing so in such a way that the boundary is treated with integrity. In contrast, in bullying, the boundary between persons is violated, and, so are the space and integrity of the target of the bullying. In bullying, the boundary between persons is crushed, and so is the emotional integrity of the intended target.
The response of empathy to bullying is to engage in a process of reestablishing the boundary between persons in such a way that people are left authentic and whole. As we shall see, this is different than being nice or even trying to induce empathy in the bully.
Bullying defined
Before we say any more—and there is a lot more to be said—let us define our terms. We rely on the definition provided by the pioneer of bullying research, Dan Olweus, whose ground breaking studies in his homeland, Sweden (and Norway), have provided a rich source of further research.[iii] Olweus was thorough in his research interviewing some 1,000 children as well as their teachers and parents. He administered projective imaging tests (the “ink blot” Rorschach) to those he had identified as bullies or the targets of bullying.
Olweus defines bullying as (1) aggression (either verbal or physical abuse) towards a person; (2) that occurs towards the person more than once over time; and (3) is between persons of unequal power (whether physical or social rank or both). [iv] The special thing about bullying is that kids do it especially when the targets seem helpless. Kicking someone when they are down is precisely an identifying feature of bullying.
According to Olweus, what is most distressing about bullying to its targets is repeated domination to inflect pain. If the aggression happens only one time, it is aggression; and that is not good; but it is not bullying. If the people are of equal power or almost equal power, then the behavior is conflict, drama, or a fight, not bullying.
The distinction between bullying and drama (conflict) is not always easy to determine, so look at physical size (height and weight), formal rank in school or professional status, and job roles. When someone who has power, whether formal or physical, over another is treating the other in such as way as to violate their dignity, that is a strong candidate for bullying.
Olweus found that about 5% of the boys in his studies were bullies and about 5% were the targets of bullying, “whipping boys” as Olweus called them.
What the latter had in common was they were physically weaker and anxious. Olweus studied only boys. The discovery of the “mean girl” phenomena still lay in the future. We now know that among girls, physical strength is less of a factor, and girls have been known to bully by indirect means.
When relationships become weaponized
When cruelty relies on what one knows about the other person or can plausibly attribute to them, then it is as if the relationship itself becomes weaponized. Insults, injuries, slights, discourtesies, racial and ethnic slurs, are used to deliver pain and suffering to the target.
Since the bullying is a boundary violation, the way to reestablish empathy and order (where “order” means common courtesy) is to reestablish the boundary between persons.
A word of caution upfront. Let’s say one is the adult hall prefect at a high school, and an act of bullying is perpetrated in full view in one’s presence. It is tempting to attempt to induce empathy in the bully by asking: “How would you feel if that (aggression) were done to you?” Ultimately such an intervention may be useful, however, not here. If Jack is calling Jill “Fatso!” it is precisely to make her feel bad; it is likely that he knows it; and that is exactly why he is doing it.
One says to Jack in a loud voice: “Stop! I don’t like what you are doing.” Or “That behavior is unacceptable. Cut it out!” Jack replies: “But Jill doesn’t mind.” An obvious lie—or maybe Jill is so depressed that, in the moment, she is just numb. One clarifies: “I don’t care how Jill feels—I don’t like it. We do not talk to our fellow students that way. It is disrespectful.” Or words to that effect.
There are numerous scenarios here. If kids are whispering in the presence of another kid such that the target is supposed to imagine devaluing things are being said, the response is similar: “It is impolite to whisper in the presence of others—stop it—it is discourteous” (said in a loud, authoritative voice). The point is to reestablish the boundary in the relatedness, so that even if people do not want to be empathic, they can at least be courteous. It may sound paradoxical, but that is the most empathic response one can provide.
If the relationship between the bully and the intended target includes hurling insults, then the bystander establishes a “no fly zone” in one’s presence. The metaphor is telling. Stop the insults from flying around. Shoot them down.
The bullying approach to relating is de-weaponized—at least in one’s presence. The bully may also be better off, at least indirectly, since he (or she) may be trying to use bullying to regulate his own de-regulated emotions. Think of the intervention as regulating the dis-regulated emotions that the bully is experiencing, but which, if only the bully had some interpersonal skills, he would be able to regulate for himself. While there is no silver bullet here, the intervention itself provides the regulation—in the form of a firm boundary to help the bully contain himself and regain an emotional composure without hurting anyone.
If we use empathy as a method of data gathering about bullies, we may be surprised to learn that bullies are a diverse group of people:[v]
(1) The stereotypical bully: The stereotype really does capture features of the real world. Think of Bill Sikes (see Figure 5) from Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Bill Sikes beats his dog and his girl friend. The relationships of power are one-sided and physical violence is prominent.
Other examples of classic bullies include Carrie’s schoolmates in the revenge movie of the same name; Nelson in the Simpsons; Malfoy in Harry Potter.
One person who reports in great detail on bullying, Emily Bazelon, calls the stereotypical bullies “thugs in training.”[vi] These bullies rely on superior physical strength. They trip you in the corridor, and steal your lunch. They exemplify the descriptions that bullies do poorly academically (except perhaps for Malfoy, who is all the more sinister for being smart and psychopathic). These bullies habitually cause conflict with others, Bazelon reports, and are 4 times more likely to become criminals.
Figure 5: Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, bullying his dog
According to Olweus, to whom Bazelon is indebted for the definition of bullying, 60% of childhood bullies have at least one conviction from breaking the law; 35% have three or more encounters with the police. These are the kids who may satisfy criteria for conduct disorder such as cruelty to animals, damage to property, casual disrespect in addressing others—along with bullying behavior.
Many of these kids, stereotypical bullies, feel miserable, and, are attempting to regulate their disregulated emotions by making others suffer. Yet these bullies would not necessarily agree or endorse the judgment that they are unhappy. This is because they are out of touch with their feelings. They would have to be taught how to feel their feelings prior to asking them, hypothetically, how they would feel if something similar was done to them. If they are out of touch with their own feelings, it is likely that they are unable to get in touch with the feeling of others. They are out of touch with the grain of empathy, which we generously attribute to them.
In most bullies, the bully’s conscience developmentally lags behind his age cohort. That is especially the case with these individuals. Even if they have a capacity for empathy, empathy is not effective in appealing to their conscience. The conscience is stunted or they dismiss its influence. They may have a trace or sense of empathy, even though undeveloped, but it is often misused to increase the suffering of the targets.
Instead of tactically trying to induce empathy, external surveillance and behavioral incentives are likely to be most effective in reducing their bullying behavior. If they could find a positive role model to admire and imitate—someone who is not a member of a street gang or “bad boy” rap star—then they could get guidance from him or her. Admiration for a role model would allow the person to acquire ideals and ambitions, contributing to their integration into the community. It just might save their lives.
(2) The clueless bully: The aggression of this kind of bully does plenty of damage. Yet, at another level, these bullies just don’t get it. He may be socially awkward, or even fall on the autistic spectrum. One kid who fell into this group called his targets “stupid.” He hurt the feelings of many, and, made some kids cry; but in the process he became extremely unpopular. If he thought bullying was a way to get ahead with his peers, it didn’t work. His status plummeted.
Our empathy suggests that the empty wagon makes the most noise, and this kind of bully is one of those. He is not filled with sadism and malice, but definitely lacking social skills. This is small consolation to those whose days he wrecked, yet it does give one pause. This is the kind of bullying for which the adult’s advice to “fight back” makes the most sense. This is not easy to do. Taking “assertiveness training” or “boxing lessons” assumes the target of bullying lacks skill in one of these areas, and has incentive to develop it.
The target has been selected precisely because this is someone who does not like to fight. The problem is that prior to assertiveness training, and so on, most targets of bullying are unable to act effectively on their own behalf—or assertively. Lack of experience and skill in dealing with hostility as well as out-and-out fear rarely improve the judgment of the person who is the target of bullying.
The target of bullying ends up being a deer in the headlights when it comes to fighting. When the power equation is out of balance and a hostile environment exists due to physical size or social conditions (e.g., apartheid (“legal” segregation), anti-Semitism, etc.), fighting back can become a suicidal gesture, literally if not emotionally. Rarely does any benefit exist in getting into a back-and-forth with the bully.
Still, this is precisely the scenario where the possibility of the would-be victim fighting back in self defense makes the most sense. In many bullying scenarios one may need to beat a tactical retreat or call for backup prior to engaging, since the power equation is so unfavorable. However, in this case, the idea of attempting to set one’s own boundaries by pushing back and confronting the clueless bully is potentially useful and self-empowering. No guarantees, but it might work.
(3) The bully who is also a target: These bullies are vulnerable to peer pressure. They succumb to peer pressure to abuse others. Nor are they good at protecting themselves from bullying. Unlike the first group, who may satisfy criteria for conduct disorders (which used to be called “juvenile delinquency”), these kids do not feel okay about themselves. They do not subscribe to the philosopher Socrates’ maxim that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it. These kids experience the worst of both worlds, but it feels less bad to bully than to be bullied.
These bullies are relatively more in touch with their feelings than the first two groups, and here is a chance that an “empathy induction” might bear fruit. “How would you feel if this were done to you?” These kids are depressed or anxious or both. They experience a conflict between the fear of being bullied and the “easy way out” of succumbing to peer pressure and becoming a bully.
Instead of intervening with a suspension from school for the bully, punishment has to be supplemented with treatment, rehabilitation, or guidance. With treatment such as counseling or therapy a possibility exists of improving the behavior once the student returns to the school community after the suspension. A continuum of interventions from online training to individual counseling to working with parents can produce positive outcomes.
(4) The bully who is a “popular” kid: These individuals score high on social skills. They are good at reading the emotions of others. They have empathy skills, though often they lack the basic foundation of authenticity and integrity needed to use the skills to benefit others or build community. They find relating to other people is relatively easy, and they know how to say just the right things to make friends or placate the grown ups. If the reader is expecting me to say that they are secretly insecure or wracked by self-doubt, that is simply not so. On the contrary, these kids are popular and mostly happy with their lives. Often their parents are well off. The kids get gear and stuff. Yet something is amiss and missing.
Here bullying occurs as a play for power and social status. A pecking hierarchy exists in which the most popular kid gets a minion to perpetrate the “dirty work,” the bullying. This is the Machiavellian moment. It is best for the Prince—I mean, bully—to be loved; but it is essential to be feared. Likewise for the Princess. When perpetrating wrong doing, one should nevertheless be perceived as being gracious and generous. What is the point of having power or status unless one is able to exercise it?
Boys provide numerous examples of popular kids who can be mean—see McFly in the Back to the Future series of films—but this is where “mean girls” come into their own.[vii]
When relationships get “weaponized,” the discussion cuts across gender lines, though girls have provided the “poster child” for meanness in the popular press. While boys bully both boys and girls, girls mostly bully girls, bringing a sublimated aggression to the act.
Up until the age of four, girls grab toys, hit, push, play rough, and shout as much as boys do. At some point, social expectations from parents, extended family, biological programming, school teachers, and so on, drive such behavior underground.
Conforming to community standards, whether helpful or hurtful, about “sugar and spice and everything nice” requires that girls become stealthy in their aggression. Fisticuffs are out. Queen Bees are in. One definition of a “Queen Bee” is a popular girl, who collects various “minions” around her. The minions, in turn, conform to her expectations in behavior, dress, language, and bullying.
Girls use threats, blackmail, gossip, rumors, attacking reputations, whispering in provocative ways, the silent treatment, or non-verbal gesturing. Opening up in relationships can leave one vulnerable to aggression from those one has trusted. Following the bad example of the grown ups, cliques of kids will “vote someone off the island.” Nor is it progress that, in some subcultures, girls are becoming almost as ready to throw a punch as the boys.
This is where empathy may be misused to increase the misery of the target of bullying. Social skills enable the would-be bully to “get inside the heads” of their intended targets to inflict the maximum upset.
One can find many, diverse examples in which the bully takes the perspective of the intended target, thinks about what would be most shaming or hurtful, and goes about implementing it. The bully has a sense of what the target is experiencing through a refined empathic receptivity.
What one cannot find is an example in which calling someone devaluing names or giving them “the silent treatment” is an example of empathic responsiveness. While the point is controversial, I am calling this out as a breakdown, indeed a “pathology,” of empathic responsiveness.
The description of empathy is crucial here. For advocates of empathy as a fundamentally “pro social” attitude, simply “getting” someone else’s feelings and perspective and then using this verbally to bully them isn’t really empathy. An empathic individual would recognize and anticipate the potential hurt, and, therefore, would not respond to the other person in a devaluing way.
The empathy lessons developed in this work takes account of the possibility that empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic interpretation can be misused to hurt people. But empathy without empathic responsiveness falls short of the definition of full functioning empathy. Such an approach fails and breaks down when empathic responsiveness is tested. One does not give back to the other person that person’s own experience in such a way that he recognizes it as his own. Instead one bullies the other. So empathy must be informed by one’s good upbringing and ethics not to misuse empathic responsiveness to hurt others.
In conclusion, the recommendation and response of empathy to bullying – and in every case – is to set limits, establish boundaries, and get one’s power back in declining to take the bait of provocative gestures. Self-defense is always appropriate is one is the target of aggression, and so is retreating in the face of disproportionate unfavorable odds.
The challenges is to contain and disarming bullying without becoming an even bigger bully than the bully against whom one is struggling. The proposal is NOT to use empathy to get in touch with the bully’s suffering. Many bullies enjoy misbehaving and they get off on the conflict and making others suffer. Rather the recommendation is to use top down, cognitive empathy to put oneself in the place of there other person (the bully) in order to understand what might be motivating him so that one can deflect, defuse, or deescalate (including implementing a tactical retreat).
Even if the bully is the boss at work or members of the local police force who have a monopoly on violence, the recommendation is still the same: set boundaries, establish limits, and try to defuse the situation. Note well: this is not a suicide mission – one may have to retreat, call for backup, and find other methods of restoring boundaries and integrity such as civil disobedience, finding powerful allies, documenting and escalating to sympathetic authorities in the establishment (if there are any), or seeking a personal solution in another context. The devil – and the empathy – is in the details and in further podcasts in this series on empathy and bullying, additional guidance will be provided.
Notes
[i] Lou Agosta. (2015). A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, and Recovery in Psycho analysis and Psychotherapy. London: Routledge: 141–194.
[ii] “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” requires telling the truth about what happened and what one made it mean. In asking forgiveness one is required to say for what one is asking forgiveness. I ask: If the perpetrator does not think to ask forgiveness is one obligated to make an unsolicited offer? Forgiveness is a possibility and a recommendation, not an entitlement?
[iii] Dan Olweus. (1973/1993). Bullying in School: What We Know and What We Can Do. London: Wiley/Blackwell.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Emily Bazelon. (2012). Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. New York: Random House. This chapter relies significantly on Bazelon’s journalistic synthesis of the literature and her incisive interviews; see also James Garbarino and Ellen deLara, (2002), And Words Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment, and Emotional Violence. New York: the Free Press (Simon and Shuster).
