Home » Posts tagged 'empathy'

Tag Archives: empathy

Image of the Greek hero Ajax falling on his sword - suicide - as he is caught in a double bind between his heroic narcissistic pride and his narcissistic rage, which gets turned against himself

Empathy and Greek Tragedy – Connecting the Dots

September 27, 2025 2:02 pm / Leave a comment

I can hear the laughter at the back of the auditorium – and indeed in the first row – a new definition of tragedy? You have got to be kidding!? Okay, maybe George Steiner (1963) or Christoph Menke (2009) already covered it – so send me the reference – in which case I modify my assertion to “an aspect of tragedy that may usefully be highlighted, foregrounded, and made the subject of further inquiry.”

If one thinks about the characters in tragic dramas such as Oedipus, Creon, Agamemnon, Antigone, Jocasta, Orestes, and Electra, they do not seem to be particularly cowardly or slavish. The representation in theatre of the latter qualities of cowardice, etc. caused Plato to ban (“censor”) theatre from his ideal city-state in The Republic; but maybe something was lost in translation and cowardice is really hamartia (the fatal flaw(s) of the tragic hero).

What does represent a common thread is that the protagonists (“heroes”) are survivors who become perpetrators (or vice versa) and they are brought low not only by the usual theatrical information asymmetries, boundary violations, and fatal acts of revenge, but by moral trauma. Moral trauma is someone who seems to have no other choice than to commit an integrity or boundary violation.

What has been overlooked is the role of moral trauma. Moral trauma is defined as the distressing emotional, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to (including participation in) events in which a person’s moral boundaries are violated and in which individuals or groups are gravely injured, killed, or credible threat thereof is enacted (i.e., individuals are physically traumatized) (Litz et al 2009; Shay 2014).) The agent, is put in a double-bind, in which, whatever the action, innocent people are going to suffer and die.

The double bind is created in diverse was. The double bind is created by information asymmetries (Oedipus does not know his biological parents, etc.); by conflicting laws of the family versus political authority in which Antigone is caught; by a curse in the form of sexual desire on the part of Phaedra for her step son, which, when revealed, even as a fantasy, represents a proposed boundary violation so immoral that the suggestion as thought itself requires punishment; by the commitment to a life of crime in support of Jason on the part of Medea that, once unleashed, is unstoppable (“might be hung for stealing a sheep as well as a lamb”); whether the best way to right a wrong inflicted on someone (Philoctetes), whose good will has now turned out to be indispensable, is to tell the aggrieved party the truth and risk rejection or try to trick the party into cooperating thereby performing a further perpetration; not knowing the future, an escaped slave about to be returned to slavey kills her baby to prevent her from being raised in slavey and is thwarted from then killing herself (Morrison’s Beloved). More pedestrianly, one decided on a last-minute change of plans and did not get on the airplane—or trolley car—that crashed–or, due to a last-minute change of plans, one did. The irreparability and irreversibility of catastrophe is a feature of a world infused with contingency. In literature this has a name. It is called “tragedy.” In such a world, radical empathy is an indispensable constituent in the project of finding one’s way forward through the fog of suffering to reconciliation and transfiguration of empathic distress into community and the possibility of fulfillment and satisfaction.

On further background for those who may need a review of the narrative, Oedipus is a survivor who is abandoned as a baby to die by his biological father but is rescued by a kindly shepherd, who foster him. Survivor. Learning of the Oracle that he will kill his father, Oedipus leaves home and unwittingly meets the biological father on his path of exile. An altercation occurs and Oedipus unwittingly kills the biological father, thus fulfilling the Oracle; but more significantly, the survivor now becomes a perpetrator. In the case of Antigone, the “double bind” is that she must either violate the laws of the family that require one bury one’s next-of-kin or violate the laws of the city that require one be a team player and defend the home-team against it’s enemies (who also happen to be next of kin). In moral trauma one is caught between a rock and a hard place – the devil and the deep blue sea.

Clytemnestra and her boyfriend, Aegisthus. may be more problematic cases—and they initially show up like villains in their adultery and homicide and treachery. Yet Clytemnestra is a survivor. Agamemnon killed Clytemnestra’s first husband Tantalus and then married her, the distinction “consent” apparently not being readily available at the time. Tough crowd. Agamemnon had adulterous adventures while he was away at war, but his wife, Clytemnestra, firmly oppressed in the patriarchy, should not? This leads naturally, by way of free association, to the equally tough case of Medea. Medea is a kind of monster, though, I assert contra Plato, not a particularly cowardly one. One wonders what tragic spectacles Plato was attending. Even if these spectacles were the same ones with which the tradition makes one familiar, the argument can be made that denial is not the only and perhaps not even the optimal method of educational. Even if one swallows all the anachronistic refinements of a society built on slavery prohibiting the representation of slavery as subversive (of course it is, but for different reasons), there have still got to be better educational methods than denial.

The confrontation with errancy (hamartia) on the part of individuals with whom one can imagine identifying—perhaps in one’s wildest dreams—and taking their place, leads to being grabbed by the throat and having one ‘s heart ripped out in pity and fear. The “fatal flaw” is usually not thought of as being both a survivor and a perpetrator, but it turns out to mean that too. That is the educational moment—that is the training—that is the therapy, if one may say so. It is rather like a spa treatment where one takes the healing waters and then drinks a double dose of a powerful purgative. One has to hold one’s nose as one’s bowels are loosened. Catharsis is different than preparation for a colonoscopy, but perhaps not by much. It is not a rational process—it is an educational and therapeutic one. The monstrous has an unexpected healing power (The Birth of Tragedy quoted in Schmidt (2001: 218))—if one survives the literary encounter with it in the literary artwork without succumbing to empathic distress.

This points immediately to Nietzsche’s answer to Plato’s banning of tragic poetry from the just city (the Republic), namely, that humans cannot bear so much truth (1883: §39):

Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence, that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could barely still endure, or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

And again, with admirable conciseness, Nietzsche (1888/1901: Aphorism 822): “We have art, lest we perish of the truth.” Here “truth” is not a semantic definition such as Davidson’s (1973, 1974) use of Tarksi (loosely a correspondence between language and world), but the truth that life is filled with struggle and effort—not fair—that not only are people who arrive early and work hard all day in the vineyard paid a full day’s wages, but so are people who arrive late and barely work also get paid a full day’s wages; that, according to the Buddha, pain is an illusion, but when one is sitting in the dentist chair, the pain is a very compelling illusion; not only old people get sick and die, but so do children. While the universe may indeed by a well-ordered cosmos, according to the available empirical evidence, the planet Earth seems to be in a local whorl in its galaxy where chaos predominates; power corrupts and might makes right; good guys do not always finish last, but they rarely finish first, based alone on goodness.

So much for Nietzsche’s response. The answer of the tragic poets (e.g., Aeschylus, Agamemnon 173–181) provided even before the question is posed by Plato, is “learning through suffering” (pathei mathos). Note well this is consistent with Plato’s guidance not to celebrate examples (whether in Epic or in Tragedy) of cowardly, slavish, or devaluing actions (which Socrates famously denounces (Republic: 395a–396b)). But we humans seem to learn the hard way—in the college of hard knocks. The suffering takes on a life of its own. Literary fiction is the phantom-limb-pain of life.

The learner is a survivor, who is in pain, but no corresponding reality of the missing limb exists, which limb, in being amputated, has become fictional. If the suffering is fictional, so perhaps is the therapy—write a poem, a tragedy, or tell a story. Life mutilates the individual, and, even if one gets through life relatively unscathed, one dies and the “celebrants” throw dirt in one’s face. Creon says “Alas. I have learned, unhappy as I am” (Antigone 1271–1272); but at that point Antigone is dead and Creon’s life is a ruin. The lesson is not for Creon, but for the audience (or reader).

Yet this is not informational learning. The tragic protagonists (e.g., Antigone) cannot learn from her error, since she is crushed by it—yet the audience can. A hard lesson indeed. The double bind—disrespect the state or disrespect one’s ancestors—is to be caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place. That so many antidotes and answers to the pain and suffering are proposed, is itself evidence that the latter can readily slip loose from one’s mastery and control, which are predictably tentative and temporary, and ruin one’s day, if not life. For the audience knows the outcome, or at least sees it coming ahead of the protagonist. Yet the audience cannot use the knowledge to produce a different factual result—hence the need for alternative fictional methods. It is not like some specific error occurs that could be corrected through better intelligence or information—check the brakes on the Trolley so that they do not fail inopportunely—it is rather that no matter how much one knows, how carefully one assesses the risks of one’s action, the outcome is still uncertain and may even be disastrous.

What kind of knowledge is that? The one certain piece of knowledge—death awaits. Yet it could be that from the audience’s perspective—the lesson is to dance in the chaos—dance in the uncertainty (so to speak)—between now and the ultimate un-over-comeable end of possibility. One double-checks the brakes, knowing full well there no guarantee exists, but that the checking is an expansion of control over uncertainty. With 20-20 hindsight, contingency starts to look like fate—that which, by definition, cannot be avoided; and yet daily counter-examples abound. A man named “John Silber” (1926–2012) is born with a birth defect—a mis-formed right arm that ended in an appendage like a thumb. Fate or rather contingency? Silber goes on to become a celebrated educator, University President, Kant scholar (which is how I got to know him), profiled on the front page of The Wall Street Journal (in the days of print journalism), and candidate for governor of Massachusetts. This was not a predictable result. Fate starts to look less constraining. The power to begin something new— “natality” as Hannah Arendt called it—new possibilities show a way forward.

The double bind is the source of tragedy, but is not alone sufficient to generate tragedy. For if one remains with the double bind, one gets “ruin and wreck,” not tragedy. For if one stays with the double bind, one gets “empathic distress.” One gets a form of insanity, not tragedy. One becomes a Philoctetes abandoned in pain and suffering, alone on an island for ten years before the return of Odysseus, Neoptolemus, and Hercules. The double bind presents a conflict but then requires that one not question the contingent framework of the conflict. Thus, the double bind is often kept in place, spinning in a tight unproductive circle, by a lack of imagination. Antigone does not think to act to claim sanctuary in the Temple of Hestia, virgin goddess of the family (which, of course, would be a different drama). The lesson? Write a poem—tell a story—use one’s imagination to brainstorm alternative possibilities—decline the constraining “set up” —embrace radical hope: “To hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates” (Shelley 1820: 153; see also Lear 2008).

In moral trauma one is no longer an agent in the full sense, which is one of the key hidden variable in classic tragedy—loss of agency. One’s agency is compromised by information asymmetries. Oedipus does not know who are his biological parents and he does not know that he does not know! One’s agency is compromised by inconsistent standards of behavior between the family and the political community, in which “cross fire” Antigone (and her family) are brought low. Now act! One is required to choose in the face of moral trauma—a choice one cannot make, that one ought not to have to make, but that, in any case, one is required to make.

Our empathy for the agent starts out requiring a decision that no one should have to make. In classic tragedy, the individual is forced to make a decision that neither the agent nor anyone else is authorized to make. But that agent has to make it anyway. Doing nothing is also a decision, and people are going to die. This is the definition of a double bind—damned if one does, and damned if one doesn’t.

Empathy is always empathy and radical empathy applies the same four aspects of relatedness—receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. Radical empathy emerges from standard empathy, when standard empathy breaks down, misfires, and/or fails in the face of empathic distress (including “burn out” or “compassion fatigue”). Empathic distress is itself a function of physical trauma, moral trauma, double binds, soul murder, and tragic circumstances that act to destroy possibilities of human flourishing, strength, aliveness, energy, and/or vitality. As a matter of definition, “soul murder” is defined by Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (1896), as destroying (through emotional or physical abuse) the possibility of love, but is generalized here to include destroying the possibility of generating new possibilities (Shengold 1989).

Radical empathy is attained when standard empathy honors the commitment to empathize in the face of empathic distress – the reaction on the part of audiences to circumstances in which tragic protagonists become entangled.This is empathy the “hard way,” and it is rare. However, no other way exists of attaining radical empathy than through empathy pure-and-simple—“standard empathy”—and much of the work accomplished here engages with the break downs of standard empathy as emotional contagion, projection, pressure to conform, and communications getting “lost in translation.” The repairs of these misfirings—and, it must be acknowledged, failures—of standard empathy lead the way to radical empathy. The transfiguration of moral trauma, double binds, and so on, by classic tragedies, work to overcome empathic distress, and, is on the critical path to performing and attaining radical empathy.

Without standard empathy, the audience does not experience the pain and suffering of the struggling humanity in the story of the runaway trolley. Even if the experiences are vicarious ones, there is no pity and fear without empathy in witnessing the unavoidable conflict that tears apart the protagonists. However, if the viewer (reader) is able to sustain one’s commitment to empathy in the face of the breakdown of standard empathy into empathic distress, then the possibility of radical empathy opens up. Radical empathy has much to contribute here.

A short description is that radical empathy relates empathically to that which causes empathic distress. Radical empathy relates to those decisions that no human being has the right to make, can make, or should have to make, but then ends up making anyway. Radical empathy reveals that one can be both a perpetrator and a survivor. Hence, the definition: the theatrical representation of moral trauma, double binds, and compromised agency, occasioning empathic distress, that calls forth the overcoming or amelioration of empathic distress by means of radical empathy for the survivor/perpetrator. Empathizing with such individuals and circumstances is why tragedy was invented.