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Rachel Simmons. (2002). Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. New York: Harvest (Harcourt).
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy and Gender
Biology is not destiny. As Simone de Beauvoir noted in The Second Sex, woman is not a mere womb. Likewise, I note: man is not mere testosterone. [Note: This post is an excerpt from the final section of Chapter Seven on my book: A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy, available here: click here to examine complete book.]
Biology is important, but biology is not destiny. That was one of the key points of the feminist revolution. Raising children is a job – a big job; and so is being the CEO of IBM as was Virginia Rometty until earlier this year.
The matter is delicate. These human beings – we human beings – are an aggressive species. It is usually the men that are doing the aggressing. That is indeed a function of testosterone – as well as upbringing [child rearing practices], enculturation, and the evaluation of the species.
Common sense suggests that woman is the more nurturing gender, given her role in giving birth and keeping the home fires burning in agricultural, hunting, and traditional indigenous cultures. Women are keeping the home fires burning, so what are the men doing? Men are out systematically doing battle with saber-toothed tigers and hostile neighbors. If this seems like an over-simplification, it is. Yet it is a compelling one, given the evolution and history of the species.
This issue of empathy and gender becomes controversial. Claims have been made that a man’s brain is different than a woman’s. In particular, men are “wired” for systematizing; and women are “wired” for empathy – for relating, especially relating to children and other human beings in general. This research – usually credited to neuropsychologist Simon Baron Cohen but also to Frans de Waal – has for sometime now been debunked – shown to be limited, distorted, and flat out wrong.
When one looks at the methods and the data in detail, no consistent gender difference in empathy have been observed – read on!
I provide the reference point upfront. As noted, the research by Simon Baron Cohen that men’s brains are “wired” for systematizing and women’s for relating and relationships are questioned and indeed debunked in Robyn Blum’s article in Heidi L. Maibom, ed. (2017). (For Bluhm’s original article see The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Empathy. London/New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis): 396 pp. )
Robyn Bluhm’s article probes the research on the evidential basis of this nurturing role and inquires: does it extend to empathy and how far?
Early gender-empathy studies were vulnerable to self-report biases and gender stereotyping that pervasively depicted females in a biased way as the more empathic gender. According to Bluhm, these early studies simply do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Case closed on them. Dismissed. Enter Simon Baron-Cohen and his innovative research, renewing the debate and shifting it in the direction of neural science as opposed to social roles and their self-fulfilling stereotypes.
Bluhm points out in detail that as Baron-Cohen’s work gained exposure and traction in the academic market place of ideas subtle shifts occurred in his presentation of the results. At first Baron-Cohen highlighted measures that were supposed to assess both cognitive and affective empathy, but later the affective dimension fell out of the equation (and the research) and only cognitive empathy was the target of inquiry and was engaged (p. 381).
Though Baron-Cohen’s initial research described the “male brain” as having “spatial skills,” his later publications, once he became a celebrity academic (once again, my term, not Bluhm’s), redescribe the male brain as “hardwired for systematizing”; likewise, the “female-type” brain, initially credited with being better at “linguistic skills,” was redescribed as “hardwired for empathy.” The language shifts from being about “social skills.” Baron-Cohen speaks of “empathy” rather than “social skills,” so that the two distinctions are virtually synonymous (p. 384).
As the honest broker, Bluhm notes that, as with the earlier research in gender differences, Baron-Cohen’s research has been influential but controversial. Men and women have different routes to accessing and activating their empathy; they respond to different pressures to conform to (or rebel against) what the community defines as gender-appropriate behavior; and men and women even have different incentives for empathic performance.
For example, “…[M]en’s scores on an empathy task equaled women’s when a monetary reward for good performance was offered” (p. 384). Monetary rewards up; empathy up? Though Bluhm does not say so, I came away with the distinct impression of a much needed debunking of the neurohype—what we would now call “fake news”—a job well done.
Bluhm’s work is especially pertinent in constraining celebrity, executive consultants (once again, my term), running with the neuro-spin, and publishing in the Harvard Business Review, who assert that brain science shows we need more women executives on corporate boards to expand empathy.
I hasten to add that we do indeed need more women executives, but that is not something demonstrated by brain science, at least as of this date (Q2 2020). We need more women executives because it is demonstrated by statistics (just one of many sources of reasons other than brain science) that to devalue the contributions to innovation, service, and productivity of slightly more than half the population is bad business practice—foolish, inefficient, and wasteful. The challenge is that the practices that make one good at business—beating the competition, engaging technology problems, solving legal disputes—do not necessarily expand one’s empathy, regardless of gender.
[In a separate, informal email conversation (dated July 2, 2018), Bluhm calls out Cordelia Fine’s fine takedown of “The Myth of the Lehman Sisters” in the last chapter of Fine’s book (not otherwise a part of Bluhm’s review): Cordelia Fine, (2017), Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society. New York: W. W. Norton. It is a bold statement of the obvious – that the part of basic anatomy that differs between men and women is definitely NOT the brain. But that is missed due to lack of empathy which is committed to responding to the whole person – not just the brain or the sex organs.]
In an expression of insightful and thunderous understatement, Bluhm concludes: “With the exception of studies that rely on participants’ self-reports or on other’s reports of their behavior [which are invalid for other reasons], no consistent gender differences in empathy have been observed. This raises the possibility that gender differences in empathy are in the eye of the beholder, and that the beholder is influenced by gender stereotypes…” (p. 386). Just so.
Okay, having debunked the myth that men’s brains are different – and in particular less empathic – what to do about the situation that many men (and women?) struggle to expand their empathy? The recommendation is not to treat empathy and an on-off switch. Empathy is rather a dial – to be tuned up or down based on the situation. That takes practice.
Some men – many men – may start out with an empathic disadvantage in experiencing their feelings after having been taught such stuff as “big boys don’t cry.” But if people, including men, practice getting in touch with their experience, then they get better at it – experiencing their experience. Likewise, with empathy. If you practice, you get better at it. For those interested in practicing, but not working too hard, may I recommend: Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide: click here to examine (and buy!) the book.
Further Reading
Ickes, William & Gesn, Paul & GRAHAM, TIFFANY. (2000). Gender differences in empathic accuracy: Differential ability or differential motivation?. Personal Relationships. 7. 95 – 109. 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2000.tb00006.x.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and The Chicago Empathy Project
Book Review: Susan Lanzoni’s Empathy: A History connects the dots between the many meanings of empathy
Short review: two thumbs up. Superb. Definitive. Well written and engaging. Innovative and even ground-breaking. Connects the dots between the different aspects and dimensions of empathy. Sets a new standard in empathy studies. The longer – much longer – review follows. Note also that since this is not a softball review, several criticisms, incompletenesses, and limitations are called out.
Susan Lanzoni’s comprehensive history of the concept of empathy – the concept, not the mere word – breaks new ground in our understanding of the distinction. She
Cover art: Empathy: A History by Susan Lanzoni – showing the full spectrum of aspects of empathy from projection to receptivity in interpersonal relations
explores empathy’s significance for diverse aspects of our humanity, extending from art and advertising to race relations and talk therapy: Empathy: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 392 pp., $30 (US).
Just to be clear: Lanzoni’s is not a “how to” or self-help book; which does not mean that one cannot expand one’s empathy by engaging with empathy’s deep structure in this multi-dimensional, historical encounter. One can. However, the reader will not find explicit tips and techniques in applying empathy.
Lanzoni engages with empathy and: (1) natural beauty and art (2) the 19th century psychological laboratories of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927), and their rivals (3) theatre and modern dance (4) mental illness such as psychosis and schizophrenia (5) social work and psychotherapy (6) measurement using psychometric questionnaires (7) popular culture including advertising and the media (8) race relations (9) neuroscience.
Lanzoni end her introduction by quoting the work of Ted Cohen (1939–2014) on metaphor in Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (2009) (Lanzoni: p.18). Formulating a metaphor and imagining oneself in another person’s position point to a common twofold root, an art [Kunst] hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty, but whose depths we are unlikely to be able ever adequately to plumb. Lanzoni’s implies the art in question is precisely empathy and the translation it makes possible. Thus, we always honor the late Ted Cohen, whose predictably cutting, caustic and cynical wit, however, masked a deep and abiding empathy.
The narrative proper begins with Violet Paget (Vernon Lee (1856–1935)), who, with her partner and muse Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson, engaged in introspective personal journaling to detect and report the physiological effects of art and beauty on the human organism. Paget’s research crosses paths with that of Munich psychologist Theodor Lipps (1851–1914). Lanzoni reports that Lee and Lipps may have met in person in Rome at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology in 1905 (where both were on the program).
At the risk of over-simplification, Paget, Lipps, and Karl Groos (1861–1946) form a triumvirate of empathy innovators, who turn to motor mimicry, inner imitation, sympathetic muscular memory, and aspects of physiological resonance to account for the stimulating effects of artistic and natural beauty on human experience. Their analysis is the flip side of the implicit panpsychism, personification, anthropomorphism by which beautiful nature is animated with human expressions of the emotional life – for example, angry storms in the ocean, melancholy mists in the valley, a joyful sunrise, a fearful darkness.
This remarkable feature of human experience: that we attribute emotions (and even intentions) to natural objects – angry storms, cheerful sunsets, and melancholy clouds. Magical, primitive thinking? An adaptive reflex? This review does not require that anyone, including Lanzoni, have solved this problem. However, some contemporary thinkers have speculated that it is a cognitive design defect of human nature to attribute intentionality (including emotional propositional contents) to otherness – whether human or physical – as an adaptive mechanism arising in the context of biological evolution.
Theodor Lipps is the one who puts Einfühlung on the map between 1883 and 1914 (his death), and those who are contemporaries must explain how they differ from his position.
Lipps’ position on empathy was already multidimensional, extending Einfühlung from the projection of feelings into objects to the perception of other people’s expressions of animate life. Lanzoni’s reading of Lipps is much more charitable than mine, and I find Lipps at loose ends and philosophically naïve as he tries to account for the first person’s access to the experiences of the second person by “an original innate association between the visual image and the kinesthetic image (1903: 116). Lipps thinks he has demolished the philosopher’s problem of other minds but unwittingly recreates it in his own terms (e.g., Agosta 2014: 62 – 63).
Lanzoni engagingly (but briefly) references the critique of Lipps’ theory of projective empathy by the phenomenologists Edith Stein (1891–1942), Max Scheler (1874–1928), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Maurice Merleu-Ponty (1908–1961), and Martin Buber (1878–1965) (p. 37).
Lanzoni notes Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) debt to Lipps based on transference as a kind of projection. For Lipps, psychological processes were performed, with few exceptions, beneath the threshold of consciousness, which is another factor that made Lipps’ positions attractive to Freud.
Any thinker or author who used the term “Einfühlung” would inevitably also conjure up the image of Theodor Lipps, which limited the thinkers ability to use it without extensive argument or the risk of being mistaken as a follower of Lipps. This point is key: in his own time Lipps had in itself branded himself as the “go to guy” for all matters empathic. More on the significance of this dilemma below.)
By the way, Lanzoni does not italicize the word “Einfühlung” unless it is used in a specifically German context. “Einfühlung” is now an English word!
Johann Herder (1744–1803) also gets honorable mention at this point (p. 32) as a philosopher in the Romantic tradition. Herder is noteworthy as a proponent of empathy as a verb – sich hereinfühlen– to feel one’s way into. Herder was a fellow traveler of Goethe and actually “on staff” as the chief Lutheran prelate at Weimar, innovating in the historical development of language in a proto-evolutionary (and metaphysical) context. This points to an entire undeveloped paradigm of empathy not developed by Lanzoni. For example, for Herder empathy was required to feel one’s way into the world of Homer in order to produce an accurate translation of Homer’s Iliad.
This paradigm of empathy as translation is arguably at the same level of generality as empathy as projection, but remained undeveloped until the rise of hermeneutics along a separate trajectory. And since Lanzoni seemingly unquestioningly accepts Rudolf Makkreel’s dismissal of the relevance of Einfühlung for Wilhelm Dilthey (granted he has little use for the word), this approach is not further explored.
Yet the modern innovators of interpersonal empathy such as Carl Rogers (1902–1987) might be read as leap-frogging back to the original sense of entering the other’s world in order to translate it into the first person, subject’s own terms. Such Herderlike usages also fits well with what Gordon Allport (1897–1967) and Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) were doing in arraying empathy against racism and prejudice in expanding the boundaries of community by empathically translating between them (see Chapter Nine).
An entire possible alternate history of empathy, as yet unwritten, opens up at this point – empathy as translation between subjects. (Granted that Rogers probably never heard of Herder, at least not in the context of empathy, so this is a conceptual nuance; but Rogers probably never heard of Lipps either.)
As is by now well known, in part thanks to Lanzoni’s work, the word “empathy” itself comes into English thanks to Edward Bradford Titchener, the founder of a Wundtian style psychology lab at Cornell University (and translator of Wundt). However, what is less well known is the back-and-forth about the meaning of Einfühlung as explored in detail by Lanzoni.
I was impressed by the work of James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934), who contribution to empathy as semblance was interrupted and obscured as he had to leave town in a hurry – apparently for Paris – after being arrested in a raid on a Baltimore house of prostitution. Baldwin was innovating with empathy in terms of semblance – the “as if” of child’s play and the play of the artist.
Lanzoni quotes in detail the devaluing remarks about “empathy” made by James and Alix Strachey, the translators of Freud, who call it a “vile word” (p. 67). Though Freud used variations of “Einfühlung” some 22 times in 24 volumes, the word is often paraphrased or mistranslated by the Stracheys, using synonyms such as “sympathetic understanding.”
It is amazing how much empathy or lack thereof turns on a mistranslation. My take on it? Basically Freud did not use the word Einfühlung more often because he was not someone who could abide being a footnote to Lipps (who, as noted, virtually owned the distinction Einfühlungin German). There are other technical reasons Freud chose not to comment more extensively on empathy, including his dismissal of the philosophical uses of introspection as a function of the conscience (superego), whereas introspection and empathy are “joined at the hip” in a therapeutic context (see also Agosta 2014: 66 – 82).
I hasten to add that Freud did say in his “Recommendations for Physicians Beginning Psychoanalytic Treatment” (1913) that if the would-be analysts start in any other way than with empathy, they are headed for trouble. But once again the reader has no idea of Freud’s true position, because “empathy” is mistranslated as “sympathetic understanding.” However, these observations are less critical to Lanzoni’s point, which is otherwise unexceptionally on target.