References

Donald Davidson. (1973). Radical interpretation. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 125–139.

___________________. (1974). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001: 183–198.

Henrik Ibsen. (1896). John Gabriel Borkman, tr W. Archer. New York: Project Gutenburg e-Book, 2006.

Jonathan Lear. (2008). Radical Hope. Cambridge, MA: 2008.

B. T. Litz, Stein N, Delaney E, Lebowitz L, Nash WP, Silva C, Maguen S. Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: a preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clin Psychol Rev. 2009 Dec;29(8):695-706. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003. Epub 2009 Jul 29. PMID: 19683376.

Christoph Menke,, (2009). Tragic Play., tr James Phillips. New York: Columbia University Press.

Friedrich Nietzsche. (1883). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1961.

________________. (1888/1901). The Will to Power, R. J. Hollingdale (tr.). New York: Vintage, 1968.

Dennis Schmidt. (2001). On Germans and Other Greeks. Bloomington: Indian UP.

J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090

Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale UP.

Percy Bysshe Shelley. (1820). Prometheus Unbound in Selected Poetry: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Harold Bloom (ed.). New York: Houghton-Mifflin (Signet Classic Poetry), 1968: 120–212.

George Stein. (1963). The Death of Tragedy. New York: Alfred Knopf.

IMAGE Credit: Wikimedia: Painting from an ancient Corinthian vase. Ajax falls on his sword in the presence of his colleagues, Odysseus and Diomedes. The short stature of Odysseus is a well-known Homeric feature. These vases are black-figured; the heroes are painted in silhouette on the red ground of the vases. Their names are appended in archaic Greek letters. Artist from ancient Corinth; public domain; between circa 800 and circa 480 B.C.; drawing published 1911.

Image / photo credit: Dr. Ornstein in 2018, speaking to high school students in Massachusetts. Credit. Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Noted in passing: Anna Ornstein (1927-2025)

July 13, 2025 6:24 pm / Leave a comment

Anna Ornstein, MD, psychiatrist, and psychoanalytic Self Psychologist, is remembered and honored as a Holocaust survivor, having been incarcerated in Auschwitz with her mother in 1944 when the Germans invaded Hungary. Her experiences are narrated in her book, My Mother’s Eyes: Holocaust Memories of Young Girl (2004). Both survived. Anna Ornstein passed away at her home in Brookline, MA at the age of 98 on July 3, 2025 after a rich, challenging, and dynamic life.

Trying to say anything about such searing experiences is perhaps foolish, yet Ornstein’s next major contribution provides the tool to do so in so far as it can be attempted at all. Ornstein is remembered and honored for making empathy central in her clinical practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and in her writings on the Self Psychology (more on which shortly). One of the things that empathy teaches us humans is to try to bring words to one’s experiences, no matter how challenging the experiences; try to find words to push back the boundaries of the inexpressible, that which is not to be comprehended. Cognitive understanding should never be underestimated; yet at times cognition is illusive and overrated whereas communication is not, empathy is not, family is not, community is not.

Image / photo credit: Dr. Ornstein in 2018, speaking to high school students in Massachusetts. Credit. Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Though starting as a collection of anecdotes and narratives of survival, the title, My Mother’s Eyes, takes the account up a level. As a 17-year-old teenager, incarcerated with her mother and allowed to be together, the survival value of being able to change perspectives – the folk definition of empathy – was critical path to surviving the rigors – the horrors – of death camp life. Even under very challenging circumstances, people are able to support one another emotional regulation by literally being there for another as a comforting presence. The relationship in this extreme situation prefigures the notion of self object, making use of the other person mutually to regulate one another’s emotions. It is the other’s presence that, with a nod to D. W. Winnicott, provides a grounding in the radical possibility of going on being.

This essay is in the nature of an intellectual biography and personal anecdote, rather than an obituary proper. For those interested in how Anna née Brünn met Paul Ornstein and become Anna Ornstein, how all three of their children became psychiatrists, the New York Times articles provides the personal details and a happy, though by no means simple, ending to the catastrophe of the Holocaust and World War II.^[1]

On a personal note, my path and that of Anna Ornstein intersected with what can best be described as an existential encounter in 2009. Something called “Self Psychology” was disrupting classic psychoanalysis and innovating around the constraints of Freudian ego psychology. The Self Psychology Conference was in Chicago that year (2009, the full title “International Assoc for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology”).^[2] In any case, there were many high points to the Conference including Dr. Arnold Goldberg’s presentation and those of other Self Psychology innovators such as Ernest Wolf, Anna and Paul Ornstein, the Kohut Memorial Lecture, the many spirited exchanges.

The highest of the high points of the Conference came for me in having a one-on-one conversation with Anna Ornstein. There she was between presentations, and I introduced myself as working on a book about empathy, which did indeed get her attention. In a naïve, misguided attempt on my part to establish common ground, I mentioned that I had attended the lectures at the UChicago on the life of the mind by the political theorist Hannah Arendt. I also quoted Arendt to the effect that since the consequences of our human actions escape us, Jesus of Nazareth had innovated in the matter of forgiveness. Star struck, what was I thinking? This was clumsy and naïve on my part, and it got a reaction which was perhaps more than I had bargained for. In the course of the conversation, Ornstein took my hand animatedly and held it as she was making her point, basically that Arendt had gotten matters wrong, very wrong. When I say “took my hand,” I mean she grabbed it and shook it back and forth, not exactly like shaking hands, but like she would wrestle me to the ground. To be sure, it was good natured enough, but intense. The take-away? I got to hold hands with Anna Ornstein! Notwithstanding my clumsiness, that was special. I cherish the encounter.

Now in a short piece such as this, doing justice to Anna Ornstein’s innovations in self psychology (the method not the label), especially the treatment of children, is no simple task. People want to read about tips and technique, and many are available. However, context is required.

On background, Heinz Kohut, MD, was the innovator who put self psychology and empathy on the map starting in the early 1970s (though see Kohut 1959). Kohut was cautious about defining the self formally, implicitly characterizing the self as a comparative experience—a near experience psychoanalytic abstraction, that is central to all human experience since it contains the person’s nuclear ambitions and ideals which are amalgamated to the sense of continuity (Winnicott’s “going on being”), the well-being and cohesion of (our) body and mind (Ornstein 1976: 29ftnt).

Thus, the self oscillates dynamically between ideals and coherence, both of which are needed for a sense of aliveness, vitality, and an actual ability to be productive in contributing to community and relationships with others. Kohut’s (1959) definition of empathy as “vicarious introspection” adds significantly to the folk definition of taking a walk in the other person’s shoes, the better to appreciate the other’s struggles and successes as the person experiences them. (For further on Kohut’s innovation see the book (and chapter devoted to Kohut) to which I referred in my conversation with Ornstein in our encounter (Agosta 2010).)

While firmly founded in Freudian dynamics, Self Psychology called out how parenting environments that delivered unreliable empathy – not total lack of empathy, but unreliable, hit-or-miss empathy – resulted in structural deficits in self-esteem, self-confidence, productivity, feelings of emptiness, lack of aliveness and vitality, in children as well as the adults into which they grow. This was a deficit model rather than – or in addition to – a conflict model. Instead of conflicts between the conscience (superego) and sexual and aggressive drives, something was missing that left the person’s personality at a disadvantage in the face of which the person compensated with arrogance, superiority, coldness, withdrawal, empty depression (rather than melancholia), and poor productivity and superficial relations.

When the self experiences narcissistic injuries – did not get the dignity, respect, empathy – to which it was entitled or felt entitled (eventually a key distinction, but not at this point), then aggressive and sexually fragmented behavior was the result. In short, maladaptive sexual behavior and hostility are reactions to a stressed-out self rather than primary instinctual drives. So if you encounter a person who is enraged, ask yourself, who hurt that person’s feelings? Who did not give her or him the dignity, respect, empathy, they feel they deserve? Thus, self psychology does not so much reject Freud’s approach as re-describe and incorporate it.

Thus the New York Times article is accurate enough when it writes “Dr. Kohut disagreed with Freud’s theory that personality disorders were rooted in the unconscious mind, driven by guilt, sex and aggression” (Gabriel 2025), provided that one takes “rooted” and “unconscious” in the proper sense. In that sense, the dynamics of Freudian pathology becomes a special case of a fragmented self that has not received the empathy, which, as Kohut famously said, is oxygen for the soul: “The child that is to survive psychologically is born into an empathic-responsive human milieu [. . .] just as he [or she] is born into an atmosphere that contains an optimal amount of oxygen” (Kohut 1977: 85; see also 253). Just as the body goes into rapid decline and arrest without oxygen, so to the human psyche (the Greek word for soul) struggles and cannot sustain itself outside of a context of empathic relations at least somewhere in its life.

For example, the classic Freudian family drama of the child (son) who wants to “kill” the father and “marry” the mother, is redescribed as aggressive and sexual fragments of a self that has experienced unreliable empathy and been the recipient of seductive behavior on the part of the mother and aggressive (defensive) behavior on the part of the father. (For the inverse scenario of father daughter, which deserves attention, too, see Kulish and Holtzman 2008, which, strictly speaking is not self psychology but inspired thereby). In a healthy family dynamic, the father welcomes the young son’s competitiveness, knowing that he (the father) is not threatened by the youngster’s competitiveness. It is only when the father is himself insecure and narcissistically vulnerable that he retaliates punitively, giving way to a reactive hatred on the part of the offspring that Freud projected back into the primal scene as the death drive. For Kohut and Ornstein, aggression and hatred are not primary drives, as with Freud’s death drive, but aggressive and hatred live as reactions to failure of empathy, dignity, and respect. Likewise, the mother welcomes the young boy’s affection and ineffective childish romancing, knowing that the childish behavior is not a serious sexual advance. It is only when the mother, unsecure in herself and her own sexuality, behaves seductively towards the youngster that over arousal of sexuality, over stimulation, boundary issues, family drama, and emotional dis-equilibrium are risked. In the inverse scenario, the father welcomes the young daughter’s affection and childish romancing, appreciating and delighting in the child’s development and growth. This is not a serious seduction – unless the father has unresolved issues. When the father is insecure in his own sexuality and responds seductively to the pretend seduction that the risk of over arousal and real and imaginary boundary violation can occur. The complicating factor in the daughter-mother relationship is that the daughter needs the mother to take care of her – unlike with the son where the hostility between father and son is a purer example of competition – as well as wanting to replace her, resulting in an ongoing ambivalence and competitiveness that is not mirrored in the son’s simple desire to “cancel” the father.

Now shift this conversation in the direction of adult empathy with children, which happens to be the title of a famous article by Christine Olden (1956). When one is in the presence of a child, whether of tender age or teenager, one is present to, aware of, one’s own fate as a child. And since one’s own fate may have little or nothing to do with that which this particular child in this pace and time is experiencing and struggling, that is precisely the point at which expanding the parents’ empathy is on the critical path.

“The parent’s ability to become therapeutic may not have always been optimally utilized in the treatment of children. This is in large part due to a rather pervasive attitude among mental health professionals in which the parents are usually considered at fault, primarily for lacking sensitivity relative to their children’s developmental needs. Anger and depreciation for having failed their children precludes any effort on the therapist’s part to understand the reasons why the parents may not have been able to develop empathic capacities. The explanation for this can usually be found in the parents’ own backgrounds. In addition to the parent’s original difficulties to be in empathic tune with the child, the child’s current difficulties create guilt, anger, and disappointment in the parent(s) which further interfere with whatever parental empathy may have otherwise been available” (Ornstein 1976: 18).

In an example of what not to do, Ornstein cites the following case, in which the empathy toward both parent and child is conspicuous by its absence:

“A young mother had regularly taken her 6-yr-old son to bed with her after the sudden death of her husband. When the boy became enuretic she visited the clinic and was told that the boy had to get out of her bed-since this was the cause of his problem. The mother followed through on the recommendation which meant nightly tearful battles with the child. However, since her own affective state was not “treated,” she could not remove him from her bed without ambivalence. The enuresis continued, and in addition, mother and son became increasingly more irritable with each other. As the mother’s depression deepened, the child developed further symptoms; he had become provocative and inattentive at school” (Ornstein 1976; 18).

Given we have an example of what not to do, what is the recommendation of what one should do in this case? As Ornstein explains (1976: 18), recognize and acknowledge the mother’s grief for her husband and the longing for closeness with the boy. You do not have to lie back on a coach to talk about it, but one might consider doing so! The ability to tolerate the separation between mother and son may usefully have been expanded by a gradual, phased introduction of the separate sleeping arrangements. Having agreed to letting the boy in, summarily throwing him out is surely asking for trouble; yet the co-sleeping cannot continue. Don’t forget that applying common sense parenting is consistent with advanced training and credentials. Many parents have an in-bed “cuddle time” with children of tender age, including a bedtime story, prior to each retiring to his or her own respective nest. “Story time” – whether read or from life – is one possible empathic moment between parent and child in the context of an empathic relationship as the adventures and stresses of the day are empathic quiesced in a narrative before the passive overcoming of going to sleep.