Meanwhile, Titchener has numerous ideas (that we would today consider highly unconventional) about how images accompany word meanings, but his translation of “Einfühlung” as “empathy” sticks. In an otherwise comprehensive engagement (Lanzoni really does seem to have read everything!), she does not mention how empathy subsequently becomes embroiled in the disappearance of introspection controversy (behaviorists regard it as illusory) and ultimately is “taken down” by the behaviorists in their attack on all things relating to subjective consciousness and inwardness. However, all this lies ahead in the B.F. Skinnerian 1950s through 1980s, and the Chapter ends with Einfühlung being an intertwining of projection, aesthetic appreciation, and Baldwin’s “semblance.”
But how does one get from a empathy that projects human emotions and mindedness onto objects in art and nature and an empathy as human understanding of another, second person who contains an emotional life and mind of his or her own distinct from that of the first person?
Lanzoni skillfully navigates the challenge of engaging how the projective aesthetic empathy of Lipps et al get transformed, translated, and reconciled, with the interpersonal receptive empathy of talk therapy and personal counseling.
One missing link comes in modern dance. The missing link is identified as to “live in the mind of the artist who designed it [the object]” (p. 97). At this moment in the text, the intentionality of the artist looms large. In effect, the regression (my word, not Lanzoni’s word) is back from the intentionality built into the artistic artifact or performance towards human subjectivity. Now intentionality is available to build a bridge between a projective empathy of the object and a receptive intersubjective empathy of the human subject.
Both projective empathy and receptive empathy are ways (admittedly divergent) of dealing with and transforming otherness– the otherness of the object and the otherness of the human subject. This is why aesthetic empathy and interpersonal empathy belong to the same concept and are not merely the same homonymous word for different underlying concepts.
Another missing link occurs in “Personality as Art.” Lanzoni gathers together the contributions of Herbert Langfeld (1879–1958), Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who expand the boundaries of aesthetic, projective empathy in the direction of the understanding of human beings. The study of the artistic self-expressions of psychotics incarcerated in mental asylums also deserves mention here as opening up the exchange between aesthetic projective empathy and interpersonal receptive empathy.
Nowhere does any one (including Lanzoni) say, “Relate to the human being with the respect and interpretive finesse with which one relates to a work of art,” but that is the basic subtext here. In our own time, the late Richard Wollheim, a notorious free spirit, sometimes took such a position about art and its objects.
The engagement with empathy as human understanding picks up speed. Whenever a breakdown occurs the possibility of a breakthrough also arises. Such is the case with schizophrenia. In apparently separate but overlapping and near simultaneous innovations, E. E. Southard (1876–1920), Roy G. Hoskins , Louis Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), and C. G. Jung identified schizophrenia as a challenge to or a disorder of empathy. In short, it is hard to empathize – Jaspers maintained it was impossible – with people who were disordered in such a way that they displayed the cluster of symptoms we now group as schizophrenia including perceptual distortions, incoherent speech patterns, disordered thinking, lack of reality testing, bizarre ideas, emotional flatness, intermittent acute anxiety or paranoia, lack of motivation, lack of responsiveness, burn out, and (occasionally) lack of personal hygiene.
Southard designed an “empathic index” (p. 101) guiding the psychiatrist through a series of questions such as: How far can you read or feel yourself into the patient? Thus the first, admittedly over-simplified, version of the schizophrenia test: Can you imagine experiencing what the patient reports he or she is experiencing? If not, then that counts as evidence they are on the equivalent of what we would today call the “schizophrenic spectrum.”
We finally arrive at our present day folk definition of empathy: the ability to step into and walk in another person’s shoes and then to step back into one’s own shoes again, and, in so doing, to “feel along with, to understand, and to insinuate one’s self into the feelings of another person” (p. 124).
Lanzoni asserts: “[T]he psycho-therapeutic rendering of empathy traded self-projection for its opposite: one now had to bracket the self’s findings and judgments in order to more fully occupy the position of another” (p. 125). Thus, a coincidence of opposites in which the two extremes are perhaps counter-intuitively closer to one another than either point is to the middle.
With Chapter Five on “Empathy in Social Work and Psychotherapy,” Lanzoni makes yet another decisive contribution to empathy scholarship.
Carl Rogers famously puts empathy on the map in the 1950s, 60s, and beyond, as the foundation for psychotherapeutic action. Though it is an oversimplification, in client-centered Rogerian therapy, one gives the client a good listening – one gives the client empathy – and the client gets better.
Lanzoni connects the empathy dots. They lead back into the empathy archives. They lead back from Carl Rogers to D. Elizabeth Davis, a student of Jessie Taft (1892 – 1960), a nurse and social worker, who, in turn, was strongly influenced in her conception of relational therapy by G. H. Mead’s (1863–1931) social behaviorism and Otto Rank (1884–1939). Rank belonged to Freud’s inner circle along with Ernest Jones (1879–1958), Karl Abraham (1877–1925), and Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933).
Not a medical man or even a scientist, Otto Rank met Freud in 1905 when he presented Freud with his innovative work on the artist as inspired by Freud’s theories. Something clicked between them. In 1905 Freud was less isolated, but still hungry for recognition and fellow travelers. Think: father son transference.
Rank eventually completed a PhD dissertation at the University of Vienna on literature (the Lohengrin Saga), in part thanks to the financial generosity of Freud. Freud paid him to be the recording secretary of the Psychoanalytic Association. The literary dimension is of the essence, and, in our own time, we have a renewed appreciation that studying literary fiction expands one’s empathy. This too strengthens the case for the overlap of the aesthetic and interpersonal dimensions of empathy.
As was often the case with Freud and his “sons” – Jung, Ferenczi, Adler – the seemingly inevitable “falling out” between Rank and the Freudian establishment was especially bitter. Ultimately Louis Stack Sullivan made the parliamentary motion to expel Rank from the American Psychoanalytic Association. With friends like these … Rank formed his own separate Association and continued to innovate and earn Greenbacks.
Carl Rogers learns of Rank’s work through one of his colleagues, who is being analyzed by Rank, now residing in the States. Rogers invites Rank to speak at a three-day seminar (circa 1936), lecturing to forty-five social workers and educators. Rogers later notes that it was in this context “that I first got the notion of responding almost entirely to the feeling being expressed” (p. 144). Voila! Mark the historical moment: Client-centered therapy is conceived.
Mine is a bare bones outline of how Lanzoni connects the dots. The dynamics and the personalities, which Lanzoni richly narrates, make for fascinating story telling in themselves. Fast forward to the 1930s as Jessie Taft, a nurse and social worker separately innovating in empathic relatedness, is translating Rank’s Will Therapy from the German. There is still research to be done to follow the threads into Rank’s work, whose literary skills in mining myth and fiction are used in elaborating an approach to the emotions that transgresses the relatively narrow definition of Freudian libido (desire).
Though Lanzoni does not get so far, I do not believe that Rank had the specific distinction of Einfühlung, but worked with the communication and understanding of the emotions in such a way as to produce psychological transformation. Rank uses the word “love” in the way of an empathy-like “unconditional positive regard.”
By the time Rogers is fully engaged with Einfühlung, “empathy” does notmean agreement with the other or mere mirroring. The therapy client may usefully be self-expressed about the emotions with which he or she is struggling. These emotions, in turn, are thereby brought to the surface, acknowledged, worked through, and able to be transformed. The therapist helps the client to metabolize the emotional congestion and gives back to the client the client’s own experience in a form that the client recognizes, hypothetically opening up a reorganization of psychic structure.
Lanzoni also gives a “shout out” to Heinz Kohut, MD (1913–1981), but just barely. Kohut was the innovator who puts empathy on the map in psychoanalysis (then the dominant paradigm in psychiatry) starting in 1959 with his celebrated article “Introspection, empathy, and Psychoanalysis.”
Kohut was very circumspect about his sources relating to empathy and regarding those who inspired him in his work on empathy. Chronically under-appreciated (and sometimes even under attack) by the prevailing orthodoxy of Freudian ego psychology, Kohut’s footnotes about empathy as such are few and far between. Surely knowing the fate of Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, and Rank, not even to mention Jeffrey Masson, Kohut pushed back against the unfriendly accusation that Kohut’s emerging Self Psychology was distinct from Freudian psychoanalysis, even as Self Psychology seemed increasingly to be so.
It is likely Kohut was influenced by Sándor Ferenczi and Michael Balint (Lunbeck 2011). Speaking personally, I have never seen a shred of evidence that Kohut read Rank, who was by that time devalued as yet another notorious “bad boy” and psychoanalytic heretic. Of course, that does not mean that Kohut did not do so – and it is also possible that I just need to get out more. Kohut and Rogers seemed to have inhabited parallel but wholly distinct universes.
My take? And not necessarily Lanzoni’s: Kohut was sui generis– and wherever he first got the word “empathy” itself (Kohut, though a Austrian, German-speaking refugee, was by 1959 writing in English), his definition of empathy as “vicarious introspection” is a wholly original contribution.
One problem is that as soon as one engages Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self (1971), arguably a work of incomparable genius, discovering as it does new forms of transference, relations to the other, and possibilities for humanization, the reader is hit by a tidal wave of terms such as “cathexis,” “archaic object,” and “repressed infantile libidinal urges.” These make the reading a hard slog for most civilians.
The force of historical empathy is strong with Lanzoni as she engages “Popular Empathy.” She describes how in the post World War II world “empathy” breaks out of its narrow academic context into the American cultural milieu at large.
For example, the then-popular radio (and eventually TV) personality Arthur Godfrey was featured on the February 1950 cover of Time magazine, asserting “He has empathy” (p. 208). The notorious quiz show scandals of the late 1950s were apparently a function of mis-guided empathy, giving contestants answers to build audience empathy for the contestants. Advertisers “got it”: help the audience empathize with the brand and the person using the brand – give the customer empathy, they buy the product. Even if it was never quite so simple, the Boston Globe(July 3, 1964) quotes the Harvard Business Review: Empathy is “the ability feel as the other fellow feels – without becoming sympathetic” (p. 210).
Meanwhile, Carl Rogers has an existential encounter with Martin Buber (celebrated author of I and Thou) at the University of Michigan (1956). Rogers is profiled in Timemagazine in 1957 as practicing a psychotherapy that uses empathy in contrast with the then-prevailing paradigm of psychoanalysis, which uses – what? Insert the caricature of an authoritarian analysis of the Oedipus complex.
In an eye-opening Chapter on “Empathy, Race, and Politics,” Lanzoni documents the role of empathy in the movement for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s in America. Both Kenneth B. Clark and Gordon Allport provided examples of (social) psychologists who were committed to social justice. They were committed to overcoming the one dimensional, trivial and convenient issues of academic research (still ongoing) instead engaging with urgent social realities such as prejudice, racism, poverty, and inequality.
According to Lanzoni, Allport drew on the tradition of Einfühlung to describe empathy as a means of grasping the human personality holistically, thus breaking down the barrier between aesthetic and interpersonal empathy. Clark used empathy as the basis for arguing for equality under the law: “to see in one man all men; and in all men the self” (p. 217). Sounds like empathy to me.
In 1944 Allport taught an eight-hour course to Boston police officers to tune down racial tensions. Allport encountered and faced what he called an “abusive torrent of released hostility.” In response Allport deployed the technique of nondirective or “unemotional listening,” learned from Carl Rogers. Once again, sounds like empathy. By the end of the session, the officers reportedly became bored by their own complaints. One who had “at first railed against the Jews tried in later remarks to make amends.” But empathy remained a two-edged sword, capable of eliciting searing anger when others thought they had not been given the dignity they deserved as well as dialing down narcissistic rage once it had been called forth (pp. 220 – 221).
Clark was so impressed by psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s (1870–1937) power dynamics in the context of society that he shifted his major from neurophysiology to psychology. In 1946, Clark and his wife, Mamie Clark (PhD, Columbia) established the Northside treatment Center in Harlem to expand education, counseling, and psychological service for youth in Harlem.
In July 1953 Clark wrote to Allport, asking help in preparing a document for the upcoming Supreme Court deliberations on desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case. Allport responded quickly. The rest, as they say, is history.
Gunnar Myrdal (author of the celebrated American Dilemma, demonstrating that the history of the US isthe history of race relations (1944)) said of Clark’s work, especially Dark Ghetto(1965): a demand for “human empathy and even compassion of the part of as many as possible of those who can read, think, and feel in free prosperous white America” (p. 241). Just so.
Instead of becoming ever more cynical and resigned in the face of prejudice that seemed baked into the neo-liberal, market-oriented vision of American society, Clark calls forth empathy. Clark’s calls for empathy became more insistent. What happens when Clark and empathy speak truth to power? Empathic reason? Rational empathy? One can only wish that Clark had lived to see the people of this great country elect Barak Obama as President of these United States. We do not know if this was an anomalous moment, a beacon in the current fog of fake everything, or a kind of liberal purgatory – one step forward, one step backward – to call forth further struggle. From the perspective of Q2 2019 as I write this review, such events seem like a dream. Breakdowns are hard but inevitably point the way to the next breakthrough.
Lanzoni demonstrates that society’s interest in empathy had continuously been at the level of at least a steady simmer in the popular and social justice communities in the 1950s through 1970s even as professional psychology was lost and wandering through the wasteland of Skinnerian behaviorism.
That which really brings the conversation about empathy to a rolling boil in the final chapter is the discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque monkeys by the group of brain scientists in Parma, Italy including V. Gallese, L. Gadiga, L. Gogassi, and G. Rizzolatti.
Mirror neurons are neurons are activated both when a subject takes an action and similarly when the subject watches another subject doing the same thing. For example, the set of neurons in the premotor cortex of the monkey is activated when it drinks from a cup. Okay, fine. The astonishing finding is that these same neurons are activated when the monkey watches another monkey (or any one) drink from the cup. Could this be the underlying basis of the motor mimicry, inner imitation, felt resonance, with which thinkers such as Violet Paget, Theodor Lipps, and Karl Groos remarked? Could this be the neural infrastructure for Kohut’s vicarious engaged, or Roger’s felt sense of participating in the other’s experience? The infrastructure for Mark Davis or Alvin Goldman on perspective taking and simulation?
The battle is joined.
Lanzoni covers the explosion of theories, studies, and amazing results that have occurred since the identification of alleged mirror neurons. Bottom up, affective empathy is combined with top down, cognitive empathy to complete the picture of empathic relatedness.
The author of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, weighs in with a follow up on Social Intelligence – that is, empathy. Victorio Gallese’s shared manifold hypothesis makes the case for a multi-person virtual manifold of experience that can be vicariously sensed by each partner in empathic resonance. Jean Decety’s seminal architectural definition of empathy paves the way for social neuroscience and functional magnetic imaging research (fMRI) that visualizes other people’s pain. Marco Iacoboni Mirroring People argues that we have no need to use inference to understand other people. We use mirror neurons. Disorders of empathy are identified: Simon Baron-Cohen’s breakthrough work on Mindblindness (1995) identifies possible interventions for autism spectrum disorders.