By the way, in the world of behavioral interventions, wise parents know to set the clock for a 2 am trip to “go number one,” which will reduce the stress on child and parent, enabling them to address the underlying issues of loss and separation in a calmer, even if not stress free, context of relatedness.

Often when a therapist meets a family, the family is not on a slippery slope, they are at the bottom of it. The narcissistic slights, emotional injuries, blind spots, shame, guilt, boundary issues, and grievances present a tangle that represents a challenge even to the most astute and empathic therapist. People are motivated to reduce the suffering and struggle, and empathy includes many ways to de-escalate conflict. Ornstein points out:

“To enhance the parents’ therapeutic potentials does not mean to give recommendations as to how to interrupt or actively discourage the child’s disturbing behavior. Particularly destructive are recommendations which ask for changed parental behavior without an appreciation for the parents’ difficulty to comply; such recommendations are “grafted” onto the parents’ pathology. Finding themselves unable to follow the therapist’s recommendations, they become more guilty and less able to effect changes in themselves in relation to the child” (Ornstein 1976: 18).

In the world of tips and techniques, Ornstein did not say “treat the parent; the child gets better”; make bedtime stories an empathic encounter for children of tender age; get inside the world of the child for whom the tooth fairy and boogeyman are real, setting boundaries and soothing in tandem; but she strongly implied them (nor is that the complete solution since the child, too, requires treatment (1976: 18)). One can try and force an outcome; but it is not going to stick; and framing boundary setting in an empathic milieu of acceptance has a much greater probability of producing a positive outcome. This report is acknowledged to be incomplete and further reading can be found in the References.

One caveat must also be offered. It is the same world of limited empathy and human success and suffering today (Q3 2025) as when Anna Ornstein published her innovative work in 1976. However, ours is also a different world. Empathy is a key ingredient, and indeed the foundation, of individual well-being, mental health, and flourishing communities. Yet ours is a world in which we have gone from a President Obama who considered empathy a criterion for appointment to the US Supreme Court to one whose billionaire friends (or “frenemies”) consider empathy a defect of civilization. Empathy and its power should never be underestimated. Never. However, one has to be empathic in a context of acceptance and toleration. It does not work to make oneself empathically vulnerable in the presence of bullies, concentration camp guards, or wanton aggression. This is obvious, but a reminder is useful that in such predicaments empathy sets boundaries, defines limits, pushes back, and, if politically possible without getting deported, speaks truth to power using rhetorical empathy (which is not much engaged in therapeutic or psychiatric circles). Carrying forward the work of Anna Ornstein? An example of rhetorical empathy? “No human being is illegal.” However, that starts a new thread – an empathic one.

References

Lou Agosta. (2010). Chapter Six: Empathy as vicarious introspection in psychoanalysis. In Empathy in the Context of Philosophy, by Lou Agosta. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Trip Gabriel (July 4, 2025), Anna Ornstein, Psychoanalyst who survived the Holocaust, dies at 98 New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/health/anna-ornstein-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Vk8.dfZz.8YyxtXebGoP1&smid=url-share

Heinz Kohut. (1959). Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis: An examination of the relationship between mode of observation and theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 7, 459–483. https://doi.org/10.1177/000306515900700304

Heinz Kohut. (1977). Restoration of the Self. New York: International Universities Press.

Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman. (2008). A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed. Lanham: Jason Aronson.

Olden, C. (1953). On Adult Empathy with Children. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 8(1), 111–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.1953.11822764

Anna Ornstein. (2004). My Mother’s Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl. Cincinnati, OH: Clarisy Press.

Anna Ornstein. (1976). Making contact with the inner world of the child. Toward a theory of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children. Comprehensive Psychiatry. 1976 Jan-Feb;17(1):3-36. doi: 10.1016/0010-440x(76)90054-7. PMID: 1248241.

Sam Roberts. (Jan 31, 2017). Paul Ornstein, psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, dies. New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/us/paul-ornstein-dead-self-psychologist.html

^[1] Trip Gabriel (July 4, 2025), Anna Ornstein, Psychoanalyst who survived the Holocaust, dies at 98 New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/health/anna-ornstein-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Vk8.dfZz.8YyxtXebGoP1&smid=url-share

^[2] I have found the “splash page” for the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP) Conference of 2009 in my archives (though not the complete program) whereas Google’s Artificial Intelligence bot says there was no such conference. In addition, I was there.

Image / photo credit: Dr. Ornstein in 2018, speaking to high school students in Massachusetts. Credit. Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology

December 17, 2024 6:54 pm / Leave a comment

The relationship between empathy and rhetoric (the art of speaking well) has not been much appreciated or discussed – until now! Empathy and rhetoric seem to be at cross purposes. 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 individual or the community. At the risk of over- simplification, empathy is supposed to be about listening, receiving the inbound message; whereas rhetoric is usually regarded as being about speaking, bringing forth, expressing, and communicating the outbound message. Once again, 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, in which the arts of empathy and rhetoric reciprocally enabled different aspects of authentic relatedness, community building, and empowering communications.

In rhetorical empathy, the speaker’s words address the listening of the audience in such a way as to leave the audience with the experience of having been heard. As noted, this must seem counter-intuitive since it is the audience that is doing the listening. The hidden variable is that the speaker knows the audience in the sense that she or he has walked a mile in their shoes (after having taken off her/his own), knows where the shoes pinch (so to speak), and can articulate the experience the audience is implicitly harboring in their hearts yet have been unable to express. The paradox is resolved as the distinction between the self and Other, the speaker and the listener, is bridged and a way of speaking that incorporates the Other’s listening into one’s speaking is brought forth and expressed. Rhetorical empathy is a way of speaking that incorporates the Other’s listening into one’s speaking in such a way that the Other is able to hear what is being said.

For the complete article (no fee) see: Available at: https://rdw.rowan.edu/joie/vol2/iss1/5

Abstract

This article aspires to elaborate the intersection of empathy and rhetoric with particular reference to empathic responsiveness. The argument regarding rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology proceeds through three phases. First, empathy is distinguished ontologically from a psychological mechanism. Second, the different aspects of empathy are exemplified. What brings forth empathy and makes it present? Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology is usefully appropriated for an ontological account of empathy. The elaboration of the intersection of empathy and rhetoric goes beyond Heidegger; and the argument is made that empathy is incomplete without an empathic response. This empathic response is the opening in which rhetorical empathy comes forth. “Empathic response” is synonymous with “rhetorical empathy.” A rigorous and critical empathy knows that it can be wrong. Finally, diverse examples of rhetorical empathy are provided.

If one defines empathy ontologically, empathy shows up as being fully present with the Other, available to the Other, without anything else such as judgment, prejudice, assessment, or evaluation added. Of course, one can’t completely or perfectly do it—be present with the Other without judgment—because the understanding of who the Other is as a possibility inevitably brings along judgments and prejudices. However, in so far as these judgments are pre-judgments (Gadamer 1998) about the Other that can be made explicit and compartmentalized, one is already not alone, and one is being potentially empathic in relation to and with the Other.

Empathy is an authentic way of being with the other individual after all the inauthentic ways of being have been overcome or at least set aside and quarantined. A reversal takes place, and the empathic way of being is the foundation for the psychological mechanisms. Projection, projective identification, and transient identification are valid and important, but not fundamental. What is fundamental is empathic relatedness, being present with the other person.

One appreciates this “being present with,” which is not about knowledge but about “being with,” most impactfully when one loses the Other through departure or death.

The loss of the Other is experienced by one as the loss of emotionally sustaining relatedness, the loss of one’s humanity. The one who loses (or does not receive) empathy is left lacking in vitality, strength, energy, aliveness—in short, is left depressed. One loses the possibility of relatedness, which possibility enables so many other possibilities. One loses the possibility of possibility (Ratcliffe 2015). It is the Other’s empathizing that gives one one’s humanness, from which, in turn, one takes a sense of vitality and aliveness to get into action and life.

Whenever one encounters the Other, empathizing is also present, even if the empathy occurs as a breakdown in empathy. Quiet and dramatic breakdowns of empathy point to missed opportunities for relatedness. Breakdowns in empathy include emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications lost in translations. These are the breakdowns in empathy that, if engaged with rigorous and critical care, point to breakthroughs in empathy. The aspects of empathic responsiveness, embodiment, acknowledgement, recognition, possibility, and validation of the Other’s experience form and inform the listener’s (and reader’s) response to the Other. Amidst the emotional contagion, projection, forcing of conformity with the crowd, and messages lost in translation, the empathy is conspicuous by its absence. What then will make empathy present?

For the detailed answer to that question see: https://rdw.rowan.edu/joie/vol2/iss1/5

Recommended Citation

Agosta, Lou PhD (2024) “Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology,” Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 5.
Available at: https://rdw.rowan.edu/joie/vol2/iss1/5

How I changed my relationship with pain

June 6, 2024 1:55 pm / Leave a comment

Expanded power over pain is a significant result that may usefully be embraced by all human beings who experience pain – which describes just about everyone at some time or another. Acute pain communicates an urgent need for intervention; chronic pain is demoralizing and potentially life changing. Intervention required!

People who do not experience standard amounts of pain are at risk of hurting themselves. Dr. James Cox, senior lecturer at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London, notes, “Pain is an essential warning system to protect you from damaging and life-threatening events” (Jacquelyn Corley (Stat2019)). Admittedly not experiencing pain is a rare and concerning condition from which few of us suffer. Hence the practical approach considered here for the rest of humanity.

I changed my relationship to pain by working on the relationship. The result is that less pain occurs in my life and the pain that I do experience does not dominate my life. If one is completely pain-free, one is probably dead, which has different issues.

The following behaviors made a difference. Regular exercise, healthy diet, spiritual discipline (I have trained extensively in Tai Chi, but Yoga and/or meditation encompass the same results), consultations with professionals of one’s choice including medical doctors; and, here is the wild card, the purpose of this post: education in the different types of pain, including but not limited to acute pain versus chronic pain. The reader may say, “Holy cow! That’s too much work!” However, if the reader is in enough pain, then consider the possibility. What’s the alternative? Continue to suffer? Medically assisted suicide (where legal)? Opioids? The latter in particular have a place in hospice (end of life scenarios), in the week after surgery, but otherwise they are a deal with the devil. And, in any deal with the devil, be sure to read the fine print. “At a time when about 130 American die daily from opioid overdoses, scientists and drug companies are actively pursuing alternative non-opioid medications for acute and chronic pain” (Jacquelyn Corley (Stat 2019)).

An example will be useful. I changed my relationship to pain, following my MDs guidance, by taking a double dose of NSAIDs – non steroidal anti-inflammatory “pain killers”. The idea is to “kill” the pain without killing the patient. This is no joke because NSAIDs such as Aleve can damage the mucous membranes of the gastro intestinal track (e.g., stomach), leading to ulcer-like conditions and the accompanying risks (not detailed here), which is why, even though they are over-the-counter, consultation with a medical doctor is important.

Doing Tai Chi changed my relationship to pain. Your mileage may vary, but I started to see results after ten weeks of dedicated daily work. My Tai Chi training has continued with one lengthy interruption for six years. My experience was the practice moved the pain threshold up. That is, I did not experience pain as acutely and when I did experience pain, it did not bother me as much. This can be a double-edged consideration. For example, the Tai Chi exercise of “holding the ball” is a stress position. One really needs a picture to see what this is.

One stands there with one’s arms encompassing a large ball at about the level of one’s chest with one’s hips tucked slightly as if sitting back. One’s whole body is engaged and conditioned. After about ten minutes one starts to heat up and after about fifteen minutes one starts to sweat. This is Tai Chi, not Yoga, but Mircea Eliade discusses similar stress positions that generate Shamanic Heat (Eliade, (1964), Shamanism, translated Willard Trask. Princeton University Press (Bollingen)).

Now a word of caution regarding the pain threshold. I went for a dermatological treatment and I got burned, literally, (fortunately, not too seriously), because I did not say “Stop – it hurts!” Granted that most people want to experience less pain, it is important to not extinguish pain completely, because pain in its acute presentation is trying to tell one something – in this case, injury to one’s skin due to heat.

Here is another example. A colleague has an inflamed ankle. It throbs. It hurts. It is not fractured but imaging shows it is enflamed, stressed out. The thing is that this is not just the person’s sprained ankle – it is his whole life. Since he needs to lose weight, he needs to get exercise. Because he cannot get sufficient exercise, he cannot lose weight. The extra weight contributes to the ankle continuing to be stressed. Double-bind! Rock and the hard place. How is this individual going to break out of this tight loop? Now I know this is going to sound crazy, but here it is: Follow doctor’s orders! Go to the physical therapy! If you have got to wear “the boot” for a couple of weeks, do so. Start low (with the number of repetitions of exercises) – go slow. If the person had access to a swimming pool, that would be ideal, but that might not be workable for many people. SPA-like treatments, soaks in Epsom salts in sensory deprivation pods have value.

Many parallel examples can be cited in which a person knows exactly what she has to do (don’t even worry about the doctor) – why is the person not doing it? Many reasons exist, but one of them is that suffering becomes a comfort zone. Suffering is sticky. “Yes, I am miserable,” the individual says, but it is a familiar misery. Suffering has become an uncomfortable comfort zone. What would it take to give that up? Once one realizes, “This is what crazy looks like,” it becomes easier to give up the suffering. This is not a deep dive into the psychology of the unconscious, yet this is not merely a physical challenge. Yes, the ankle hurts – objectively, there is even an image that shows inflammation, albeit hazy and faint. However, even if there weren’t evidence of an injury – and soft tissue damage often escapes imaging, the emotional issue – ambivalence about one’s body image (“weight”) – gets entangled with the person’s whole life. In this case, a struggle with unhealthy excess weight – and the person’s emotions run with the ball – elaborate the injury psychologically. This is also a form of catastrophizing or awfulizing (made famous by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)), but CBT did not invent it.

I gave the example of an inflamed ankle, but it might also apply to lower back pain, headaches, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which are notoriously difficult to diagnose medically. Speaking personally, I want a quick fix. We all do. However, after a while, if the “fix” does not occur, there is no in principle limit on the amount of time and effort one can spend trying to find a quick fix. After a certain time, one gets a sense that one might put the time and effort into incremental progress – finding whatever moves the dial – whatever shifts the stuckness. Here’s what I did not want to hear: This is gonna take some work. After a time, one decides to roll up the sleeves and do the hard work need to get one’s power back. Healthy diet and a well-defined exercise program are important components. Finding an MD and/or health care provider including physical therapist where the interpersonal chemistry works is on the critical path to dialing down the suffering. Here “interpersonal chemistry” is another description for empathy. Look for someone whose empathy is open enough to encompass one’s pain and suffering without being coopted by it. This is the critical path to recovery.

The distinction between acute pain and chronic pain needs to be better understood by the average citizen. An excerpt from Neurology 101 may be useful. In acute pain, the peripheral nervous system in the body’s appendages such as one’s toes reports via neural connections to the central nervous system (e.g., the brain in one’s head). The impact of a heavy object such as a large brick with my toe releases neurotransmitters at the nociceptors (we are not talking Greek and “nocio” means “pain”). The mechanics are such that a message is delivered from the periphery to the center that what is in effect a boundary violation – an injury – has occurred. The brain then tells the toe to hurt – “Ouch!” The message is delivered seamlessly to the conscious person to whom the toe “belongs” in the neural map that associates the body with conscious experience unfolding in the person’s awareness. The toe which had quietly been doing its job in helping the person walk, balance, be mobile now makes a lot of “noise” – it starts throbbing. This is what acute pain feels like.

With chronic pain the scenario gets complicated. If the injury is subjected to other stressors, slow to heal, reinjured, or otherwise neglected, then the pain may continue across a period of days or weeks and become habitual. In effect, the pain signal becomes a bad habit. The pain takes on a life of its own. What does that even mean? What starts out as a way of reminding the person to attend to the injury gets stuck on “repeat”. Like the marketing company that keeps sending your notices even after you specify “Do not solicit!” The messaging is not just from the toe to the brain, from the periphery to the center, but it gets reversed. The messaging is from the center to the periphery, from the brain to the body part. The brain tells the periphery to hurt. Chronic pain becomes a source of suffering. Here “suffering” expands to include worry that anticipates and/or expects pain, which gets further reinforced when the pain actually shows up.

The poster child for chronic pain is phantom limb pain. Not all pains are created equal. Phantom limb pain provides compelling evidence that pain is “in one’s head” only in the sense that pain is in the brain and the brain is in one’s head. Only in that limited sense is pain in one’s head. Yet the pain is not imaginary. Documented as early as the American Civil War by Silas Weir Mitchell, individuals who had undergone amputation, felt the nonexistent, missing limb to itch or cramp or hurt. The individuals experienced the nonexistent tendons and muscles of the missing limb as cramping and even awakening the person from the most profound sleep due to pain (As noted, further in Haider Warraich. (2023). The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain. New York: Basic Books, pp. 110 – 111).

Fast forward to modern times and Ron Melzack’s gate control theory of pain marshals such phantom limb pain as compelling evidence that the nervous system contains a map of the body and the body’s pains point, which map has not yet been updated to reflect the absence of the lost limb. In effect, the brain is telling the individual that his limb is hurting using an obsolete map of the body – the memory of pain. Thus, the pain is in one’s head, but not in the sense that the pain is unreal or merely imaginary. The pain is real – as real as the brain that is indeed in one’s head and signaling (“telling”) one that one is in pain. (R. Melzack, (1974), The Puzzle of Pain. Basic Books.)

Whatever the level of pain, stress is probably going to make it feel worse. Therefore, stress reduction methods such as meditation, Tai Chi, Yoga, time spent soaking in a sensory deprivation pod, and SPA-like stress reduction methods are going to be beneficial in moving the pain dial downward.

One question that has not even occurred to scientists is whether it is possible to have the functional equivalent of phantom limb pain, even though the person still has the limb functionally attached to the body. This sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it. If there is a map of the body’s pain points in the central nervous system (the brain), there is nothing that says “phantom” pains cannot occur even if an appendage still exists. For example, the high school football player who needs the football scholarship to go to college because he is weak academically; he is not good at baseball, but actually hates football. He incurs a soft tissue sports injury, which gets elaborated due to emotional conflict about his ambivalent relationship with football, leaving him on crutches for far-too-long and both physically and symbolically unable to move forward in his life. As if the only three life choices are football, baseball, and academics?! Note that the description of the injury “painful soft tissue” already opens and shuts approaches to treatment. That is the devilish thing – what is the actual and accurate description? Thus, due to the inherent delays in neuroplasticity – the update to the brain’s map of the body is not instantaneous and one does not have new experiences with a nonexistent limb – pain takes on a life of its own.

Though an oversimplification, the messaging between the peripheral and central nervous systems is reversed. Instead of the peripheral limb telling the brain of a “hurt,” the brain develops a “bad habit” of signaling pain and tells the limb to hurt. That is the experience of chronic pain – pain has a life of its own – pain becomes the dis-ease (literally), not the symptom. What then is the treatment, doctor? Physical therapy (PT) – exercises to strengthen the knee and, in effect, teach him to walk again.

Chronic pain is discouraging, demoralizing, fatiguing, exhausting, negatively impacting one’s mental status. I have been cagey about my own experience of pain in this post, but it is a matter of record that I have osteoarthritis, a progressive deterioration of the cartilage in joints such as occurs in people who are getting older and who are long term runners. The person understandably and properly continuously asks himself – what am I experiencing? And does it include pain? No one is saying the “cure” is don’t think about it (pain), don’t worry about it. No one is saying “play hurt”? “Playing hurt” is a bad idea for so many reasons, including one is going to make a bad injury worse. Professional athletes who “play hurt” may indeed get a bunch of money, but they also often dramatically shorten their careers – and that costs them money.

While distraction from one’s pain can be useful in the short term, it is not a sustainable solution. Rather when, after medical determination of the sources of pain are determined to be unable to be completely extinguished or eliminated, one is saying undertake an inquiry into what one is really experiencing. Rather than react to the uncomfortable twinges and twitches, bumps and thumps, prodding and pokes, that one encounters, ask what one is really feeling. Undertake an inquiry into what one is experiencing. If, upon consideration, the answer is “The pain is acute going from 4 to 8 to 9 on the 10 point scale,” then stop and call for backup, including taking pain killers such as NSAIDS as recommended by an MD.

Here the vocabulary of pain is relevant. See Melzack’s McGill pain chart. [List the vocabulary]

Further background information will be useful. Haider Warraich, MD, in The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain (Basic Books, 2023) radicalizes the issue of pain that takes on a life of its own before suggesting a solution. After providing a short history of opium and morphine and opioids, culminating “in the most prestigious medical school on earth, from the best teachers and physicians, we [medical students] were unknowingly taught meticulously designed lies” (p. 185), that is, prescribe opioids for chronic pain. The reader wonders, where do we go from here? To be sure opioids have a role in hospice care and the week after surgery, but one thing is for certain, the way forward does not consist in prescribing opioids for chronic pain.

After reviewing numerous approaches to integrated pain management extending from cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to valium, cannabis and Ketamine – and calling out hypnosis (hypnotherapy) as a greatly undervalued approach (no external chemicals are required, but the issue of susceptibility to hypnotic suggestibility is fraught) – Dr Warraich recovers from his own life changing back injury in a truly “physician heal thyself” moment thanks to dedicated PT, physical therapy (p. 238). If this seems stunningly anti-climactic, it is boring enough to have the ring of truth earned in the college of hard knocks, but it is a personal solution (and I do so like a happy ending!), not the resolution of the double bind in which the entire medical profession finds itself (pp. 188 – 189). The way forward for the community as a whole requires a different, though modest, proposal. The patient signs up for and completes physical therapy (PT), a custom set of exercises tailed to his pain condition and mobility issues.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The body is the best picture of the soul.” The default since René Descartes is to distinguish physical pain from psychic pain – what used to be called the difference between “body” and “soul” before science “proved” that the soul did not exist. (Once again, we are talking Greek “psyche” is the Greek word for “souI.”) Nevertheless, in spite of the “proof” that the soul does not exist, soul-like phenomena keep showing up. For example, if the person’s “soul” is regularly subjected to negative verbal feedback from those in authority, the person becomes physically ill – ulcers, headaches, lower back pain, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). As noted, these are notoriously difficult to diagnoses. The adverse childhood experience survey (ACE) provides solid evidence that psychic and moral injuries correlate significantly with major medical disorders (e.g., Felitti 2002).

One big issue is that we (science and scientists) lack a coherent, effective account of emergent properties. One with neurons. The alternative is the current reductive paradigm according to which, in spite of contrary assertions, on has trouble explaining that things really are what they seem to be – that table are tables andmade of microscopic components such as atoms. We start with neurons. We are neurons “all the way down.” Neurons generate stimuli; stimuli generate sensations/experiences; experiences generate [are] responses; responses form patterns; patterns generate meaning; meaning generates language. With the emergence of language, things really start to get interesting. Organized life reaches “take off” speed. Language generates community; community generates – or rather is functionally equivalent to – culture, art, poetry, science, technology, and the world as we know it.

What about individuals who are put in a double-bind by circumstances as when someone in authority makes a seemingly impossible demand? For example, the army Sargent gives what seems to be a valid military order to the corporeal to shoot at the rapidly approaching auto, thinking it is a suicide car bomb, but it is really an innocent family. The soldier, thinking the order is valid and that he is protecting his team, follows the order. The solider is now both a perpetrator and a survivor. People have gotten hurt who ought not to have been hurt. Moral inquiry. Moral trauma has occurred. Tai Chi is not going to save this guy. This take the form of guilt – which is aggression – hostile feeling and anger – turned against one self. The individual’s agency – the individual’s power as an agent to choose – is compromised by contingent circumstance, including the individual’s unavoidable choice in the circumstance, since taking no action is also a choice.

This is why the ancient Greeks invented tragedy. A careful reading of the Greek tragedies, which cannot be adequately canvassed here, shows that virtually every tragic hero has the compromised agency characteristic of a double bind. Oedipus is a powerful agent, yet compromised and brought low by inadequate information. Information asymmetries! Antigone’s agency is bound, doubly, by the conflict between the imperatives of politics and the integrity of family. Agamemnon’s agency is compromised by the negative aspect of honor and pride and an overweening narcissism. Iphigenia’s agency is compromised by literally being bound and gagged (admittedly a limit case). Double-binds have also been hypothesized to contribute to the causation of major mental illness (Bateson 1956). Contradictory messages from parents, explicit versus implicit, spoken versus unspoken, are particularly challenging. Here the fan out to related issues is substantial.

I changed my relationship to pain and suffering by reading all thirty existing Greek tragedies. One might say if something is worth doing, it is worth over-doing, and the reader might try starting with just one. Examples of pain and suffering occur in abundance: acute pain – Hercules puts on the poisoned cloak, which burns his flesh; chronic pain – Philoctetes has a wound that will not heal and throbs periodically with painful sensations; and suffering – Oedipus is misinformed about who is his birth mother and after having children with her he suffers so from his awareness of his violation of family standards that he mutilates himself, tearing his eyes out. The latter would, of course, be acute pain, but the cause, the trigger, is thinking about what he has done in relation to the expectations of the community, namely, violating the incest taboo.

Now, according to Aristotle, the representation of such catastrophes is supposed to evoke pity and fear in the audience (viewer) of the classic theatrical spectacle. Indeed, such spectacles – even though the violence usually happens “off stage” and is reported – are not for the faint of heart. We seem to want to identify with the characters in a narrative, which, in turn, activates our openness to their experiences in an entry level empathy that communicates a vicarious experience of the character’s struggle and suffering. Advanced empathy also gets engaged in the form of appreciation of who is the character as a possibility in relation to which the viewer (audience) considers what is possible in her of his own life. One takes a walk in the other’s shoes, after having taken off one’s own. Other examples of similar experiences include why (some) people like to see horror movies. One does not run screaming from the theatre, but conventionally appreciates that the experience is a vicarious one – an “as if” or pretend experience. Likewise, with “tear jerker” style movies – one gets a “good cry,” which has the effect of an emotional purging or cleansing.