On a less positive note, the colonization by neural science of the humanities and social sciences has proceeded apace with neuroaesthetics, neurolaw, neurohistory, neurophilosophy, neuropsychoanalysis, neurozoology,and so on, drawing provocative but, in many cases, highly questionable conclusions from what areas of people’s brains “light up” as they lay back in the fMRI apparatus and are shown diverse pictures or videos of people’s fingers being painfully impacted by blunt force.
Lanzoni reports on the neuro-hype that accompanies the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys: “Cells That Read Minds.” Hmmm. The backlash is predictable if not inevitable. Greg Hickok’s The Myth of Mirror Neurons raises disturbing questions about voodoo correlations in fMRI research. Other than a single report from 2010 of human mirror neurons allegedly identified in epileptic patients undergoing surgery, there is no evidence of the existence of human mirror neurons.
Lanzoni is an equal opportunity debunker: The fMRI research, while engaging and provocative, provides evidence of diverse brain functions that include thousands of neurons, not individual ones, whose blood oxygenation level data (BOLD) is captured by the fMRI. Correlation is not causation. The brain lights up! Believe me, if it doesn’t you are in trouble.
Still, the neuro-everything trend has traction (and its merits). Even if human mirror neurons do not exist, it is highly probable that some neurological system is available that enables us humans – and perhaps us mammals – to resonate together at the level of the animate expressions of life.
If there is a myth, it is that we are unrelated. On the contrary, we humans are all related – biologically, socially, personally. You know that coworker or boss you can’t stand? You are related. You know that politician you regard with contempt? You are related. You know that in-law or neighbor who gets your goat? You are related – intimately related, because we all share the same cognitive, affective, and neural mechanisms – and defects – designed in from when we were that band of hominids fighting off large predators and hostile neighbors in the environment of evolutionary origin.
Since this is not a softball review, as noted, I call out the limitations and incompletenesses of Lanzoni’s impressive contribution. One of the challenges is that the history of the concept empathy is not limited to the word “empathy” or Einfühlung. Indeed prior to Lanzoni’s work, some entirely reasonable individuals had concluded that Lipps projective empathy and Roger’s interpersonal empathy were entirely distinct concepts. We now know that they belong together in a kind of coincidences of opposites because empathic animation of the work of art or beautiful nature and empathic receptivity to other human beings are related, but diverse, ways of engaging with otherness.
First incompleteness: Prior to Titchener’s invention of the word “empathy” as a translation of the German “Einfühlung” the main word in English was “sympathy.” Now it is a common place today to say that “sympathy” means a reactive emotion such as pity in contrast with “empathy” that captures a vicarious experience of the other’s experience or takes a sample or trace affect of the other’s experience. And that remains true today. David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) get barely a shout out.
However, if one goes back as recently as David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1731) one can find at least four different senses of sympathy – emotional contagion, the power of suggestion, a vicarious experience such as one has in the theatre, the conjoining of an idea and impression of another’s expression of emotion with the idea of the other [which starts sounding like our notion of interpersonal empathy].
In addition, if one looks at Hume’s aesthetic writings, one finds the distinction of a delicacy of sympathy and of taste. If your delicacy of sympathy and taste is more refined than mine, then you may experience a fine-grained impression that is more granular than mine. For example, you perceive sadness behind a person’s outburst of temper whereas I only perceive the obvious anger. Your delicacy of sympathy and taste is superior to mine. In our own modern language, you empathy is more discriminating.
A second incompleteness is in the treatment of the phenomenologist’s – Edith Stein (1891–1942), Max Scheler (1874–1928), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Maurice Merleu-Ponty (1908–1961), who receive honorable mention in a cursory nod to their diverse engagements with Einfühlung. For example, Max Scheler’s eight distinctions of sympathy and empathy are called out in a footnote (p. 360n40): Miteinanderfühlung [reciprocal feeling], Gefühlsansteckung [infectious feeling], Einsfühlung [feeling at one], Nachfühlung[vicarious feeling], Mitgefühl [compassion], Menschenliebe [love of mankind], akosmischtishe Person- und Gottesliebe [acosmic love of persons and God], und Einfühlung [empathy]. Well and good.
Leaving aside purely practical considerations of editorial constraints on word count and that the phenomenological material may have been covered elsewhere [e.g., see Agosta 2014, especially Chapters 4 – 6]: the reason that the additional phenomenological chapter was not provided is a breakdown in an otherwise astute historical empathy.
In particular, today hardly anyone has heard of Theodor Lipps (granted that Lanzoni’s work is changing that). However, in his own day Lipps was famous – celebrated as the proponent of a theory of Einfühlung that provided the substructure for aesthetics and grasping the expressions of animate life of other people. It was as if Lipps was an Antonio Salieri to would-be Mozarts such as Freud or Husserl (once again, except for the play (and movie) Amadeus). Using modern terms, it was as if in his own day Lipps was branded in the marketing sense as “the empathy guy.”
Between roughly 1886 and 1914 (the date of Lipps’ death) no philosopher, psychologist, or psychoanalyst could use the word “Einfühlung” without being regarded as a follower – or at least a fellow traveller – of Lipps.
In the case of the phenomenologist, the result is a sustained attack on Lipps. Edith Stein quotes Max Scheler against Lipps’ theory of “projective empathy.” Her contribution becomes a candidate deep structure of Husserl’s 5thCartesian Meditation. Husserl attempts to overcome the accusation of solipsism [there is nothing in the universe except my own consciousness] without using empathy as a mere psychological mechanism. Yet Husserl dismisses empathy, using a Kantian idiom, and “kicks it upstairs”: “The theory of experiencing someone else, the theory of so-called ‘empathy,’ belongs in the first story above our ‘transcendental aesthetics’ ” (1929/31: 146[173]). “Transcendental aesthetics” is a form of receptivity – such as receptivity to another subject. But then Husserl has to reinvent empathy in other terms calling it “pairing” and “analogical apperception.”
One thing is certain: in Husserl’s Nachlass (posthumous writings) he makes extensive use of Einfühlung in building an account of intersubjectivity. Empathy is the window into the sphere of ownness of the other individual subject. Empathy is what gives us access to the Other, with a capital “O.” Empathy enacts a “communalization” with the other. Key term: communalization (Vergemeinschaftung).
In his published writings Husserl was exceedingly circumspect in his use of the term “Einfühlung,” virtually abandoning it between Ideas (1913) and the Cartesian Meditations (1929/31). But in Husserl’s work behind the scenes empathy was moving from the periphery to the center of his account of intersubjectivity. The Nachlass volumes corresponding the Cartesian Meditations contain hundreds of references to Einfühlung, in which it is doing the work of forming a community of subjects. The anxiety of influence? The influence of Lipps? Quite likely.
I would not blame anyone – including Lanzoni – for not wanting to try to disentangle this complex of distinctions and influences of empathy in the context of phenomenology. It is not for the faint of heart.
As of this date (Q2 2019), Lipps is not translated from the German so far as I know. There is a reason for that – Lipps falls through the crack between Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Wundt. If ever there were someone of historical interest, it is Lipps.
Lipps provides an elaborate rewrite of rational psychology using a quasi-Kantian idiom without any of the empirical aspects of Wundt. Still, Lipps enjoyed considerable celebrity in his own time. So far as I know, no one has commented on the fact that Lipps in effect substitutes the term “Einfühlung” for “taste” in his aesthetics. Those wishing to engage further may usefully see Agosta 2014: “From a Rumor of Empathy to a Scandal of Empathy in Lipps in A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy: pp. 53 – 65: DOI: 10.1057/978113746534.0007.)
A third incompleteness is the role of empathy in psychoanalysis proper, which was perhaps a wilderness too desolate to reward proper scholarly engagement. Lanzoni notes: “There were also handful of psychoanalysts, trained, not surprisingly, in Vienna, who ventured to explain empathy to a popular audience. Analyst and writer Theodor Reik published Listening with the Third Ear in 1948 [….] Empathy worked like wireless telegraphy to allow one to tune in to the inchoate messages of another’s unconscious” (p. 208). Empathy as receptivity andbroadcast of messages. However, Reik was not a medical doctor, and the American Psychoanalytic Association declined to validate his credentials, leaving him as yet another voice crying in the wilderness.
Lanzoni gives Kohut another “shout out,” noting that empathy was an observational act that led the analyst to a scientific appraisal of the other person rather than one of the “sentimentalizing perversions of psychotherapy” (p. 207). Of course, Kohut moved steadily in the direction of asserting that empathy itself could be curative, though, in contrast to Rogers, mainly in a process of optimal breakdown, being ruptured and restored. Empathy breaks down, the attuned therapist acknowledges and cleans up the misunderstanding, empathy is restored, psychic (personality) structure is shifted and strengthened – thenthe patient gets better.
A fourth incompleteness is the missing paradigm of empathy as translation between different individuals and the worlds in which the individuals inhabit. Once again, this is not a criticism of Lanzoni, but simply to note that, substantial though Lanzoni’s contribution is, there is more work still to be done.
Herder was working on a complex interpretive problem of empathy, creating an entire world in all its contingencies and details in order adequately to translate a text from attic Greek into German or understand a work of art in its ancient context. Herder’s project envisions no trivial translation, and, if anything, is an application of empathy broader and bolder than what is being proposed here or in any reconstruction of Kant. According to Herder, in order to deliver an adequate translation, the translator must think and feel himself into – empathize into [sichhineinfühlen] – the world of the author or historical figure. The translator is transformed into a Hebrew, e.g., Moses, among Hebrews, a poet among bards, in order to “feel with” and “feel around” the world of the text (e.g., Herder as cited in Sauder 2009: 319):
Feeling is the first, the most profound, and almost the only sense of mankind; the source of most of our concepts and sensations; the true, and the first, organ of the soul for gathering representations from outside it . . . . The soul feels itself into the world [sichhineinfühlen] (1768/69: VIII: 104 (Studien und Entwürfe zur Plastik)) (cited in Morton 2006: 147-148).
Thinking from the point of view of everyone else is not to be confused with empathy in the Romantic idea of empathy where empathy is a truncated caricature of itself and summarily dismissed as merger, projection, or mystical pan-psychism. Nor is it clear that Herder, always the sophisticated student of hermeneutics, ever envisioned such a caricature of empathy. In any case, empathy is not restricted to the limitations of a Romantic misunderstanding of empathy as merger. Empathy as creating a context within which a translation – an empathic response – can occur stands on its own as an undeveloped paradigm (see also Agosta 2014: 36–37 (from which this text is quoted)).
Among the many strengths of Lanzoni’s book is her engagement with the many women researchers and scholars who contributed to the history of empathy: Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), who was there at the beginning with the physiological, mirroring effect of empathy in inner imitation; Edith Stein, research assistant (along with Martin Heidegger) to Edmund Husserl and her dissertation The Problem of Empathy (1917), which was influenced by and, in turn, informed Husserl’s ambivalence about making Einfühlung the foundation of intersubjectivity (community); Jessie Taft, who developed an entire model of psychotherapy, relational therapy, combining element of G. H. Mead’s social behaviorism and Otto Rank’s psychoanalytically informed approach to the emotions, which, in turn, decisively influenced Carl Rogers. A rumor of empathy is no rumor in Susan Lanzoni’s Empathy: A History. She makes empathy palpably present, and empathy lives in the work she is doing. All this and more does Lanzoni truly deliver.
References and Further Reading
Jean Decety (ed.). (2012). Empathy From Bench to Bedside(2012). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jean Decety and P.L. Jackson. (2004). “The functional architecture of human empathy,” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, Vol 3, No. 2, June 2004: 71-100.
Sigmund Freud. (1913). “Further recommendations: On beginning the treatment.” Standard Edition, Volume 12: 121-144.
Victorio Gallese. (2001). “The shared manifold hypothesis: embodied simulation and its role in empathy and social cognition.” In Empathy and Mental Illness, T. Farrow and P. Woodruff (eds.), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 448-472.
Edmund Husserl. (1905/20). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass: Erster Teil: 1905-1920,I. Kern (ed.). HusserlianaXIII. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
______________. (1913). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books, 1972.
_____________. (1918). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, tr. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.
______________. (1921/28). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass: Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928I. Kern (ed.). HusserlianaXIV. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
______________. (1929/31). Cartesian Meditations, tr. D. Cairns. Hague: Nijhoff, 1970.
_____________. (1929/35).Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität: Texte aus dem Nachlass: Dritter Teil: 1929-1935, I. Kern (ed.). HusserlianaXV. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.
Marco Iacoboni. (2007). “Existential empathy: the intimacy of self and other.” In Empathy and Mental Illness, Tom Farrow and Peter Woodruff (eds.), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 310-21.
L. Jackson, A. N. Meltzoff, and J. Decety. (2005). “How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy,” Neuroimage24 (2005): 771-779.
G. Jung. (1921). Psychological Types, tr. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
Susan Lanzoni. (2012). “Empathy in translation: Movement and image in the psychology laboratory,” Science in Context, vol. 25, 03 (September 2012): 301-327.
Vernon Lee [Violet Paget]. (1912). Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. New York: John Lane, Co.
Theodor Lipps. (1883). Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens. Bonn: Verlag des Max Cohen und Sohns.
_____________. (1897). “Der Begriff der Unbewussten in der Psychologie.” In Dritter internationaler Congress für Psychologie in München vom 4. bis 7 August 1896. München Verlag von J.F. Lehmann, 1897: 146-163.
_____________. (1909). Leitfaden der Psychologie. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelman Verlag.
_____________. (1903). Aesthetik. Volume I. Hamburg: Leopold Voss.
Lou Agosta. (2014). “From a Rumor of Empathy to a Scandal of Empathy in Lipps in A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy: pp. 53 – 65: DOI: 10.1057/978113746534.0007.
____________. (2014). A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Pivot.
Elizabeth Lunbeck. (2011). “Empathy as a Psychoanalytic Mode of Observation: Between Sentiment and Science,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and E. Lunbeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
George H. Mead. (1922). “A Behavioristic account of the significant symbol,” Journal of Philosophy, 19 (1922): 157-63.
Michael Morton. (2006). Herder and the Poetics of Thought: Unity and Diversity in On Diligence in Several Learned Languages. London and University Park: Penn State University Press.
Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empaths don’t get enough empathy
[Note: the podcast and the blog post are both about the natural empath and the challenges faced by the natural empath; but they do not map one-to-one, and podcast is not the book review, so you may want to start there.]
Empaths don’t get enough empathy.
An empath is a person who is naturally endowed with an overabundance of empathy. As I understand the term, a “natural empath” (my term, not Orloff’s) is an individual who is 
naturally endowed from birth or genetically “loaded” with a deep and extensive empathy, a hypersensitivity to the experiences of others.
This gift of empathy shows up as a mixed blessing, since the natural empath experiences the pains and sufferings of the world more intensely and deeply than do other individuals. Less charitable people redescribe the “natural empath” as someone who is “irritable” or “overly sensitive.”