Now I am not a natural empath, and I have had to work at expanding my empathy. In contrast, the natural empath is predisposed, whether by biology or upbringing (or both), to take on the pain and suffering of the world. Not surprisingly this results in compassion fatigue and burn out. The person distances him- or herself from others and displays aspects of hard-heartedness, whereas they are actually kind and generous but unable to access these “better angles.” It should be noted that empathy opens one up to positive emotions, too – joy and high spirits and gratitude and satisfaction – but, predictably, the negative ones get a lot of attention.

“Suffering” is the kind of thing where what one thinks and feels does make a difference. Now no one is saying that Oedipus should have been casual about his transgressions – “blown it off” (so to speak); and the enactment does have a dramatic point – Oedipus finally begins to “see” into his blind spot as he loses his sight. Really it would be hard to know what to say. Still, the voice of reality would council alternatives – other ways are available of making amends – making reparations – perhaps more than two “Our Fathers” and two “Hail Marys” as penance – what about community service or fasting? “Suffering” is not just a conversation one has with oneself about future expectations. It is also a conversation one has with oneself about one’s own inadequacies and deficiencies (whether one is inadequate or not). For example, unkind words from another are hurtful. In such cases what kind of “pain” is the hurt? We get a clue from the process of trying to manage such a hurt. The process consists in setting boundaries, setting limits, not taking the words personally (even though inevitably we do). The hurt lives in language and so does the response. Therefore, in an alternative scenario, one takes the bad language in and turns it against oneself. One anticipates a negative outcome. One gets guilt (once again, regardless of whether one has does something wrong or not).

The coaching? If you are suffering from compassion fatigue, then dial down the compassion. This does not mean become hard-hearted or mean. Far from it. This means do not confuse a vicarious experience of pain and suffering with jumping head over heels into the trauma itself. What may usefully be appreciated is that practices such as empathy, compassion, altruism are not “on off” switches. They are not all or nothing. Skilled executioners of these practices are able to expand and contract their application to suit the circumstances. To be sure, that takes practice. The result is expanded power over vicariously shared pain and suffering. One gets power back and is able to assist the other in recovering their power too. (Further tips and techniques on how to change one’s thinking and expand one’s empathy are available in my Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide (with 24 full color illustrations by Alex Zonis), also available as an ebook.)

Before concluding, I remind the reader that “all the usual disclaimers.” This is a personal reflection. The only data is my own experience and bibliographical references that I found thought provoking. “Your mileage may vary.” If you are in pain (which, at another level and for many spiritual people, is one definition of the human condition) or if you are in the market for professional advice, start with your family doctor. If you do not have one, get one. Talk to a spiritual advisor of your own choice. Above all, “Don’t hurt yourself!” This is not to say that I am not a professional. I am. My PhD is in philosophy (UChicago) with a dissertation entitle Empathy and Interpretation. I have spent over 10K hours researching and working on empathy and how it makes a difference. So if you require expanded empathy, it makes sense to talk to me. A conversation for possibility about empathy can shift one’s relationship with pain.

Bibliography

Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J., 1956, Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, 251–264.

Corley, Jacquelyn. (2019). The Case of a Woman Who Feels Almost No Pain Leads Scientists to a New Gene Mutation. Scientific American. March 30, 2019. Reprinted with permission from STAT. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-case-of-a-woman-who-feels-almost-no-pain-leads-scientists-to-a-new-gene-mutation/

Eliade, Mircea. (1964). Shamanism. Princeton University Press (Bollingen).

Felitti VJ. (2002). The Relation Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead. The Permanente Journal (Perm J). 2002 Winter;6(1):44-47. doi: 10.7812/TPP/02.994. PMID: 30313011; PMCID: PMC6220625.

Melzack, R. (1974). The Puzzle of Pain. New York: Basic Books.

Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide is now an ebook – and the universe is winking at us in approval!

April 8, 2024 4:50 pm / Leave a comment

The release of the ebook version of Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide coincides with a major astronomical event – a total solar eclipse that traverses North America today, Monday April 8, 2024. The gods are watching and wink at us humans to encourage expanding our empathic humanism!

My colleagues and friends are telling me, “Louis, you are sooo 20^th Century – no one is reading hard copy books anymore! Electronic publishing is the way to go.” Following my own guidance about empathy, I have heard you, dear reader. The electronic versions of all three books, Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide, Empathy Lessons, and A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy – drum roll please – are now available.

A lazy person’s guide to empathy guides you in –

Performing a readiness assessment for empathy. Cleaning up your messes one relationship at a time.
Defining empathy as a multi-dimensional process.
Overcoming the Big Four empathy breakdowns.
Applying introspection as the royal road to empathy.
Identifying natural empaths who don’t get enough empathy – and getting the empathy you need.
The one-minute empathy training.
Compassion fatigue: A radical proposal to overcome it.
Listening: Hearing what the other person is saying versus your opinion of what she is saying.
Distinguishing what happened versus what you made it mean. Applying empathy to sooth anger and rage.
Setting boundaries: Good fences (not walls!) make good neighbors: About boundaries. How and why empathy is good for one’s well-being. Empathy and humor.
Empathy, capitalist tool.
Empathy: A method of data gathering.
Empathy: A dial, not an “on-off” switch.
Assessing your empathy therapist. Experiencing a lack of empathic responsiveness? Get some empathy consulting from Dr Lou. Make the other person your empathy trainer.
Applying empathy in every encounter with the other person – and just being with other people without anything else added. Empathy as the new love – so what was the old love?

Okay, I’ve read enough – I want to order the ebook from the author’s page: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt

Top Ten Empathy Trends 2024

January 3, 2024 4:45 pm / Leave a comment

This is going to be a tough year—heck, some of these trends were formulated before January 1^st, 2024, and it was already a tough year, not having even started! I am sick at heart for the atrocities and killing. I begin the year in grief for all the dead. I am regularly donating blood at the local blood bank, so I bleed in solidarity with the victims and survivors of boundary violations, atrocities, and killings. Based on empathy, I am confident that you, dear reader, will do whatever you can. As Lenin said, “You ask me for a contribution—we’re all doin’ what we can.” Just so there is no misunderstanding—that would be John Lennon. We need a lighter moment, too, amid all the bad news. Meanwhile—I am going with Paul Simon:

“Who says, “Hard times?” / I’m used to them / The speeding planet burns / I’m used to that / My life’s so common it disappears / And sometimes even empathy / Cannot substitute for tears” (1990, “The Cool, Cool River”)

—okay, I substituted the word “empathy” for “music”—but the point is similar.

(10) The first casualty of war is truth—the second is empathy. Empathy has to call for backup. The backup is in the form of radical empathy. In time of war, the power of empathy consists in putting oneself in the shoes of the opponent, thinking like the opponent, and thereby anticipating and thwarting the opponent’s surprise attack. Putting oneself in the opponent’s shoes requires taking off one’s own shoes first. Empathy should never be under-estimated, but empathy requires a safe space of acceptance and tolerance.

Yet, empathic engagement in such predicaments must be limited to cognitive empathy—use critical thinking to try to figure out what the Other is thinking and feeling in order to intervene in a way that is useful according the standards of a humane community. When confronting an aggressor, the empathic approach is to set limits, set boundaries, establish a safe space of one’s own that can be grown to include those willing to join.

The world was on fire last year at this time. The conflagration is spreading. Empathy is one of the few proven methods of deescalating anger and rage—but only if the parties are willing to do so. Empathy is based on creating a safe space of acceptance and tolerance within which the opposing parties can engage with the possibilities for expanding community. Killing everyone in sight and/or signing up for a suicide mission is indeed a solution—but all the evidence is that it is a bad solution. Once someone throws the first stone, or the first bomb, then self-defense, limit setting, drawing boundaries is appropriate. Empathy does not work with psychopaths, certain kinds of autism, most bullies, suicide bombers, totalitarian bureaucrats, and lynch mobs. It is not joke, but especially in the latter cases, call for backup. Many of these individuals will take your affective, emotional empathy and use it against you.

The FBI hostage negotiating team understands that empathy reduces rage and upset; and they use empathy in context for that purpose, though, as far as I know, they do not use the word “empathy” as such. Yet once the bullets start flying, the time for empathy has passed. Send in the swat team. For an illuminating article on the margins of empathy see Elizabeth Bernstein on “Advice From a [FBI] Hostage Negotiator” (WSJ.com 06/14/2020) [https://on.wsj.com/3ajoYon]. Never underestimate the power of empathy. Never.

Though not a new book, Micha Zenko’s Red Team considers the dynamics of thinking like one’s opponent, and it is as timely as it was five years ago.

(9) Radical empathy lands hard, and a grim empathy lesson hits home: If one wants to end a cycle of revenge killings and get peace, one is going to have to negotiate with the people who have killed one’s children and parents. As an analogous case, this grim empathy lesson was expressed by Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin (Oct 13, 2023) during Q&A in her talk, “The Triumph of Counter-Terrorism and the Despair of Human Rights” at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Aoláin draws on the example of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, The Troubles, between 1960 and 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. This had all the characteristics of intractable hatred, perpetrations and human rights violations, the British government making every possible mistake, the Jan 30, 1972 shooting of 26 unarmed civilians by elite British army troopers, internment without trail, members of the Royal Family (Louis Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy of India, and his teenage grandson (27 Aug 1979)) blown up by an IRA bomb, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) launching a mortar at 10 Downing Street (no politicians were hurt, only innocent by-standers), and many tit-for-tat acts of revenge killing of innocent civilians. It is impossible to generalize as every intractable conflict is its own version of hell—no one listens to the suffering humanity—but what was called The Peace Process got traction as all sides in the conflict became exhausted by the killing and committed to moving forward with negotiations in spite of interruptions of the pauses in fighting in order to attain a sustainable cease fire. The relevance to ongoing events in the Middle East will be obvious. An organization widely designated in the West as “terrorist” changes the course of history in the Middle East. Hearts are hardened by the boundary violations, atrocities, and killings. The response requires radical empathy: to empathize in the face of empathic distress, exhausted by all the killing. Though neither the didactic trial in Jerusalem (1961) of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann nor the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995) lived up to their full potentials, they formed parts of processes that presented alternatives to violence and extra judicial revenge killings. In this frame, the survivor is willing to judge if the perpetrator is speaking the truth and expressing what, if any, forgiveness is possible. The radical empathy that empathizes in the face of empathic distress acknowledges that moral trauma includes survivors who are also perpetrators (and vice versa). (See Tutu 1997 in the References for further details.) In a masterpiece of studied ambiguity, radical empathy teaches that two wrongs never make a right; they make at least twice the wrong; and one who sews the wind reaps the whirlwind.

(8) In the USA, librarians are the point of the spear in expanding empathy. Reading teaches one to walk in someone else’s shoes. Reading takes one to worlds that don’t exist, like the world of Harry Potter. One can feel what it was like for Rosa Parks to refuse to sit in the back of that segregated bus in 1955. This trend calls out the convergence of reading and empathy—both open up new worlds, both provide vicarious experiences of the lives of Others, both point to possibilities that had not previously been imagined. In both reading and empathy, we relate to an Other—in the one case in-person, in the other case, in-fiction or the vicarious presentation of historical narrative. Librarians will receive expanded empathy—just not in Florida or similar cultural swamps—but will continue to struggle with unemployment insurance and lost healthcare benefits—empathy for the reader goes into reverse as more books are banned from library shelves (by volume count) than are added to the library inventory. To be sure, parents are responsible for vetting the reading material that their children encounter. According to a Washington Post article, a majority of book ban complaints were filed by eleven (11) people (Hannah Natanson, “Objection to sexual, LGBTQ content propels spike in book challenges,” Washington Post, May 23, 2023 [see shortened URL: https://shorturl.at/hpEHM%5D; see also Reshma Kirpalani and Hannah Natanson, “The lives upended by Florida’s school book wars,” Washington Post, Dec 21, 2023). Your library’s reading list is being dictated by someone whose fears and inhibitions are inspiring her to legislate morality. Never has the power of the word—or magical thinking—been greater—if one says the word “gay,” that calls it forth and gives it reality. Might be worth a try: “Empathy, empathy, empathy!” “Peace on earth, peace on earth, peace on earth!”

(7) Rhetorical empathy emerges as a new practice and the distinction expands. Empathy is generally understood as a listening skill with responses being limited to short speech acts of recognition and acknowledgment, “I get you, man!” Rhetorical empathy refers to empathic responsiveness—speaking into the listening of the person with whom one is attempting to empathize with a form of words that indicates one understands what the Other has experienced. Not just listening, but also speaking empathically. For example, when Abraham Lincoln called in his 2^nd Inaugural address to “bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and is orphan,” Lincoln’s rhetorical empathy created a clearing for compassionate action. When Malcolm X said to his African American audience in an example of “out bound,” rhetorical empathy: “You didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth rock landed on you,” the audience felt heard and appreciated in its long suffering and struggle for social justice. The “Amens!” and laughter of knowledge that erupted in the audience were evidence of the accuracy of Malcolm’s empathic responsiveness. Arguably the Parables of Jesus of Nazareth—especially that of the Good Samaritan—are examples of rhetorical empathy—getting inside the experiences of the listeners to overcome their blind spots—in the case of the Good Samaritan of the understanding of who is one’s neighbor—the one who is in need right now. (See Blankenship 2019 in the References for more on rhetorical empathy.)