Granted, the natural empath brings a deep sensitivity to the experience of human suffering and joy, the natural empath also lives through the nuances and delicate details of the experiences intensely. Too intensely?
Granted that the empath seems to be protesting, at least sometimes, that her empathy is working overtime and causing suffering—a breakdown—a book such as Judith Orloff’s The Empathy’s Survival Guide is a timely antidote. [1]
Such empaths seem to be challenged—lack skill—in tuning down their empathy. Indeed they often do not think of the possibility of such skillful tuning. They do not acknowledge such a possibility. There is nothing wrong, but there seems to be something missing. Hence, the need for Orloff’s guidance. Granted, individuals are born a certain way, and that, no doubt, can represent a challenge, but being born a certain way does not mean one always has to stay that way.
Meanwhile, the empath is experiencing a breakdown in empathic receptivity (my term, not Orloff’s). According to Orloff, instead of a well-rounded, mature, developed empathy, the empathy of the natural empath breaks down into emotional contagion (at least on a bad day). The suffering of the other person floods her or his empathy; indeed the suffering of the world inundates the individual. But that is not all, and the dominoes start falling.
Orloff gets into the details. Overwhelmed and under stress, the natural empath engages in defensive gestures that ultimately are self-defeating. These include isolating oneself, turning to alcohol or street drugs in an attempt to self-medicate, enacting other addictive behaviors (over-eating, restricting., sexual acting out), and so on. Furthermore, the chronic social stress experienced by the natural empath is a source of inflammatory disorders such as autoimmune diseases, allergies, clinical anxiety, depression, and so on, to which we are all susceptible, but the empath especially so. The result is a form of emotional burnout, compassion fatigue, empathic distress, emotional contagion, not empathy.
The empath is just being what she or he calls “empathic”; but it is not working for the individual in question. Why not? Orloff explains that due to natural endowment and/or adverse childhood experiences, the empath lacksexperiential filters and sensory inhibition. The glass is both half empty and half full. The empath is endowed with intuitive abilities that may be exceptional. However, the trouble is that the empath’s empathy lacks inhibition. He is too open to the pain and suffering of the world. Heck, even a succession of sunny days can become burdensome, though in a different way.
In contrast to the natural empath, most people are too inhibited, including being inhibited as regards their empathy. Most of us are not sufficiently in touch with our feelings and experiences in relationships.
Not so, the natural empath. The natural empath endures too much “in touchness” with feelings and experiences of the pain and suffering of others. In this one respect, empathy, the natural empath is too uninhibited. In this one particular area of openness to the suffering and pain of other people, the natural empath may usefully increase her inhibition. Consider the example of Dr Brecht in Thomas Mann’s celebrated novel Buddenbrooks, a dentist who deeply experiences the pain of his dental patients, so that he has to sit down, exhausted by the suffering of his patient, and wipe his brow after each procedure. Dentistry – perhaps not the best choice of profession for a natural empath.
A sound scientific basis exists for this a predicament. (We will shortly get to the scientifically debatable aspects of Orloff’s work.) People who are “natural empaths” have an acute sensitivity to in-bound sensations and perceptions. The function of what physiologists call “lateral inhibition” of sensory perception seems to be “lazy” and under-performing in these people. Lateral inhibition enables the nervous system to filter out the distracting background noise and intensify the relevant, salient sensations in the environment.[i]
That does not mean the natural empath should become hard-hearted or unkind, though paradoxically that is sometimes the sad result of burnout, compassion fatigue, or empathic distress. In order to overcome the breakdown of empathy, what does one actually doin order to expand or contract one’s empathic receptivity?
Orloff’s work is rich in tips and techniques for the struggling empath. Many of her best tips can be summarized in one phrase. Set firm limits and boundaries. The empathy lesson for such individuals consists in: Practice methods of “down regulating” one’s empathy. State a request; and use humor (p. 122). Remember that “No” is a complete sentence (p. 222). “Don’t try to fix others” (p. 230).
In a different category of tips and techniques are a long list of self-soothing, distress tolerance, and emotional regulation skills. Since this is self-help book, expect to encounter numerous recommendations about proper nutrition, regular exercise, sleep hygiene, and so on. All good recommendations, every one, but not specific to empathy as such. More problematic is the writing heavily weighted in the direction of “new age” interventions such as burning incense, holding healing gems, telepathic communication with plants and animals, and Epsom salt baths.
I hasten to add that I am a big advocate of Epsom salt soaking, especially in the form of sensory deprivation, though it tends to expand openness and sensitivity. More on the other “new age” interventions shortly. Empathy works to create a space of acceptance and toleration, so if the practice in question helps one regulate one’s emotions, do it.
The empath definitely can feel like he needs a survival guide – and Orloff’s work is a good place to start for the magical thinking free spirit. However, from the perspective of a rigorous and critical empathy, some real problems and issues are going to get in the way of a serious appropriation of this book, outside the confines of a weekend retreat on telepathy and intuitive energy healing.
There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies – and Orloff points at many of them. How shall I put it delicately?, Orloff’s discussion proceeds as if subtle communications are undisputed medico-scientific-therapeutic facts not compelling puzzles that should alert us to a depth of our emotions and thoughts that may usefully be plumbed in a rigorous and critical empathy.
For example, in 1779 the Viennese physician Anton Mesmer published a treatise on animal magnetism, describing a subtle physical “magnetic” fluid – analogous to but different than Newtonian gravity – that permeates the universe, connecting, men, the earth, and the heavens. The imbalance of this hypothesized fluid in the body is responsible for such emotional disorders as hysteria and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Mesmer conducted “magnetic banquets” that provided the nobles and aristocracy with substantial relief from their physical and psychosomatic symptoms.
At about the same time, one of Mesmer’s students, Viscount Jacques Maxime de Castenet de Puységur, differentiated “magnetic sleep,” which we would today call “hypnotic suggestion” and seemed to offer relief, not to the nobles, but to soldiers, workers, and peasants. The word “hypnosis” does not occur in the text, but I speculate that many of Orloff’s tips and techniques are forms of self-hypnosis. Might be worth a try.
Animal magnetism, psychic energy, libido, the energetic Chi practiced in Tai Chi, the instincts or vasanasliberated in Yogi, the mystical heat generated by the Shaman, emotional contagion, and so on, are not grounded in any conventional scientific theory or practice. So such energy work is not exactly an objective fact, and yet it is not a fiction.
Speaking in the first person plural, since Orloff has diagnosed herself as an empath, she writes: “Since everything is made of subtle energy, including emotions and physical sensation, we energetically internalize the feelings, pain, and various physical sensations of others [….] [and] are even able to connect with animals, nature, and their inner guides” (p. 6).
Any one who owns a dog or cat knows from experience that we communicate with animals – exchanging feelings and experiences. But what Orloff has in mind is much more specific and goes well beyond provocative metaphors to questionable material instantiation.
Orloff is captured by the materialist fallacy and forgets that factual reality itself is permeated with fictions and fantasies. Ignoring the power of fiction, she wants to make a compelling linguistic locution such as “psychic energy” into a fact, thereby losing its power to enable us to describe and transform feelings and behavior. As demonstrated by many of Orloff’s imaginative and ”out there” statements, an idea does not need physical or factual reality to be effective – it just has to be expressed in a performative language.
There is a fancy name for Orloff’s main fallacy – reification – making into a thing that which is otherwise an abstraction. The idea of psychic energy is a compelling one, and it does have many applications in describing the mental status, awareness, or ability to be present in a conversation, of a person in a would-be empathic relationship. But it is the name of a problem and a deep issue, not a physical reality.
For example, neurology assures us that the brain – and indeed the body – gives off an electro-magnetic field. But this is a blunt instrument enabling us to tell whether an individual is conscious or in a coma, aware of his surrounding or experiencing an epileptic seizure. Orloff does not say that perhaps someday the granularity and specificity will improve. This is not a “some day” survival guide. No, she is claiming to have that skill now in her practice and workshops – and perhaps you can get it, too, if you work with her and follow her guidance .
Ironically, Orloff’s empathy is off. Empath’s are also naturally endowed with intuition, and Orloff consistently confuses intuition and empathy. Intuition and empathy are closely related, but they are inverselyrelated. More intuition often occasions less empathy, and vice versa. Intuition is the ability to make inferences, educated guesses, based on nuanced clues that are often barely over the threshold of perception. It is the kind of thing at which Sherlock Holmes excelled, and he was a notoriously hard case.
In contrast, empathy is the ability to take a vicarious experience, based on sustained listening to another person, and process it further cognitively, resulting in an empathic response. The properly empathic empath uses his empathic receptivity as to who the other person is as a possibility. The empath takes a walk in the other’s shoes with the other’s foot size, giving back and responding to the other individual her experience in a form of language such that the other person recognizes it as her own. As the empath learns to set firm boundaries and limits, her intuition is transformed into sustainable, usable empathy in the full sense from which both she and the community benefit.
Ours is a world in which pain and suffering are abundant. This does not make the would-be empath cold-hearted or the object of moral condemnation. Indeed such people might be more willing to engage in helping behaviors such as volunteering or donating money based on cognitive appreciation of the other person’s predicament rather than the experience of vicarious suffering. It means that the natural empath should practice taking distance from his own feeling in such a way that he gets a sample or trace of the other person’s feeling without being overwhelmed.
Expressed positively, if distance (or inhibition) were a medical drug, the natural empath may usefully increase the dosage. Take more of it. However, this is at best an imperfect analogy. Recall that inhibition is what enables the average person to get results in a world that the individual subsequently experiences as causing boredom precisely because inhibition is doing such a good job of down regulating the wave of stimulations that potentially wash over the person; and likewise the natural empath, hypothetically lacking such a filter, needs to down-regulate her empathy through self-distraction and abstraction to sustain emotional equilibrium rather than over-stimulation. The natural empath is an important and engaging case, and he may actually increase his good deeds in a particular situation by contracting his empathic receptivity, one particular part of empathy.
Note that Orloff considers herself an empath. She shares childhood experiences that indicate this was so as long as she can remember. I consider myself to be one of those “neuro typical” individuals, who used simply to be called “normal” (except that we no longer know what is “normal’). I hasten to add that I have expanded my empathic capabilities through extensive practice and training discussed elsewhere.[2]
Being an empath is surely a mixed blessing – as is this book. If one can expand one’s empathy, one can also contract it. The power of the empath – and the ordinary person – consists in doing both in their proper time and place. That is an important point from the perspective of a rigorous and critical empathy, about which Orloff may usefully be more explicit. Empathy in all its forms works to create a space of acceptance and toleration, so I acknowledge Orloff’s commitment to empathy.
REFERENCES
[1]Judith Orloff, MD, 2018, The Empathy’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies forSensitive People. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc.; 263pp, $17.95.
[2]Lou Agosta, (2018), Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pairs Press.
[i]Georg von Bekesy. (1975). Sensory Inhibition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Von Bekesy was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in physiology and medicine.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Review: The Empathy Effect by Helen Riess
The force of empathy is strong with Helen Riess, MD, and her team.
In The Empathy Effect: 7 Neuroscience-based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences(with Liz Neporent, Forward by Alan Alda
(Sounds True publishing, 234pp, $22.95)) Riess lays out a program for training medical doctors (and the rest of us) to expand our empathy.
The most important point that Dr Riess makes in the concise opening three chapters is that empathy is learnable. Empathy can be taught. The empathic capabilities of the human being can be expanded by practice and training. This is the set up for the introduction and promotion of the proprietary empathy training program, “E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.”®, offered by the for profit enterprise, Empathetics, of which Riess is the CEO. The training based on intellectual property developed at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. More on that shortly.
The work contains many personal reflections amid a fully buzz-word compliant narrative on the psychology and neuroscience of empathy. Dr Riess lets slip that she was in second grade when the 1963 Community Mental Health Act set in train consequences, some planned, most unintentional, that resulted in the emptying out of the Psychiatric Institutions (“Asylums”) that served for the long-term incarceration of those diagnosed with severe mental disorders.
This means that Dr Riess was young enough to have benefited from the innovations in empathy of Carl Rogers, PhD, and Heinz Kohut, MD, who, prior to the second psychopharmacological revolution, were responsible for putting the term “empathy” on the treatment intervention map of humanistic and self psychology.
Though not explicitly discussed by Riess, for practical purposes, the “second psychopharmacological revolution” is dated from Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac(1993). It took the legs out from under virtually every form of talk therapy then in the market, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT, however, has demonstrated staying power for many reasons, not the least of which is that insurers are willing to reimburse for a dozen (or so) sessions).
Riess is conversant with Paul Ekman’s innovative research in coding (and decoding) the micro-expressions of the human face, an emotional “hot spot,” to discern what a person is “really” experiencing and feeling. Though Ekman does not use the term “empathy,” his approach to micro-expressions implies a definition of empathy distinct from that of Riess’ proprietary approach, which, in turn, aligns with David Hume’s “delicacy of sympathy and taste” (1741). If one person literally perceives a micro-expression of which another is unaware, then the one person’s “delicacy of empathy” (my term, not Hume’s) is more expansive that the other’s.
Thus, Dr Riess calls out the contributions of Rogers and Kohut such as “unconditional positive regard” and “vicarious introspection,” respectively. She appreciates the deep history of empathy (“Einfühlung”) in German aesthetics, in which empathy emerged from the projection of human feelings onto beautiful nature and art, something we humans seem to be cognitively designed to be unable to stop doing.
Riess appreciates that the distinction “empathy” is significantly different than “compassion,” “sympathy,” or “projection,” and she helps the reader distinguish among them. She “gets it” that empathy, like so many phenomena, is on a spectrum and that some people are naturally endowed with less of the capacity (think: disorders of empathy such as autism or at another extreme psychopathy) and some people have more of it (think: the natural empathy, who is acutely sensitive). Riess understands that empathy can misfire or breakdown: empathy faces obstacles and roadblocks, which, paraphrasing now, extend from sentimentalism, spoiling, codependence, projection, all the way to burnout, compassion fatigue, and empathic distress.
In every case, practice and training can expand the empathic competence of the individual and the empathic response in the face of the challenges of unempathic people and circumstances. Riess refers to turning “the dial on … emotional empathy” (p. 19), which is why training is needed. Thus, empathy is more like a dial or tuner – turn it up or down – rather than an “on-off,” all-or-nothing switch.
This brings the discussion round to the details of Riess and Empathetics, Inc.’s innovative, proprietary empathy training. She begins by citing research that demonstrates medical doctors are often trying to deliver one message and their patient’s are getting another one or nothing at all. The antidote? “E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.”®!
It turns out there is a “secret sauce,” a proprietary application of biofeedback technology. I have a report that if you, as a hospital or medical group practice, actually pay the $50K [I am making this number up] to train your medical doctors en masseat Mass General, then patented biofeedback metrics are used to judge the arousal of the subject and, hence, the effectiveness of the empathy induction. Though I am not sure, it sounds like they put the little Velcro-cuff on one of your fingers to measure the galvanic skin response.
While galvanic skin response is a blunt instrument and does not distinguish between emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, high spirits, much less subtle states such as envy or indignation, it does provide a measure of physiological stimulus and arousal. Useful. Might be worth a try.
This add something to that old joke that when a therapist meets a new patient, there are two anxious people in the room; and it is the therapist’s job to be the least anxious. It adds something, but what? Still, it might be worth a try, especially given the emotional numbness of the survivors of the boot camp approach to medical school and the sleep deprivation regime of medical residency.
Meanwhile, the technology is wrappered in a conversational training that aims at expanding the empathic capabilities of the trainee. There are seven “keys” to empathy which, of course, occur simultaneously, but have to be presented in sequence for purposes of exposition.
The empathy training works on: (1) Eye contact: the eyes are the window to the soul. Look the other person in the eye to expand connectedness, but do not stare without blinking, which communicates aggression. Riess does not mention, but might usefully have done so, that Simon Baron-Cohen[1]calls out lack of eye contact as one of the indicators of a person being on the autistic spectrum.
Training in making eye contact to expand empathy leads naturally to including: (2) Facial expressions as a whole: the human face is an emotional “hot spot,” and while humans can fake many facial expression, there are some micro-expressions that are disclosive of an emotional depth that cannot be faked.
Here the decisive innovations and work of Paul Ekman and his team are critical path. Ekman spent some seven years mapping all the muscles of the face and their contribution to the expressions of emotions. The bottom line? People can consciously control many of these muscles – but not all of them. The muscle around the eyes participate in an authentic smile, and when they do not do so, the smile is perceived as off – as fake.
Riess says: “You don’t have to be an expert to pick up on the minute micro-expressions described by Ekman and others.” Actually you do. Significant practice and training is required, and even then one may know that the other person is not being entirely straight with you, but the micro expression does notprovide any insight into the underlying motive(s). Is the motive sinister or is the person suffering from shame, guilt, or post trauma upset? One has to have a conversation. The “M” is for “facial expression” – okay, actually “muscles” or “micro expressions” in the face.
The face, in turn, leads to: (3) Body language as a whole. Amy Cuddy’s “power pose” does not increase testosterone in the saliva, but significant anecdotal evidence indicates it does expand a person’s self-confidence. In short, look at how a person is standing or sitting and attend to one’s own posture. It can reveal a lot about how one is feeling. “P” is for “body language,” or, to be exact “posture.”
Riess acknowledges the distinction between cognitive and affective empathy – top down and bottom up empathic understanding and receptivity. A future version of this training might incorporate “perspective taking” or “point of view,” in the place of the “P,” the folk definition of empathy, which is otherwise missing from the list of keys. I make no representation as to how such a gesture would require adjustment or amendment to the intellectual property or whether it is even possible to claim as one’s own property something that is arguably the proper possession of all of humanity. One thinks of Kohut’s notion of empathy as oxygen for the soul. Who owns the oxygen? Presumably, humanity, not Harvard.
Next (4) empathy is all about “affect” and the communication of affect. People are not born knowing the names of their emotions. We have formal training in kindergarten in naming colors and numbers. It is not too late to practice experiencing one’s emotional experience and naming it.
In a separate section, Riess calls out the disorder of “alexithymia,” inability or extreme difficulty in naming and articulating feelings. This is different than “over intellectualization,” but sometimes not by much. This is an occupational hazard of anyone who spends years in graduate or medical training, but other people are seemly hardened against experiencing their feelings due to disposition or adverse life experiences.
(5) The “tone” of voice is richly communicative. If is a person is telling what should be a sad story of loss, injury, or set back, yet the person sounds happy, then something is going on beneath the surface that warrants further inquiry. The pace, rhythm, pitch, delivery, and prosody of a statement make a big difference in its reception and processing. Not to be overlooked: “A surgeon’s voice peppered with dominance and delivered with a lower register of concern was predictive of a malpractice claims history” (p. 54). But if one is only undertaking this training to stay out of legal trouble, that is itself an indication of trouble.
(6) Listening to the whole person is the point at which the training has to go beyond the tips and techniques that have dominated this list. This one is easier said than done and may require a deep engagement with spiritual disciplines of mindfulness, Tai Chi, or a couple of years of one’s own therapy in order to be available to the other person. “H” is for listening to the whole person – and hearinghim or her – presumably within the fifteen minute encounter that is budgeted for the initial medical inquiry.
(7) Empathy without responsiveness is like a tree that falls in the forest without anyone being there. It does not make a difference. Regarding empathic responsiveness, I would have appreciated an example of giving the other person’s experience back to her in a form of words that demonstrate that one “got it” without the exchange being so explicitly compassionate.
Recognition, acknowledgement, and alignment are ways of responding that do not require agreement or altruistic intervention. Yes, of course, it is helpful to be appreciated in one’s struggle and effort, and that is different than having someone jump in and actively provide compassionate support.
By all means, if someone is bleeding, apply a tourniquet while awaiting emergency services. But here one has actually to “dial down” one’s empathy in order to be effective. The point is that both empathy and compassion are often in short supply in the world and the world needs both more compassion and expanded empathy. However, empathy and compassion are distinct.
I may have misread Dr Riess if she wants to build into the human capacity for empathy, a compassionate response – whether her own proprietary version or empathy writ large. I offer this caveat because the vast majority of the examples of empathic response she gives are instances of pro-social helping, altruism, charity, or other aspects of being a Good Samaritan.
Once again, the world needs more Good Samaritans. The world needs both more compassion and expanded empathy; but the two are distinct. The exceptions in the text to examples of compassion are largely those of being over-whelmed or nearly over-whelmed by trauma and counting one’s breaths in order to stay centered in the face of hospital emergency room style dismemberment.
The irony of this book, which promotes linking empathy to its underlying neuroscience, is that the empathy is strong but the neuroscience, weak. Since this is not a “softball review,” a few examples will make this clear.
For example: “Scientists can see the electrical impulses spread through the brain using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scanning technology” (p. 28). False.
The fMRI makes visible the blood oxygenation level data (BOLD) of between five thousand and fifty thousand neurons in its unit of measure, the voxel (depending on the variable size of the neuronal cells). The inference is: when the neurons get active, because the person is having an experience such as thinking a thought or attending to an event, then the neurons require more blood-rich oxygen to do their job.
In no way, does the fMRI monitor individual neurons or even a small number of them. The fMRI is a powerful tool for imaging soft tissue disorders, but it does not provide visibility down to the level of granularity of anything like individual neurons.
Perhaps Riess was thinking of the EEG: The spread of “electrical impulses through the brain” can indeed be monitored by an electro encephalogram (EEG), a fundamental tool for evaluating disorders of consciousness such as epilepsy and sleep disturbances, but even with an EEG the overall, high level activity of the brain is what is being monitored not individual or even small numbers of neurons.
A similar slip occurs early on: “Scientists first viewed the brains of their subjects in a brain scanner as the subjects had their fingers stuck by needle to determine the precise neurons involved in pain perception” (p. 17). Here “precise” would mean between five thousand and fifty thousand neurons, which is not my definition of “precise”. The level of granularity of the fMRI is an order of magnitude off from that required to “see” an individual neuron. Thus, fMRIs do not see or monitor mirror neurons (if they exist). Period. Once again, the fMRI does provide evidence that the parts of the brain that are busy processing experience receive enhanced blood oxygenation level data (BOLD), and that is the data captured by the fMRI.
Another problem item: “Mirror neurons are specialized brain cells in specific areas of the brain called the premotor cortex, known as the F5 area…” (p. 18). The problem is that the F5 area is part of the brain of the macaque monkey. There is no F5 area in the human brain. Thus, the battle is joined, whether mirror neurons even exist in human beings.
The neurohype around mirror neurons is well represented; but what about the alternative point of view that such an entity as a mirror neuron does not even exist in humans and that the neurological infrastructure has a different configuration and explanation?[2]
How do we advance from synchronization and mirroring (Riess’ big idea of “shared mind intelligence”) to understanding of another person or the person’s mindedness? There are several questions of representation and functional analysis between which scientists and researchers are still working to “connect the dots.” Riess represents this all as a “done deal” with the answer being “mirror neurons,” but she is oversold and fails to connect the dots.
Mirror neurons are one hypothetical explanation for such a phenomenon as “low level (empathic) affective resonance” in human beings. However, so are reflex-like mechanisms such as associations of actions, impressions, and ideas—known to the British empirical philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) as “habits” or “customary conjunctions.”
Macaque monkeys (the original subjects in the research done by Rizzolati, Gallese, and others (1996)) have a community and social order for which mirror neurons are sufficient to provide monkey interaction in the monkey community; buthuman behavior, action, and emotion involve more complex meanings, which human mirror neurons (if they exist) do notexplain—do not explain by means of language, social institutions, cultural practices, or tradition—because meaning is more than matching. As a mere mechanism of matching, mirror neurons struggle to explain the meaning created and deployed in minded actions and emotions.[3]
In humans and the human species, the macaque mirroring mechanism has been elaborated in evolutionary time into expanded behavioral, emotional, and cognitive capabilities useful for interrelating in significantly more complex human communities. Once prehistoric humans acquired language and used it to expand group solidarity in building communities with tools, art, stories, religious practices, social rituals, and the description of regularities in behavior of the stars and other human beings, diverse pathways opened up for creating and communicating meanings, emotions, projects, and thoughts between individuals.
The neurohype continues as the author moves from the neurologically misleading and false to the superficial. Using the example of addiction to alcohol: “New findings in Neuroscientific studies have redefined addiction from a condition of flawed character to a model of biology and disease. We now know that the brains of people who become addicted are different from those who do not” (p. 174). The brains of people who study French are different than those who do not, so we are on thin ice here in terms of a compelling analogy or contribution.
The good news? If a person has a disease such as pneumonia, modern medicine can cure him even if he is in a coma. That is not the case with the “disease” of addiction. In contrast, overcoming addiction requires the participation of heart and mind – and conscious commitment. The choice between a “moral flaw” and “neuroscience” is a false one once any physical dependency on the abused substance has been attenuated.
Riess recommends the empathic practice of perspective taking is key to shifting out of addictive stuckness – and gives a “shout out” to the program at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation; and, no doubt, getting a good listening is highly beneficial to any person, including addicts. However, the contribution of empathy is unwittingly weakened by making it seem like empathy is the answer to overcoming the conflict between the nucleus accumbens, a pleasure center in the brain, and the frontal lobe responsible for decision making.
This brings us to the mereological fallacy, which is pervasive in Riess as indeed in many works of this kind. The mereological fallacy attributes the function of the whole to the part (and vice versa). Brains are a part of a person; and neurons are a part of the brain. Brains are all about neurons; and, in so far as neurons are a necessary condition for the functioning of the embodied person, persons are neurons “all the way down.” But the neurons then start generating phenomena such as consciousness, meaning, language, intentions, joint intentionality, personality, community, and culture.
Thus, social neuroscience is born. Yet brains do notthink; people think. Brains do not express emotions; people express emotions. Brains do not intend this-or-that; people intend this-or-that. Brains do not become addicts; people become addicted. Brains do not empathize; people empathize. The mereological fallacy is a growth industry in social neuroscience. My brain made me do it? Hmmm. Human choice and commitment suggests your brain was definitely participating, but it is far from the whole narrative. The task is to avoid or contain the mereological fallacy, even while allowing social neuroscience to make its contributions in the areas of its strengths. This has not happened in this text.
Another problem? The number of variables changing simultaneously for a person lying still in a fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine is large, very large. What worries me is that in an attempt to capture a response in the brain to interesting events experienced by the subject, the researchers, including Helen Riess, have created a brain in a vat. The vat is the fMRI.[4]
What then do brains do when viewed in an fMRI? They “light up.” They discharge neuro-correlates of consciousness (NCCs) in patterns of activation, as indicated in the form of blood oxygenation level data. The empathy circuit “lights up” when people lie back and view “empathy cues,” “empathy triggers,” or “empathy inducers.” We enjoy punishing cheaters—when apprehended and subjected to sanctions, the nucleus accumbens—a pleasure center of the brain—“lights up.” It gets busy. Empathic cruelty? Of course, there are many things that cause the nucleus accumbensto light up, implying the hazards of backwards inference. If it doesn’t light up, you are dead, or in serious neural trouble.
Nevertheless, in spite of weakness in the main selling point promoted in the subtitle and that of which the author is most proud – neuroscience – the force of empathy is strong in this text. If one can survive the neurohype of Part I, the reader is rewarded in Part II – presumably the nucleus accumbens is lighting up like a Christmas tree at this point (but so what?) – with applications of empathy to early child development, education, the hazards of social networking, art and literature as ways of expanding empathy, leadership and politics (and the lack of empathy in them), tough issues in mental illness, criminality, sexual identity, and so on, as well as the benefits of empathy for self-soothing, distress tolerance, and emotional regulation.
Now take matters up several levels from neurotransmitters to two human beings interacting in a conversation in a would-be community. Though Riess does not explicitly say it, the solution to the limited empathy of parochial, biased in-group thinking and behavior is straight-forward: expanded empathy. The person on the street thinks of empathy as an “on off” switch. “On” for the in-group. “Off” for everyone else – the “out group.”
However, practice and training enable a person to relate to empathy as a dial or tuner that can be adjusted to the situation. If I am experiencing empathic distress, dial empathy down. If I just do not “get” the other person, dial the empathy up. This does not come naturally to most people – so, once again, the case is made for practice and training, including Riess’ particular solution.
As a critical reader, I would have appreciated a statement that many ways are available to learn and practice empathy. Every mother, parent, teacher, business person with customers, doctor with patients, therapist with clients practices empathy on a good day and already knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Thus I imagine Riess saying: “While you, dear reader, do not need a psychiatrist to tell you about empathy [whose training regime since the early 1990s has overwhelmingly consisted in psychopharmacology], nevertheless let me tell you about the advantages of my proprietary way offered by my company Empathetics.” Perhaps Dr Riess thought such a statement was implied, and I can appreciate that point of view, but I still would have welcomed the clarification that it is not the only empathy game in town.
In a separate communication (10/31/2019), Helen Riess wrote to me: “…[P]art of empathy training is modeling respect for others in the field of empathy education, research ad [sic] training.” Agree. Respect, dignity, empathy, and related belong on a short list of phenomena, which, when the person does not believe she is receiving them, the person tends to get stressed, angry, even enraged. Sounds like the individual in question could use expanded empathy.
I hasten to add that, to her great and unconditional credit, Riess is decisively in action against the appalling scandal that empathy peaks in the third year of medical school (Hojat 2009; see also Halpern 2000) and that since the 1990s psychiatric training has overwhelming emphasized psychopharmacology. Meanwhile, the rate of the disabled mentally ill has doubled between 1987 and 2007 and is now six times the rate as in 1955.[5]Hmmm.