(6) Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense—about empathy. The trend is to confuse fake empathy and mutilated empathy with the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy, to the latter’s detriment. A cottage industry has grown up of demonstrating the biases and limitations of empathy, and, like any powerful skill, empathy has its strengths and weaknesses. A bold statement of the obvious: empathy can breakdown as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, or understanding getting lost in translation. However, these misfirings of empathy call for training and improving one’s practice of the skill, not giving up on it. That empathy can be parochial and favor the “in group” is properly remedied with expanded empathy and the practice of inclusion. The matter is complex. The practice of including the breakdowns of empathy in empathy’s definition is like invalidating the practice of carpentry because Roman soldiers used hammers and nails in crucifying their victims. A case in point is Alisha Gaines’ Black for a Day (see the detailed review: https://shorturl.at/ozNRU), in its own way an engaging narrative, which, however, presents significant problems. The narrative of Black for a Day consists in describing the cases of several non-fiction narratives of individuals, born Caucasian, who “go under cover,” changing the color of their skin cosmetically and chemically from white to black, in order to “pass” as African American while travelling in the American south (or, in one case, Harlem) in the late 1940s and 1950s (note well the dates!).

According to Black for a Day, these impersonations are supposed to produce empathy between the races and/or in white people for black people, but what they actually produce is “empathic racial impersonation”—that is, fake empathy. This is a subtle and complex point. Black for a Day denounces “empathic racial impersonation,” but what Black for a Day might more usefully be denouncing is fake empathy. Key term: fake empathy (my term, not Gaines’).

These social psychology experiments, “passing” as black, impersonating a black person, provide engaging adventures and misadventures that demonstrate that when one starts out by faking race, solidarity, integrity, relatedness, and empathy as input, then one gets fake race, fake solidarity, fake integrity, fake relatedness, and fake empathy as output. This is not surprising. Fake in; fake out. If one begins with pretense, deception, and inauthenticity as input, then one gets pretence, deception, inauthenticity—and fake empathy—as output. Black for a Day, as indicated, includes a fascinating account of what amounts to social psychology experiments gone bad. White people putting on the equivalent of black face, pretending to be black, is a bold experiment, which, admittedly engaging as a kind of misguided role playing, does not work as intended. As noted, such a mixed result no more invalidates a rigorous and critical empathy than that Roman soldiers invalidate the practice of carpentry by hammering nails into the limbs of the people they were crucifying.

A similar consideration applies to Glenda Carpio’s Migrant Aesthetics and the limits of empathy, which tries to force a choice between fighting against the evils of “empire” (racism, imperialism, the pathologies of capitalism, prejudices of all kinds, and so on) and empathy. (See the complete review at https://shorturl.at/absCQ.) But why force a choice between empire and empathy? Isn’t “empire” the systematic negation of empathy? Don’t we need to reduce the evils of empire and expand empathy? Such a choice must be declined and the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy brought to the struggle against global injustice.

(5) Historical empathy gets new relevance. You, dear reader, really gotta get this—history does repeat itself—a US President was elected to two non-consecutive terms and a popular socialist candidate ran for US President from prison after being convicted of sedition (but was not elected) in 1892 and 1920, respectively. This is an invitation to take an alternative, opposing point of view, regardless of what side you are on in 2024. Grover Cleveland was the only US President (so far!) to be elected twice to two non-consecutive terms (1885/1889, 1893/1897). During his first administration, Cleveland supported the Dawes Act of 1887, which basically legalized the stealing of Native American (Indian) land from the tribes. Shortly after assuming office for the 2^nd time, Cleveland called out the US Army as strike breakers to operate the railroad during the Pullman railway strike in 1894 under the pretext of delivering the US Mail. As a historical footnote, the reader may know that the railroad baron, George Pullman, built an ideal “city” on the southside of Chicago for his workers in a utopian moment of flush profits when other capitalists were squeezing workers as hard as they could. This good start came to a violent end in 1894 when railroad revenues plunged in the economic panic of 1893 and workers were laid off—but the Pullmanville rents were not reduced. The President of the Railway Union, Eugene Debs, went on in historical fact to run for President from prison in 1920. Debs was sent to prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing US participation in World War 1. He garnered nearly a million votes for his socialist party while unable to campaign. Heading an oligarchy of monied interests, Cleveland was a model of personal integrity in what was in-effect a fascist dictatorship in which the US Presidency and Congress were dominated by the robber barons of capitalism. A fictionalized account of this period is narrated in Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), which tells of the conflict between the trade union labor movement in the USA and a fictional fascist dictatorship that reads a lot like the Cleveland Presidency. One of Marx’s most relevant observations: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In this case, it was indeed Karl, not Groucho, Marx, though, I submit, worthy of Groucho. Still, democracy (in some version somehow) survived. Previous performance is no guarantee of future results.

(4) Empathy disrupts the patriarchy. The innovations of Simon Baron-Cohen into mind blindness, the ability to take the perspective of the Other (the folk definition of empathy), are well-known, even legendary. In a different context, Baron-Cohen’s research on gender has been influential but controversial. Men and women have different routes to accessing and activating their empathy; they respond to different pressures to conform to (or push back against) what the community defines as conforming to gender-appropriate behavior; and men and women even have different incentives for empathic performance. For example, “…[M]en’s scores on an empathy task equaled women’s when a monetary reward for good performance was offered” (Bluhm 2017: 384). Monetary rewards up; empathy up? Though Bluhm does not say so, the author came away with the distinct impression of a much-needed debunking of the neurohype—what we would now call “alternative facts”—a job well done. Bluhm’s work is especially pertinent in constraining celebrity, executive consultants (once again, my term), running with the neuro-spin, and publishing in the Harvard Business Review, who assert that brain science shows one needs more women executives on corporate boards to expand empathy. I hasten to add that we do indeed need more women executives, but that is not something demonstrated by brain science, at least as of this date (Q4 2023). We need more women executives because it is demonstrated by statistics (just one of many sources of reasons other than brain science) that to devalue their contributions to innovation, service, and productivity of slightly more than half the population is a highly problematic business practice—foolish, inefficient, and wasteful. The challenge is that the practices that make one good at business—beating the competition, engaging technology problems, solving legal disputes—do not necessarily expand one’s empathy, regardless of gender. Empathy under capitalism is an equal opportunity debunker—take a walk in the Other’s shoes in order to sell him or her another pair; treat the workers with respect and dignity in order to sustain commitment to the mission and enhance productivity.

(3) The banality of empathy gives way to a thoughtful rigorous and critical empathy. Namwali Serpall’s “The Banality of Empathy” (2019) provides the entry point. Nice title. Serpall is invoking Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1971), about which it is hard to say just a little. I shall try. One of Arendt’s recurring themes is that evil is a consequence of thoughtlessness. “Enlarged thinking” interrupts thoughtlessness by “trying on” and integrating many diverse points of view. According to Arendt, Eichmann was a simpleton, a “Hans Wurst” from the folktale, who did not think and just followed orders. The wanted-dead-or-alive poster for Thoughlessness has Eichmann’s photo on it. The result of thoughtlessness was catastrophe. Indeed. Of course, Eichmann had many “fellow travelers” in genocide.

If one empathizes thoughtlessly, the banality of empathy of Serpall’s title, then one is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and Arendt, no advocate for sloppy anything, much less sloppy empathy, is halfway, but not all-the-way, there with her invocation of Kant’s rigorous and critical method. The above-cited quotation from Arendt and my analysis of terms must count towards a clarification of the nuances of the matter of empathy.

Serpall’s article then raises the question about narrative art “If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?” Though this may have been intended as a rhetorical question, the answer requires an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Some witnessing of suffering does indeed spark good deeds. The standard Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan when he stops to help the survivor of the robbery thereby creating neighborliness and community; whereas the Levite and Priest succumb to empathic distress and cross the road, thereby expanding indifference and alienation. These events get “narrativized” in the Parable of the same name, which, in turn, inspires some to good deeds, though others are left paralyzed by empathic distress.

(2) In the USA, empathy causes the temperature in politics to cool down. Groups called Braver Angels and the Listening First Coalition are making it a priority to bring the practice empathic listening to hot button political issues and disrupt “false polarization” with empathy—similar to the “empathy circles” (work inspired by Edward Rutsch and thecultureofempathy.com). Such empathy-based conversations are not trying to change participants’ minds about the issues; they are trying to change the participants’ minds about each other. In an account in Aaron Zitner’s WSJ.com article (cited below): “Each party would meet separately at the start and come up with a list of the most common false stereotypes of their group—what they think the other party believes incorrectly about them. Then, they would ask what was true of themselves, instead. Finally, they would ask themselves to acknowledge any kernel of truth to the stereotype. Only then would the two parties meet and discuss how each side sees the other. A central goal was to reduce “false polarization”—the misperception that the people in the other party are more extreme in their views than is true.” If this is not the practice of empathic listening, then I would not know it. As the Wall Street Journal article points out, substantial donor dollars are in play, so this trend has legs. See the shortened URL for Aaron Zitner’s Dec 25, 2023 Wall Street Journal article, “Meet the Americans Trying to Lower the Temperature in Politics”: https://shorturl.at/bBM23.

(1) Empathy “the hard way” results in radical empathy. Empathy “the hard way” means that there is no way of getting to radical empathy except through empathy. For example, one could take a short cut through mind reading, mindfulness, diverse spiritual or religious practices, or chemical interventions such as micro dosing with psilocybin. No doubt all of these and more will be assayed by one thinker or would-be empath or another, and nothing is wrong with that. However, the approach of this work is that the hard work of practicing a rigorous and critical empathy is the path on which radical empathy goes forward. Empathy, whether radical or standard, is at risk of breaking down into empathic distress, misfiring, or failing into the breakdown, or failure of standard empathy with which a would-be radical empathy has to struggle. The short account is that standard empathy encounters a hard case—complex physical and moral trauma, double-binds, tragedy embedded in tragedy (examples are many and not hard to find)—and standard empathy breaks down into empathic distress.

When empathy is practiced by an individual or group that is committed to continuing to empathize in the face of empathic distress, then standard empathy is able to emerge from the refiner’s fire of the breakdown of empathy as radical empathy. This is empathy the hard way. In other words, radical empathy is not a predictable result. As an exercise consider what would empathy “the easy way” look like? What is really needed is a kind of Turing Test for empathy. No, not ChatGPT, though that is a possibility for future research. As a first approximation such a test exists—though it does so in a fictional universe. A masterpiece ahead of its time, Philip K. Dick’s (1928–1982) negative fantasy of the future Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) provides for the Voight-Kampff Empathy test (a fiction within a fiction). Once again, life continues to imitate art. One thinks that nothing like a Philip K. Dick’s Voight-Kampff empathy test ever existed. Think again. Helen Riess, MD, (2018) and her neuroscience colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, have developed a bio-feedback-like set of protocols to train medical doctors and related healthcare professionals in regulating their physiological arousal in contexts relevant to empathy, which context, in medicine, is exactly every encounter with a conscious patient. These protocols and this training are proprietary, intellectual property, and are confidential, so I cannot assess the details. Though I am not sure, it sounds like the trainer puts the little Velcro-cuff on one of the subject’s fingers to measure the galvanic skin response. Galvanic skin response is a blunt instrument and does not distinguish between emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, high spirits, much less subtle states such as envy or indignation, yet it does provide a measure of physiological stimulus and arousal. Useful. Might be worth a try. Never was it truer, if you want to sell something, put the word “neuroscience” on it. That’s empathy “the easy way,” but it’s not empathy. It’s gimmick, but, heck, maybe a gimmick just just what empathy needs in these times of alternative facts and fake everything. However, if one is “suffer[ing] woes which Hope thinks infinte; […] wrongs darker than death or night” and one needs “to defy power, which seems ominipotent,” then empathy “the hard way” is the alternative path – to empathize in the confrontation with empathic distress until empathy creates from its own wreck the empathy it contemplates.

References

Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (tr.). New York: Bantam Books, 1961.

Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.

Robyn Blum. (2017). Gender and empathy. In (2017). The Routledge Handbook of the philosophy of Empathy. Heidi Maibom (ed.). London/New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis).

Brenda Carpio. (2019). Migrant Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Pres. [See separately published review: at https://shorturl.at/absCQ.]

Simon Baron-Cohen. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books (MIT Press), 1997.

______________________. (2003). The Essential Difference: Males, Females, and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books.

______________________. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26]

Alisha Gaines. (2018). Black for a Day. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. [See separately published review: at : https://shorturl.at/ozNRU.]

H. Riess. (2018), The Empathy Effect. Boulder, CO: Sounds True; for details see separately published “Review: The Empathy Effect by Helen Riess”: https://shorturl.at/AFZ36 [checked on 2023/09/12].

Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].

Desmond Tutu. (1997). No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Random House.

Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.

Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas in the original Broadway production of Native Son (1941), photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son

December 16, 2023 4:28 pm / Leave a comment

Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son(New York: Harper Perennial 504 pp + end matter)

The varieties of empathy and empathic experiences extend from authentic empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic responsiveness, all the way to fake empathy and mutilated empathy. Wright’s novel, Native Son, provides abundant examples of how empathy breaks down into emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications getting lost in translation. Of course, once empathy breaks down and fails, strictly speaking, it is no longer empathy and calls for a response to “clean up” the misunderstanding out of which a rigorous and critical empathy is restored and reestablished. Nevertheless, the varieties of empathically related phenomena that are constellated makes Wright’s classic work a study in empathy in all its diverse forms.

Native Son is as powerful and timely as it was when Richard Wright first published it in 1940. Though it has aspects of tragedy and traffics in ruin and wreck, in the final analysis, it has as much in common with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as it does with ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.

The novel has not changed since 1940, but the world has – becoming both better and worse. To open up the reader’s historical empathy, a background report will be useful and is provided. This report also provides a chapter in African American history. The engagement with Native Son will be interspersed in this review with historical details that bring to life the power of the story in ways that might not be appreciated without a firm historical grounding. This is not a digression but of the essence, lest we forget how far we have come, and how far we still have to go to expand empathy and attain social justice.

The world has become better in that the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus the Board of Education (1954) that separate, segregated education in grammar and high schools is inherently

unequal. That is worth repeating: Separate but equal is inherently unequal. The world has become better in that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (1965/1965) were passed by a super majority of Congress. These outlawed segregation by law, also called “Jim Crow”; these enabled county and congressional districts in the South (or anywhere) with majority black populations to register to vote and elect black sheriffs and local officials. Why could they not do so previously? There were discriminatory poll taxes, which the impoverished people could not afford to pay; there were written tests (including trick questions) which people who lacked reading skills or merely had a grammar school education were unable to pass; there were other bureaucratic obstacles including the need to present state issued documents that were hard to obtain, putting the would-be voter in a double bind. One hastens to add that the struggle for social and political justice continues, with the US Supreme Court (2023) requiring Alabama and Georgia to redraw their gerrymandered congressional districts to allow for majority black districts. Under backward steps, the so-called “war on drugs” – espoused by Nancy Reagan and implemented by the Clinton administration, resulted in the incarceration (still ongoing) of a generation of young black men for relatively victimless crimes involving using crack cocaine.

Meanwhile, schools of all kinds continue to be under stress because of mass casualty gun violence. Teaching is a tough job, especially elementary and middle schools and it has gotten tougher; the bureaucratic requirements to present politically correct curriculum has pushed out fundamental skills of critical thinking along with skills such as the three R-s – reading, writing and (a)rithmetic. These have been replaced by the need for librarians and administrators to act in the role of surveillance state capitalism (see Zuboff 2018), overseeing whether some text refers to “gay,” “trans,” the name of a sex organ, and so on, and that someone – especially a parent – might be made to feel uncomfortable. To be sure, parents and educators need to be sensitive to the stages of child development and present material that fits the stage at which the growing child is maturing.

While Jim Crow is a historical reference and black empowerment is advancing, at times haltingly, the number of unarmed black people who end up dead after encounters with the local police has astonished everyone – everyone except black people who have known all about it all along. Today the number of black CEOs of major corporations is some 5.9 % out of an overall black population of 13.6% (US Census). That is progress since 1940 when Wright’s work was published, at which time the percentage was essentially zero. Johnson Publications, the publisher of Ebony magazine (among others), would not be founded until 1942. Yet a case can be made that, though many of the social and legal details are different, the need for struggle and protest is as powerful today as it was in 1940. We are not living in a post racial society, notwithstanding fact of having had a black president. All this and more may usefully inform our reading of Native Son.

Now to the narrative. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas (henceforth referred to as “BT”), completes the 8^thgrade. He is too poor to continue school, nor is he motivated to do so. He experiences segregation and prejudice wherever he turns, as indeed do all black people. BT says, “Hell, it’s a Jim Crow army. All they want a black man for is to dig ditches. And in the navy, all I can do is wash dishes and scrub floors” (1940: 353). BT is not allowed to become a pilot or a tank driver or a professional. “I wanted to be an aviator once. But they wouldn’t let me go to the school where I was suppose’ to learn it. They built a big school and then drew a line around it and said that nobody could go to it but those who lived within the line. That kept all the colored boys out” (1940: 353). It is true there were a few exceptions – some black people go to college and become doctors, lawyers, or engineers, though how they pulled that off is not for the faint of heart.

However, basically, the form of life under segregation (Jim Crow) does not just lack possibility – the possibility of possibility itself is missing. Possibility is not even defined. What does that mean? For example, as soon as Barak Obama was elected US President, the media went to middle schools and interviewed black ten-year-old children about what they wanted to be when they grew up. They immediately knew they wanted to be President. Now this little different than wanting to be a cowboy or a fireman or a doctor, a child’s fantasy. The point is that prior to Obama’s election the possibility could not even be imagined by black children, excepting perhaps some weird science fiction scenario. That is what is meant by the possibility of possibility. BT lacks the possibility of possibility.

What happens in the narrative after BT serendipitously gets a “good job” as a chauffeur with a wealthy white family, shows that BT still does not “get” – understand or experience – the possibility of possibility. BT is so constantly in survival mode that, in trying to survive, he does the very thing that causes his tragic undoing. It is a well-known stereotype that whenever a black man is lynched or otherwise “taken down” socially, he is initially accused of assaulting or trying sexually to molest a white woman.

Who Is BT as a person and as a possibility at the start of the story? He is bully and a petty criminal. Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X, was eleven years old when Wright began working on Native Son in 1936. Both BT and Malcolm, each in their own way, started out as petty criminals. Malcolm was arrested and went to prison. Malcom was the only person I ever heard of who said that prison made him better – indeed saved his life – because he met a follower of a version of strict Islam that enabled him to turn his life around, channeling his intelligence and leadership skills into black empowerment (though, ultimately, it also eventually led to his undoing in a tragedy of betrayal).

Meanwhile, in Native Son, Mary Dalton is the young adult daughter of the wealthy Henry Dalton, who has given some $5 million dollars to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) while continuing to operate inner city slums overcrowded with blacks who are unable to rent or buy in other neighborhoods due to red lining and restrictive covenants (contracts) that prevent selling to black people. Moral ambiguities and flat-out hypocrisy are front and center. Henry’s wife is blind – she cannot see – and walks about the mansion dressed in white like a ghost. Everyone else in the novel – black and white – can see well enough – are visually unimpaired – but have blind-spots and unconscious biases sufficient to sink the Titanic. They do. Full speed ahead into the field of ice bergs!

Mary is an undergraduate at the local university near their mansion on Drexel Blvd. As a part of her late adolescent rebellion, she goes for the kind of boyfriends most calculated to shock her parents. She likes those “bad boys.” In this case, that would be the left wing radical and card carrying communist, Jan. On background, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – Sacco and Vanzetti – were executed in the electric chair in 1927 for being anarchists, amid anti-Italian and anti-immigrant hysteria, not for the robbery and murder of which they were convicted and did not commit.

Wright was authoring at a time (circa 1936) when the Great Depression was still very much an economic reality. The Mayor was a machine boss, who would respond to crime waves by rounding up Communists and Negros. The Governor would call out the National Guard to put down workers who tried to form a union and go out on strike. The blacklisting of workers, both white and black (but mostly white because the blacks did not have jobs), who attempted to form unions was common, which meant they could not find work. Corporations stockpiled tear gas, vomit gas, ammunition and machine guns for armed strike breakers to use against railroad, steel, and manufacturing workers who dared to go out on strike. The National Labor Relations Board was not even validated by the US Supreme Court until 1937 in NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1 (1937). The forty-hour work week did not become law until the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first enacted in 1938 under President Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This was a different world from 2023 and being a “Communist” meant something different than it does today, when, in the wake of the success of the trade union movement, much of what the original movement sought to accomplish (such as the 40 hour work week, sick leave, paid overtime, etc.) is part of standard legal labor law practice, rendering The Party irrelevant. Nevertheless, Mary and her boyfriend, Jan, a committed Communist, saw a common cause between the oppressed workers and the oppressed black people, and in this they were accurate enough, but naïve and idealistic, even utopian, in what it was going to take to make a difference.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions – and fake empathy. The privileged daughter, Mary, of the wealthy real estate tycoon (Mr Dalton), wants something from her new chauffeur. Remember, BT has just got a new, good paying job as the chauffeur. Mary wants him (BT) to ignore orders from her father, BT’s employer, and drive her around town with her boyfriend instead of to the University. Mary uses him (BT) as she would any extension of her own self-interest. For Mary, BT is an extension of her narcissism. BT later reports on his first encounter with Mary:

“She acted and talked in a way that made me [BT] hate her [Mary]. She made me feel like a dog. I was so mad I wanted to cry [. . . .] Mr Max, we’re all split up. What you say is kind ain’t kind at all. I didn’t know nothing about that woman. All I knew was that they kill us for women like that. We live apart. And then she comes and acts like that to me” (1940: 35).

The “acted like that” is the fake empathy – it seems kind enough on the surface in that the language does not have any devaluing words; yet there is a subtext – a soft violence, a quiet aggression, a conversational implicature that wrappers the relationship in BT’s subordination. “Acted like that” may also have a seductive aspect to it in that “being nice” in a situation where “no contact” is the norm may easily be misinterpreted as romantic flirting. The latter is not explicit in the text, but one thing is clear: BT and Mary Dalton really are the moth and the flame. Naivete and innocence are abundant on all sides. The moth has an automatic, hypnotic-like attraction to the flame. Little does the moth know what awaits. Does the flame have empathy for the moth? No, the flame is just the flame, towards which the moth has a luminously-based incentive that is its incineration. On background, the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Loving v Virginia in 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws, prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks (among others), were unconstitutional.

BT has survived on the street among white people by saying “Yessum; it’s all right with me” (1940: 64) and doing as he is told, and (in effect) justifying it by saying he was following orders. Recall, this is 1938 and that statement will come to have a different meaning in 1963 as Hannah Arendt reports for The New Yorker magazine on the trial of one Adolph Eichmann, who said something similar regarding the Holocaust. “I was just following orders.” There is nothing wrong with a chauffeur following orders, yet, in this case, “following orders” from Mary because she is white is an integrity outage in relation to his employment agreement with Mr Dalton to drive Mary to school. BT’s relationship to his word is as “fast and loose” as a rabbit randomly zig-zagging to try to survive by escaping a predatory fox.

Mary tells him “After all, I’m on your side” (1940: 64), and BT was not even aware of the possibility that changing side was imaginable – that there was a gate in the wall between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, employed and unemployed – mostly white and black. BT is getting $25 dollars a week and a pound of pork chops costs 5 cents ($.05), so that is a good wage. BT is in touch with his own self-interest, which is to keep his job so he can help himself and his mother and siblings. Yet something is off:

“Now, what did that mean? She was on his side. What side was he on? Did she mean that she liked colored people? Well, he [BT] had heard that about her whole family. Was she really crazy? How much did her folks know of how she acted? But if she were really crazy, why did Mr Dalton let him drive her out? [….]

“She was an odd girl, all right. He [BT] felt something in her over and above the fear she inspired in him. She responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she. And he had never felt that before in a white person. But why? Was this some kind of a game? The guarded feeling of freedom he had while listening to her was tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do” (1940: 64, 65).

If someone tells you something that is too good to be true, it probably is. The ancient Greeks besieging Troy give up, sail off, and leave behind a giant horse as a gift to the gods. Casandra throws a spear at it, and it makes a hollow sound – thwomp! “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!” No one believes her. Things do not work out well for the Trojans. “After all, I’m on your side.” The blind Mrs Dalton, walking around the mansion in her ghostly white gown, is the ineffective prophet, representing the blindness of all the players.

“Fake empathy” is defined here as a form of empathic responsiveness in which the person(s) claiming to be empathic towards the Other believe their own BS (bunkum, baloney, balderdash), endorse their own malarky, and, in effect, are sincerely self-deceived about the conflict of interest in which they are engaged. In another context, “fake empathy” could mean being intentionally deceptive as when a used car salesman knows the auto is defective but represents it as being in excellent shape. In most cases, the problematic sales person believes his or her own lies and could pass a lie detector test, which, of course, does not detect lies, but merely physiological arousal due to the stress of trying to deceive.

Mary wants BT to hide the facts from her father (that she is not gong to night school but out on the town with her “bad boy” community friend Jan). This puts BT at risk of losing his job. Mary acts in such a way as to claim to be on BT’s side, which is accurate enough in that she endorses racial integration and rights for workers, while seemingly remaining uninformed about the monopoly rents collected from black people by her father’s South Side Real Estate Corporation. Yet how could she not know? Another blind spot. More deception and self-deception.