In the final ten pages of her work, Dr Riess calls out the “cytokine theory of depression” (and related mental disorders). I assert that she ought to have begun the book with it.
The cytokine theory of depression (see Maes 1995, 1999) is the approach that emerged in the mid 1990s – about the same time that Prozac was disrupting mourning and melancholy paradigms of mental illness with its serotonin chemaical imbalance theory of depression – that emphasizes the role of chronic social stress (divorce, finances, business travel, bullying bosses, misbehaving teenagers, and so on) in kindling long-term inflammation of major organ systems resulting in “sickness behavior.”
Such sickness behavior looks a lot like major depression yet, at least initially, it lacks the melancholic, negative self-talk. Riess highlights treatment options – and life style adjustments – such as mindfulness, yoga, Tai Chi, exercise, diet, alone and in combination, that emphasize stress reduction, self soothing, emotional regulation, and empathy for oneself.
Naturally, the brain participates in all these activities, but reducing stress and expanding distress tolerance through empathy is also a function of the adrenal-hormonal system. It’s just that neurology has the buzz this season, not endocrinology or psychotherapy. Never was it truer that empathy guides us in engaging with and treating the human being as a whole – not a mere amygdala hijack or frontal lobe disinhibition. So the stress reduction paradigm, which is at right angles to and arguably does not contradict the neurotransmitter imbalance paradigm, was pushed to the margins and hardly heard of again until recently (e.g., Segerstron and Miller 2004).
Perhaps after the boot-camp of medical school, the rigors of residency, and the corporate transformation of American medicine (relying as it does on “hitting the numbers”), empathy is at such a low water mark in the medical doctor’s consciousness that “tips and techniques” are the best we can do. Indeed the “H” stands for “listening to the whole person and hearingthe individual,” so the intention is present.
Yet using empathy to “dial down” stress, aggression, and narcissistic injuries, does not map in any obvious way to “E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.”®, which becomes a pair of golden hand-cuffs for the trainer. The ultimate irony is that the only obstacle in the way of expanding empathy – the distinction, not the propriety gimmick – is precisely “E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.”®.
References
Agosta, Lou. (2018). Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pairs Press.
Decety, Jean, Chenyi Chen, Carla Harenski, and Kent A. Kiehl. (2013).An fMRI study of affective perspective taking in individuals with psychopathy: Imagining another in pain does not evoke empathy, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2013; 7: 489; published online 2013 September 24. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00489.
Halpern, Jodi. (2001). From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hojat, Mohammadreza, M. J. Vergate, K. Maxwell, G. Brainard, S.K. Herrine, and G. A. Isenberg. (2009). The devil is in the third year: A longitudinal study of erosion of empathy in medical school, Academic Medicine84 (9): 1182–1191.
____________________, Daniel Z. Louis, Fred W. Markham, Richard Wender, Carol Rabinowitz, and Joseph S. Gonnella. (2011), Physicians empathy and clinical outcomes for diabetic patients, Academic MedicineMar, 86(3): 359–64. DOI: 10.1097ACM.0b013e3182086fe1.
Hume, David. (1741). Of the delicacy of taste and passion in Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill: 1965.
Hickok, Gregory. (2014). The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: W. W. Norton.
Maes, M. (1995). Evidence for an immune response in major depression: A review and hypothesis, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmaclogy and Biological Psychiatry19: 11–38.
_______. (1999). Major depression and activation of the inflammatory response system, Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology461: 25–46.
Riess, Helen. (2013). The power of empathy, TEDxMiddlebury: https://www.youtube .com /watch?v=baHrcC8B4WM [checked on 03/23/2017].
____________, John M. Kelley, Gordon Kraft-Todd, Lidia Schapira, and Joe Kossowsky. (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: https://doi.org/10. 1371/journal.pone.0094207.
____________, 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; 27(10): 1280–1286. DOI: 10.1007/s11606-012-2063-z.
Rizzolatti, G., L. Fadiga, V. Gallese, and L. Fogassi. 1996. Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions, Cognitive Brain Research 3: 131–41.
Satel, Sally and Scott O. Lilienfeld. (2013). Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. New York: Basic Books (Perseus).
Segerstrom, Suzanne C. and Gregory E. Miller. (2004). Psychological stress and the human immune system: A meta-analytic study of 30 years of inquiry, Psychol Bulletin. 2004 July; 130(4): 601–630.
FOOTNOTES
[1]Simon Baron-Cohen. (1995). Mindblindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[2]For example, see Gregory Hickok. (2014). The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: W. W. Norton. For further debunking of the neurohype see Decety et al. 2013, Vul et al. 2009, and Satel and Lilienfeld 2013.
[3]The following paragraphs are adapted from the section “Your brain on empathy” in Lou Agosta 2018: 171–172.
[4]Presumably this is notwhat the late Hilary Putnam meant when he wrote his prescient article of the same name, since the fMRI had not yet been invented, but who knows for sure? See Hilary Putnam. (1981). Brains in a vat, in Hilary Putnam. (1981). Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–21.
[5]Robert Whitaker, (2010), The Anatomy of an Epidemic. New York: Broadway Paperbacks (Random House), 2010: p. 7.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Top Ten Empathy Lessons: Trends for the New Year 2018
Here are Empathy Lessons for the New Year ahead. You know what would really interest me? To hear from you (dear reader) what is your empathy lesson? 
Whether inspired by this list or your own experience over the winter holiday or living into the future: what is your empathy lesson? (My contact data is at the bottom of this post. Let me hear form you.) Meanwhile, my top ten (10) trends in empathy lessons for the New Year 2018—this is a count down list (think: Letterman)—are as follows:
- Empathy deserts grow; empathy lessons struggle to get traction: Under late modern digital global capitalism, empathy is a means, not an end. Capitalism organizes empathy along with workers and production processes. Yet many workplaces are empathy deserts in spite of the appearance of mangers with published “open door” policies.[i] Key term: empathy desert.
One’s humanity withers in the desert. So if you find yourself feeling dehumanized by your job, maybe you work in one of those, regardless of the prevailing rhetoric.
Instead of the industrial supervisor shouting orders to his workers, who curse under their breath and conform, managers employ therapeutic strategies to create a convivial environment of trust, relatedness, sociality, loyalty, and care. Happy people sell. Happy people write more software code with fewer bugs. Happy people who happen to be medical doctors see more patients an hour for more hours. Happy people deliver projects on time, on budget. Value creation in the late capitalist economy is a function of the exchange of emotion and empathy.[ii]
Yet the boss is not necessarily a paragon of empathic understanding. On the contrary, it’s “by the numbers,” “get your numbers,” and if you don’t get your numbers, your days are numbered. And if you don’t have any numbers, that itself is a bad sign, and we will find some for you. Relations with coworkers and superiors can be Machiavellian—and conflict-laden. The guy who said, “We don’t need more data; we need expanded empathy” was counseled out. Truth be told, successful business requires data and empathy; and both have their uses.
Today empathy is trending. Everyone is “talking the talk” of empathy. What could be better than empathy? But “walking the walk” of empathy arouses resistances, which are a major point of engagement in a similarly titled chapter.
The empathy lesson? Coming from empathic understanding—identify upsets and breakdowns. Do so in the spirit of expanding relatedness and community. Identify the unfulfilled expectation, thwarted commitment, or undelivered communication. Restore what is missing, especially if it is empathy, to complete the expectation, commitment, or communication.
In other words, clean up your own act: if you owe something to another person—whether money, an overdue library book, a promised email response, or a borrowed lawn mower—arrange to pay it back. If you have lied, acknowledge the lack of integrity to the other person; and take action to repair the damage done. Asking forgiveness does not just mean the slate is wiped clean and the perpetrator is free to commit boundary violations again. It means the person asking forgiveness tells the truth about what he (or she) did. It means being prepared to deal with the cost and impact of one’s inauthenticities and integrity outages.
This creates a clearing for success with empathy by cleaning up inauthenticities: Take action assertively to repair disruptions in relatedness and communication by acknowledging your contribution to the disruption. A person cannot relate authentically—that is, empathically—to people while being inauthentic in other areas of his or her life. People have to compartmentalize in order to survive the day; but empathy is the one area where compartmentalization is least effective. The inauthenticity around empathy in one particular area tends insidiously to spread to other areas.
Challenging as it may be, creating a foundation of authenticity is actually the first step in recovering and expanding one’s empathy, one’s power in relation to empathy, and the authentic relatedness that empathy makes possible.
Absent such a foundation, a person is simply not ready to engage empathically. Even if readiness was established up front, it can be lost along the way. Go back to step one. Those who are unwilling to do so may drop off at this point. Empathy is simply too hard; but any other approach is built on sand. No matter how good the following recommendations may be, if one does not establish a foundation of authenticity for empathy, a clearing for success, one is putting buttercream frosting on a mud pie.
- Empathy, capitalist tool: “CEO” now means “Chief Empathy Officer”: You heard it here first, and not for the last time. One can already hear the push back. This conversation shows up like another responsibility with which the head of the organization is tasked. As if she did not already have enough alligators snapping at various parts of her anatomy, now “CEO” no longer means “Chief Executive Officer,” but “Chief Empathy Officer.”
The things that cause people to excel at getting business results (beating the competition, solving technical problems, dealing with legal issues) do not necessarily expand one’s empathy.
Never is empathy needed more in business than when it seems there is no time for it. Building a business, growing a market, innovating in products and services, are all about building teams, networks of people, and communities. Empathy is at the foundation of community. Therefore, empathy is the foundation of business. Though business leaders hate to be tasked with yet another job, empathy has to start at the top if it has any hope of percolating up from the bottom. “CEO” now means “chief empathy officer.”
When I ask executives what is the budget in the organization for empathy training and empathy consulting, they usually look at me with a blank stare or just say “zero.” However, when I ask what is the budget to reduce conflict, enhance teamwork, innovate and improve productivity, then they see possibility and make it a priority to obtain a budget.
At the risk of over-simplification, empathy training consists in surfacing the resistances to empathy, the pervasive fear and cynicism (and so on) in the organization that lurks just beneath the surface. Interpret the resistance: “It is perfectly understandable that you would be cynical, given what you have been through, but that is not who you (we) authentically are.”
- Empathy’s “dark side” strikes back: “Machiavellian empathy” emerges as a growing threat to empathic empathy. When those in the executive suite are surveyed, some 60% of executives believe that their organizations are empathic, whereas 24% of their employees agree.[iii] An empathy deficit?
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was famous for saying that it would be best if the leader—the Prince, in his day—was loved, but it is essential that he be feared. Machiavelli never actually said that the ruling Prince must be perceived to be empathic, even as he ruthlessly wields power behind the scenes. But that is what he implied.
In the context of politics, Machiavellian empathy refers to business people and politicians who present themselves as being empathic while manipulating, spinning alternative facts, and double dealing behind the scenes. Machiavellian empathy shows up in business, too. If managers are not in touch with their empathic abilities, they are counseled to “fake it till you make it.” Most never “make it” and continue “faking it.”
Whether or not one authentically understands the experience of the other person is less relevant to the Machiavellian empath than scoring points on a check list of concerned behavior.
If the corporation were a machine, which is a well-worn but all-too-accurate metaphor, empathy would be the lubricant that keeps the various parts working together without overheating. The number of corporations that are “over heating” and “going up in flames,” with dramatic news hitting the global media, is one index of those experiencing the most severe empathy breakdowns.
The explicit symptom is predictably a revenue shortfall, but behind the headlines lurk dysfunctional relationships, cynicism, a culture of bullying and shaming, loss of authenticity, lack of leadership, and lack of empathy.
Even the cynical sales person understands the value of taking a walk in the customer’s shoes, if only to sell him another pair. The wise (and empathic) sales person understands that in any business that allows for product differentiation or distinctions in service level agreements, building a relationship with the customer is the royal road to solution selling.
Strictly speaking, Machiavellian empathy takes nothing away from empathy’s intrinsic benefits and uses. Even if one wants to present the appearance of being empathic for propaganda purposes while continuing to operate with dubious business practices the behind the scenes, reality has a way of catching up with appearances.
It is not entirely fair, but when a person with psychopathic tendencies—once again, wanton lack of respect for boundaries, cruelty to animals, and a willingness, even eagerness, to inflict pain on others—grows up in poverty, the person often runs afoul of the criminal justice system. The person ends up in prison.
In contrast, when such a person grows up in affluence and gets an education in business, the person often becomes a hard-charging, “type A personality,” and a successful executive. The person ends up in the corner office. When psychopaths go to work, or get elected to political office, the result is sometimes snakes in suits (the title of a book cited in the endnote).[iv] We observe, and not for the last time, that the things that create success in business, do not always expand our empathy.
Amazon said it was a wonderful place to work. Then the New York Times got some employees to comment on the record about “mean” behavior.[v] Uber was disrupting the disrupters and creating the Gig Economy, which supposedly set us free. Then the CEO, Travis Kapernick, got unwittingly interviewed on camera by a driver.[vi] Bullying is not just for high school kids anymore; it has always lived in the business world, too. Still, there is no guarantee that the Machiavellian empath will slip up and document his or her own inauthenticity; but it just might happen.
Is this then the ultimate cynical moment? Is this the reduction to absurdity of empathy? If empathy is about setting boundaries, where is the boundary? The limit to Machiavellian empathy is Lincoln’s famous saying, “You can’t fool all the people all the time.” Ask Travis Kapernick. Ask Bernie Madoff and Michael Milken.[vii]
- Empathic response is an act of imagination, not agreement: Positively expressed, empathic response means giving the other person back his experience in such a way that he recognizes his humanity in the experience. However, agreement is often what people want in expressing their unhappiness or describing the setbacks in life that they have experienced.
After giving an account of some dramatic encounter, the one person turns to the other with a significant pause in order for the other person to respond with a heartfelt, if not empathic, agreement and approval. One often turns to the other person to get validation that the experience conforms to one’s own preferred interpretation. One uses the spontaneous response of the other to guide how one really feels about what occurred. This does not rule out that one person is often looking in advance for a particular reaction and to “get a rise” out of the other.
The scenario is complex; and the “get a rise” is not necessarily what a gracious empathic understanding or receptivity is going to provide. “Tough love” shows the other what he does not necessarily want to confront. Sometimes so does “a rigorous and critical empathy,” specially when the latter is framed in a way that recognizes and respects the other’s struggle.
The bridge between the cynical present and an impossible-to-envision future is empathy. The empathic moment is the act of imaging a different world, a future world of expanded empathy, in which the community expands inclusively.
Different viewpoints are available with regard to one’s action, including the perspective of one’s adversaries. One forms an opinion by engaging the issue from different perspectives. One makes present to the mind the perspectives of those who are absent or even opposed. That is, one represents them. This process of representation adopts the points of view of those who have different standpoints.
Thus, empathy is closely related to what one can imagine about the other person in relationship to oneself. An empathy that does not include the other fails the definition of empathy. This especially applies when the other is at odds with oneself. It may seem like a dream; but the dream lives. The empathic response is an act of imagination.
- If you have “compassion fatigue,” maybe you are not empathic enough: It is no accident that the word “compassion” occurs in “compassion fatigue.” Could it be that people who are experiencing compassion fatigue, but claim to be in a break down of empathy, are actually in a break down of compassion?
If one is trying to be empathic, but one is experiencing compassion fatigue, maybe one is doing it wrong. Maybe one is practicing empathy “wrongly,” with inadequate skill, precision, completeness, or finesse; and one needs a tune up for one’s empathy.
One reason that empathy training programs have not worked or have had mixed results is that they train the participants in compassion, being nice, conflict resolution, baby and child care, and a number of worthy and related tasks. This is all excellent, and the use of empathic methods is making the world a better place in all these situations. So keep it up. There is nothing wrong with being nice and so on: do not be “unnice”! But paradoxically something is missing—empathy.
The empathy lesson “not more empathy, expanded empathy” indicates that if one subtracts empathy from compassion, then one gets sympathy, reaction, burnout, compassion fatigue, which end up giving empathy a bad name. Now I do not wish to give anyone a bad name, who is committed to empathy, compassion, or making a difference is overcoming human pain and suffering. On the contrary, I acknowledge and honor one and all. The battle is joined; we are all on the same side; but we want to deploy our limited resources wisely.
Expanding one’s empathy requires an engagement with one’s own inauthenticities around empathy.
Expanding one’s empathy requires engaging with one’s own resistance to empathy. Until we engage with our own resistance to empathy we will remain stuck in our blind spots, breakdowns, burnouts, and compassion fatigue. In order to expand one’s empathy, one needs to engage with applications of empathy in the tough cases—stress and well being, bullying, business, and gender and romance. Engaging with these implementations is essential to consolidating the mastery of one’s practice of empathy—practice, practice, practice.
- Empathy and humor are closely related, and converge even further: Both empathy and humor create and expand community. Both empathy and humor cross the boundary between self and other. However, empathy crosses the boundary between individuals with respect, recognition, appreciation, and acknowledgement, whereas humor does so with aggression, sexuality, or a testing of community standards.
Here “aggression” includes language that people would find insulting. Therefore, be careful. The aggression or sexuality in question is usually presented in such a way that it creates a tension by violating social standards, morals, or conventions to a degree that causes stress short of eliciting a counter-aggression against the teller of the joke.
Substituting humor for empathy can work in some situations, but in others it can create a breakdown in the would-be relationship. You know how the more objectionable the joke, the funnier it is?
The result is either the release of tension through laughter or a failed joke and a shameful, if not scandalous, situation on the part of the joker. Indeed when the violation of the social convention, moral, or standard is such that the target of the joke experiences a dignity violation, then the joke arouses anger or even rage, not laughter. The caution flag is out.
Ground zero of cynicism and humor is Scott Adam’s Dilbert cartoon. It is wickedly funny because it expresses more than a grain of truth about dysfunctional, anti-empathic organizations.
In one classic example, the pointy-haired boss says that the organization will assign job functions based on the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. For those readers who may not know, the MBPT is the famous test that distinguishes introversion and extroversion, thinking and feeling, and related categories. The boss continues: “For those of you who do not have a personality, one will be assigned by the human resources department.”[viii] I must say that I am deeply ashamed of myself; I can’t stop laughing.
In humor, stress and psychological tension are created by violating a standard—in this case against insulting the lack of personality of the corporate cog—and then the stress is released in laughter by the mechanism of the joke such as a pun, double meaning, or violation of expectations.
The more objectionable the joke is, the funnier it is. The put down, “If you do not have a personality, one will be assigned by HR” is indeed wickedly funny; but it is also deeply debunking of the corporate world (and shaming of the individual), in which people come to feel like a gear in an inhuman mechanism.
After a day at the office, people often feel as if their personality had been erased.
So a trace of empathy for the long suffering inhabitants of corporate cubicles does come to the surface after all. That is what Scott Adam’s Dilbert longs to express. It is a common place in the corporate world that people function as replaceable cogs in a well-oiled machine. Therefore, in this case, the cartoon is an example of how not to expand empathy. Cynicism and shame drive out empathy; and driving out cynicism and shame create a space into which empathy can expand spontaneously.
How then does one drive out cynicism, shame, denial, and so on? The short answer is by calling it out, acknowledging it, interpreting it, and offering an alternative point of view. Not “alternative facts,” which have come to mean “spin” and “deception”; but an alternative perspective. It is cynicism versus empathy.
Empathy is the foundation of community in a very deep way, for without empathy we would be unable to relate to other people. In being empathic with another person, one creates a community with the other person; likewise, with humor. Humor creates a community among the audience and joke teller as the tension is dispelled in the laughter. For more on creating community through jokes, I recommend Ted Cohen’s Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, which also contains some really funny jokes.[ix]
- Train and develop empathy by overcoming the obstacles to empathy: People want to know: Can empathy be taught? People complain and authentically struggle. People say, “I just don’t get it—or have it.” The short answer is: Yes, empathy can be taught.
What happens is that people are taught to suppress their empathy. People are taught to conform, follow instructions, do as they are told. We are taught in first grade to sit our seats and raise our hand to be called on and speak. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is good and useful at the time.
No one is saying, “Jump up and run around screaming” (unless it is recess!). But compliance and conformity are a growth industry and arguably the pendulum has swung too far from the empathy required for communities to work effectively for everyone, not just the elite and privileged at the top of the pyramid. The lesson? If a person can contract his or her empathy, the person can also expand it.
Now do not misunderstand this: people are born empathic, 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 math 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 that rule-making and the drum beat of compliance seem to be growing by leaps and bounds.
Teaching empathy consists in overcoming the obstacles to empathy that people have acquired. When the resistances are overcome, then empathy spontaneously develops, grows, comes forth, and expands. That is the training minus all the hard work.
The hard work? Remove obstacles to empathy such as dignity violations, devaluing language, gossip, shame, guilt, egocentrism, narcissism, lack of integrity, inauthenticity, hypocrisy, making excuses, finger pointing, jealousy, envy, put downs, being righteous, stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, cynicism, denial, competing to be the biggest victim, and injuries to self-esteem—and empathy spontaneously expands, comes forth, develops, blossoms. Yes, empathy can be taught.
- Health insurers promise empathy, do not deliver, and continue to collect monopoly rents. The empathy gap widens. Health insurers maintain a firm grip on the market for empathy-related “behavioral health” services without actually providing any. This is the only candidate trend from the last two years that I am repeating, since it is still accurate but a work in progress—and, unfortunately, picking up even more speed, going in the wrong direction. The Affordable Health Care Act (“Obamacare”)—reportedly to be terminated with extreme prejudice at any moment—promised to equalize benefits for medical benefits such as annual physical health checkup (including $800 worth of blood work) with mental health services such as psychotherapy. At the risk of being cynical, I don’t know if the reader has tried to collect lately or services rendered. The war stories, pretexts for nonpayment, and simple violations of their own rules—e.g., timely response—by insurers continue to mount. One feels a certain dissatisfaction with the lack of solutions. What to do about it? In spite of claims to the contrary, the recommendation from insurers seems to be: “But your majesty, the people have no mental health benefits. Then let them pay cash! And then let them eat cake.”
2. Empathy is the secret sauce in sexual satisfaction: Empathy is the new love. It is what people fundamentally desire – to be gotten for who they authentically are. When one person’s desire aims at the other person’s desire, then desire begets desire. The desire of the other’s desire is precisely the empathic moment. Sex goes better with empathy, providing access to the kind of kindling that transports the couple into a raging conflagration. The empathy lesson is that one takes off one’s inhibitions with one’s clothes, undressing one another.
While love is a many splendid thing, empathy is what is required to get off with another person. The “secret sauce” is when one partner gives permission to be turned on, and the other partner is inspired to accommodate. Then the Hollywood cinema cliché of sky rockets and fire works fits the moment. The recipe is about facilitating and sustaining such a state to create a peak experience . The secret sauce is empathy.
Desire unleashes a runaway process of desire between the partners that works something like the Dutch tulip craze of the 1630s, only in sexual favors. Like a speculative market bubble, desire becomes desirable because it is desired. But does such “irrational exuberance” in desire then threaten the entire relationship between the partners the way the housing bubble threatened the world economy? Certainly there are risks to the relationship in unleashing a sexual inferno. It requires a certain ego strength to let go and be vulnerable. In the case of sexuality versus economic bubbles, organism and ultimately pregnancy tend to moderate the runaway process. Meanwhile, the partners are willing to try to read the clues and do what the other wants the partner to do to the other person. A synchronization of desires occurs. The other can see through one to one’s desire. One can see through the other to the other’s desire. That’s the empathy lesson. This is starting to sound a lot like empathy.
And THE number one empathy lesson trending in 2018 (drum roll, please):
- Empathy is the ultimate anti-bullying antidote: Bullying is abroad in the land. Bullying is all about violating the boundaries between the bully and the target—personal, physical, emotion; empathy is all about establishing and reestablishing boundaries between self and other. Empathy is the antithesis of bullying. Wherever empathy lives, bullying has no place. When you think about it for two seconds, so is parenting, teaching, and being a traffic cop—all about setting boundaries.
At least initially, establishing boundaries is not about having empathy for the bully; it is about being firm about damage control and containing the bullying. Ultimately the bully benefits even as the community is protected from his perpetrations; but more in the manner of a three year old child, who, having a tempter tantrum, benefits from being given a time-out in such a way that he cannot hurt himself or others.
Kids in middle school have usually developed some empathy for those on the “inside” of their peer group. The developmental milestone for them is to be expand their definition of “inside” and widen the circle of caring, making more of “them” into “us.” The many different kinds of bullies, bullying, and possible responses on the part of children, students, teachers, parents, and administrators will not be repeated here. Suffice to say: if it’s mean, intervene.
Empathy versus bullying is receiving much needed attention in middle and high schools; but it is also a significant factor in business and politics.
Bullying is not just for high school “bad boys” anymore. In politics, Mr. T. returns tit for tat in a verbal salvo against “Little Rocket Man [LRM].” LRM man remains true to his name and fires a real missile test across Japan in the direction of the central pacific. Under a future scenario that is not hard to envision, a miscalculation leads to a fail safe situation, which does not fail safely. A nuclear exchange escalates, resulting in burning cities that put enough particulate matter into the upper atmosphere to create a twenty-five year long “nuclear winter,” causing a species extinction. The human species ends; it was just a bad idea anyway. Come on, guys, we can do better than that. This is not an inevitable outcome.
However, a word of caution: it seems really to be the case that LRM would rather see the people of the North eat grass rather than give up the nuclear weapons. These people might have something to say about that at some point, or maybe not. But if shooting starts, head for the bomb shelter, it will be too late for empathy to make a difference, except perhaps much later on for the survivors, if there are any.
Meanwhile, the empathy lesson: empathy deescalates anger and rage: When people do not get the empathy to which they feel entitled, they start to suffocate emotionally. They thrash about emotionally. Then they get enraged. The response? De-escalate rage by acknowledging the break down—it seems you really have not been treated well—clean up the misunderstanding, and restore the empathic relatedness. Empathy does many things well. One of the best is that empathy deescalates anger and rage.
Without empathy, people lose the feeling being alive. They tend to “act out”—misbehave—in an attempt to regain the feeling of vitality that they have lost. Absent an empathic environment, people lose the feeling that life has meaning. When people lose the feeling of meaning, vitality, aliveness, dignity, things “go off the rails.” Sometime pain and suffering seem better than emptiness and meaninglessness, but not by much. People then can behave in self-defeating ways in a misguided attempt to awaken a sense of aliveness.
“Empathy is oxygen for the soul” is a metaphor. But a telling one. When people do not get empathy—and a short list of related things such as dignity, common courtesy, respect, fairness, humanity—they feel that they are suffocating—emotionally.
People act out in self-defeating ways in order to get back a sense of emotional stability, wholeness and well-being—and, of course, acting out in self-defeating way does not work. Things get even worse. One requires expanded empathy. Pause for breath, take a deep one, hold it in briefly while counting to four, exhale, listen, speak from possibility.
The empathy lesson? Set boundaries. Look for balance. Be responsible. Own it. Empathic parenting is about boundary setting. With older children, “first you do your homework, then you go to the mall (or play a computer game).” Just maybe there is a lesson here for international relations too. A good fence makes for good neighbors. But there is a gate in the fence. And over the gate is a sign that says “Empathy.”
NOTES / REFERENCES / CONTACT DATA / COPYRIGHT
[i] Roman Krznaric. (2104), quoted in Belinda Parmar.(2014). The Empathy Era: Woman, Business and the New Pathway to Profit, London: Lady Geek: 91. Parmar does not cite a page in Krznaric, and I have not been able to find it so far.
[ii] Tristam Vivian Adams. (2016). The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organises Empathy. London: Repeater Books: 56–77.
[iii] William Gentry. (2016). Rewards multiply with workplace empathy, Businessolver: http:// www.washingtonpost.com/ sf/brandconnect/businessolver/ rewards-multiply-with-workplace-empathy/ [checked on 03/31/2017].
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld. (2015). Inside Amazon: Wrestling big ideas in a bruising workplace: The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions. The New York Times, August 15, 2015: https://nyti.ms/1TFqcOG [checked on June 30, 2017].
[vi] Alynia Selyuk. (2017). Uber CEO apologizes over video of dispute with Uber driver. National Public Radio (NPR) All Things Considered: http://www.npr.org/2017/03/01/5179 88142/uber-ceo-apologizes-over-video-of-dispute-with-driver [checked on July 2, 2017].
[vii] According to Forbes: Milken made his billions in leveraged buyouts in the 1980′s, only to be sent to prison in 1989. He pleaded guilty to securities fraud after the government agreed to drop criminal charges against his younger brother, Lowell, and then served 22 months. The one-time Drexel Burnham Lambert executive has charted an entirely different course ever since and is a well known philanthropist.: https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2012/10/26/billionaires-and-former-billionaires-who-have-spent-time-behind-bars/#6b7b75 b32107. Meanwhile, more breaking news, as this article is being written, some 49 men stand accused of sexual misconduct in various workplaces extending from Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood production company (from which he was fired) through venture capital firms to restaurant businesses: https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2017/11/10/us/men-accused-sexual-misconduct-weinstein.html?_r=0. The problem is that, while it is good that this abuse is finally coming out, it has been hidden in plain for years and years. See Harry Markopolis’ (2010) statement in a different context above, “no one would listen” [also the title of his book]. Where is Lord Acton when we need him? He is the one who said: “Power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
[viii] Scott Adams. (1996). The Dilbert Principle. New York: Harper Business.
[ix] Ted Cohen. (1999). Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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