If a further example is needed, Mary’s fake empathy continues as an expression of naivete and projection:

“You know, Bigger [BT], I’ve long wanted to go into these houses,” she said, pointing to the tall, dark apartment buildings looming to either side of them, “and just see how your people live. You know what I mean? I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro house. Yet they must live like we live. They’re human . . . . There are twelve million of them . . . ” (1940: 69–70; italics and ellipsis in the original)

In so far as Mary genuinely cares about her black neighbors, this is a first step, born of good, caring intentions. However, Mary’s privilege, naivete, and arrogance (this list is not complete) are obstacles to her empathy. Her empathy misfires as projection. Mary speaks to BT in the third person about the group of which he himself is a part. The condescension is so thick that BT’s street knife would not cut through it had he even thought to try. Mary says, “Yet they [black people] must live like we live,” and that is definitely not the case. BT lives with his mother and two younger siblings in a single room. The opening scene of the novel involves a battle with a large rat in the small single room. Thus, the building is rat infested. Mary lives in a mansion with multiple servants, including BT. Mary tries to take a walk in BT’s shoes, shifting points of view, but it does not work. She is unable to take off her own shoes, so to speak – she can only imagine a glamorous life of travel – and her empathic imagination is insufficient to have a vicarious experience of the grinding, dehumanizing, poverty of her black neighbors, which poverty lives in her blind spot.

In contrast to fake empathy, a rigorous and critical empathy examines its own blind spots, projections, and conflicts of interests. It knows that it can be inaccurate or misfire. By cleaning up its conflicts of interests, projections, emotional contagions, and/or messages lost in translation, empathy becomes critical and rigorous. Unfortunately, Mary does not live to have the opportunity to work through her fake empathy to a rigorous and critical one, and BT experiences this dawning realization as he awaits execution for killing her.

The reader may say, I want instant empathy. Like instant coffee, just add water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice? Nor is anyone saying such a thing as “instant empathy” is impossible. It may work well enough in a pinch; but like instant coffee, the quality may not be on a par with that required by a more demanding or discriminating appreciation and taste.

Jan’s case is similar to Mary’s though more nuanced. Jan wants something from BT as does Mary, but Jan’s agenda is less individual and, as befits a Communist, guided by an analysis of class. Yet he is equally naïve and utopian. Driving along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which offers a panoramic view of the tall buildings in the central city from the South Side, Jan remarks:

“We’ll own all that some day, Bigger,” Jan said with a wave of his hand. “After the revolution it’ll be ours. But we’ll have to fight for it. What a world to win, Bigger! And when that day comes, things’ll be different. There’ll be no white and no black; there’ll be no rich and no poor” (1940: 68).

Jan’s innocence can be measured in that he is not even a very good Communist – his economic analysis is badly flawed. Jan talks as if the Communist revolution will change ownership from the capitalist to the communists whereas any Communist will tell you that the revolution will bring about the abolition of private property. Yet even if he is not a good Communist, Jan is a good human being. His righteous indignation is functioning. Learning that BT’s father was killed in a riot (read “massacre”) targeting black people in the South, Jan says to BT:

“Listen, Bigger, that’s what we want to stop. That’s what we Communists are fighting. We want to stop people from treating others that way. I’m a member of the Party. Mary sympathizes. Don’t you think if we got together we could stop things like that?” [….] You’ve heard about the Scottsboro boys?” (1940: 75; quotations and italics in the original)

On back ground, in 1931 eight black young adults and one juvenile, The Scottsboro Boys, were falsely accused of raping two women. After examination by a medical doctor, no evidence of rape was found. None. The testimony of the women themselves was coerced in that they were involved in sketchy activities that might have opened them up to criminal charges. The young men were tried by an all-white male jury for rape and sentenced to death for it (except for the juvenile, who was sentenced to life in prison). The NAACP and the Communist Party provided legal assistance to the young men and stopped the State from executing them; but they had to endure long and unjust years in prison. The novel calls out the newspaper headline in bold type in referring to BT:

“AUTHORITIES HINT SEX CRIME. Those words excluded him [BT] utterly from the world. To hint that he had committed a sex crime was to pronounce the death sentence; it meant wiping out of his life even before he was capture; it meant death before death came, for the white men who read those words would at once kill him in their hearts” (1940: 243).

BT’s life unfolds in three phases. Phase 1 lasts until, BT puts a pillow over the face of an intoxicated Mary Dalston, in trying to keep Mary from crying out and giving away that he (a black man) is alone with a white woman, even more “incriminating,” in her bedroom. At best he will lose his job – before being lynched for “rape.” The latter is here defined as the white man’s projected fantasy of the black man’s sexual attraction to and on the part of the white woman, which fantasy must be eliminated by lynching the innocent black man. (See the appendix on the varieties of prejudice below.)

What actually happens when BT is left alone with Mary Dalton, who is completely drunk? Mary is sloppy drunk, and can barely stand. BT tries to help her to her bedroom – by supporting her up the stairs. Practically, he has to carry her. Mary’s blind mother, Mrs Dalton, an insomniac, is wandering about the mansion like a ghost. The reader can see trouble coming – suppose they are discovered together in the dark in or near the bedroom? BT tries to explain to his girlfriend Betsy what happened:

“I didn’t mean to kill her. I just pulled the pillow over her face and she died. Her ma came into the room and the girl was trying to say something and her ma had her hands stretched out, like this, see? [The mother, Mrs Dalton, is blind and could not see BT.] I was scared she was goin’ to touch me. I just sort of pushed the pillow hard over the girl’s face to keep her from yelling. He ma didn’t touch me; I got out of the way. But when she left I went to the bed and the girl … She … She was dead” (1940: 227; italics in the original).

This decisive event happens early on in the story. The reader can see it coming. Mary is drunk. BT is uncertain what to do. Mr Dalton did not clarify to the new chauffeur (who is an extension of the auto) that the “boss” is Mr Dalton, who seems to have a blind spot about his angelic daughter’s rebellious streak. The unconscious fantasy, the unconscious bias, is that a black man alone with a white woman, much less an intoxicated one, is the equivalent of statutory rape. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense move the action forward. Every action that BT takes to avoid the false accusation advances the action in the direction of an even more tragic outcome. BT ends up smothering Mary in order to avoid being discovered with her and being falsely accused of rape (which, of course, will get one lynched). In BT’s conversation with his attorney, Mr Max, BT muses:

“They would say he had raped her and there would be no way to prove that he had not. That fact had not assumed important in his eyes until now. He stood up, his jaws tightening. Had he raped her? Yes, he had raped her [but, of course, not literally]. Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a well and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape very time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too was rape.” (1940: 227 – 228)

BT’s lawyer (Mr Max) tells the judge at BT’s trial:

“…[T]hat night a white girl was present in a bed and a Negro was standing over he, fascinated with fear, hating her; a blind woman walked into the room and that Negro [BT] killed that girl to keep from being discovered in a position which he knew we claimed warrants the death penalty” (1940: 400).

The being present together in the bedroom of the black chauffeur and the drunken white college age daughter is in 1940 already a capital crime for all intents and purposes. Here” rape” becomes a cipher for all the boundary violations perpetrated by survivors of perpetrations of survivors of perpetrations, and so on, in a seemingly endless cycle back to the Atlantic slave trade (which does not come up in the novel). Two wrongs do not make a right, and yet it is BT’s ownership of the crime that gives him agency, even if that agency is mutilated by the crime that calls it forth.

In Phase 2, BT lives into the devaluing expectations that white people have of him – he becomes a kind of Frankenstein – not just a monster but one created by white society, which monster seeks to strike back for the perceived injustice but goes about it in all the wrong ways that indirectly validate the stereotypes that live in white fantasy. James Baldwin has criticized Wright for writing a protest novel in which black people are depicted as dangerous – sexually and aggressively – in a way that maps to white racist stereotypes. And there is truth to it, yet at every step, Wright’s exaggerated “black badness” calls forth the unexaggerated social and legal injustices of discrimination in the North and Jim Crow in the South. Once again, two wrongs do not make a right. Two wrong make a bad situation worse – and at least twice the wrong. Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone; and, in this case, shame does not stop the stones from flying. Once the stones start flying, no one is spared. Wright makes it clear that BT is caught in the double bind of his own untutored judgment and the incoming pervasive slow violence (and fast aggression) of white society’s segregationist limitations.

In Phase 2, BT descends into hell in a particular sense. It is a kind of mutilated journey of the hero (think of Joseph Campbell’s mythologizing (1990)) on the way to a rebirth of agency, however, with one key difference. BT had not yet been born as a responsible agent, so, instead of “rebirth,” it would be better to say “birth,” born for the first time ever. The definition of hell includes an abundance of pain and suffering, to be sure, but the real hell is that no one hears it – not even God. This is BT’s description:

“[…[T]here were screams and curses and yells of suffering and nobody hears them, for the walls were thick and darkness was everywhere” (1940: 361).

This is BT’s experience of hell as he is locked up in Cook County Jail awaiting his fate. There is no evidence that Wright ever read Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus(or vice versa) or Mephistopheles’ description of hell contained in it. Wright was writing just as World War 2 was starting; Mann, perennially and a few years afterwards as Europe was a smoking ruin that still stank of the crematoriums of the Nazi concentration camps. Note well the above-cited quote is Wright not Mann, and it was written seven years before Mann penned his own description of hell. In a fine literary gesture, in {Mann’s) Mephistopheles’ description of Hell, words are used indirectly to describe the indescribable. In Hell –

“Every compassion, every grace, every sparing, every last trace of consideration for the incredulous, imploring objection ‘that you verily cannot do so unto a soul’: it is done, it happens, and indeed without being called to any reckoning in words; in soundless cellar, far down beneath God’s listening […]” (Mann 1947: 245).

The key aspect of hell – what makes a hell into Hell – is not the fire and ice – though, to be sure, that is not to be dismissed – but the hellish thing is that no one is listening, not even God, especially not God. BT’s fate indeed, though a spark of what might be called radical hope (Lear 2008) emerges when BT meets Mr Max. Mr Max is a “Clarence Darrow for the defense” type lawyer, who is retained for BT by the Communist Party. They are trying to find a common cause between exploited works and the black victims and survivors of racial prejudice, poverty, and social injustice.

In phase three, BT discovers his agency in taking ownership of the quasi-accidental killing of Mary. But this is a very qualified (re)birth in that agency is shot through-and-through with moral trauma. BT is asked to make a choice he should not have to make; that, strictly speaking, he cannot make; and that, in any case, he inevitably makes whether he takes action or not, since doing nothing is also an action. BT enters Mary’s room as a survivor of systematic racism and Jim Crow. He tries to survive the encounter with Mary’s blind mother. He takes an action to prevent being discovered alone with a drunken white woman, and in doing so he unwittingly smothers her with a pillow to prevent her from talking drunken nonsense. BT enters the room a survivor, and leaves it as a perpetrator. That is moral trauma (also called moral injury” (Shay 2014)).

In phase three, BT becomes a kind of Frankenstein and chooses the dark side (in the Star War’s sense – already the language is impossible). Recall that in the original Mary Shelley story, Victor Frankenstein rejects the creature that he assembled out of spare body parts and animated using electricity (electricity being a not-well-understood phenomenon at the time (1808) to which quasi-magical powers were attributed). Dr Frankenstein’s creature is lonely and wants a mate, in effect, a girl friend; but the “mad scientist” cannot countenance creating another such physically hideous creature, thereby, giving birth to an entire race of miscreants. At that point the creature has a kind of Richard III moment – “since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / and hate [. . . ]” Though it changes the meaning of the sentence to stop it mid-phrase, “hate” is the active ingredient here. He becomes a monster, exacting his revenges by murdering members of Victor Frankenstein’s family. Likewise with BT.

Though all the details are different, BT’s fate follows a parallel trajectory at this point with hatred simultaneously providing the dehumanizing and humanizing element. Hate is also the principle that animates BT’s emergence into agency, albeit a mutilated one, since it occurs on death row.

Until BT committed the first murder, he was little different than the biblical Cain before he slew Abel. Human history begins at the point at which that murder, born of envy, occurs. The murder creates agency. Likewise with BT:

But, after he murdered, he [BT] accepted the crime. And that’s the important thing. It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight [. . . .] It was an act of creation! (1940: 396, 400)

In the beginning was the word – murder. Murder results in one thing for sure – more murder. “The surest way to make certain that there will be more such murders is to kill this boy [BT]” (1940: 391).

Now one may well say, there’s gotta be a better way to get one’s agency, and that would be an accurate statement.

An argument can be made that Mr. Max’s rejection of sympathy in favor of empathy serves the reader well. But does it serve BT well? In terms of saving BT’s life, it would be better to question his agency, to make a play for sympathy, and to point to poverty, cognitive limitations, and a limited IQ. Insult BT, but save his life? Max asks:

“Is love possible to the life of a man I’ve described to this Court?” (1940: 401)

The ability to love, to experience empathy for an Other, has been negated, annulled, killed, by the systematic racism of the entire community – this is soul murder. The short definition of soul murder (a distinction arguably implicit in Wright) is that it is the systematic lack of empathy that destroys the possibility of love, that destroys the very possibility of possibility.

Max’s Jeremiad raises the text to the level of an early articulation of the key theses of the 1619 project (see Hannah-Jones 2019). Max argues to the court that BT is in so many double binds, that his agency is compromised, his empathy is mutilated, by soul murder. (For a sustained treatment of soul murder see Shengold 1989.)

“But in conquering they [the early American settlers] used others, used their lives. Like a miner using a pick or a carpenter using a saw, they bent the will of others to their own. Lives to them were tools and weapons to be wielded against a hostile land and climate.”

Given that BT was convicted by an all-white jury and the Governor, to whom an appeal for clemency was to be made, was a known racist, one might say Max was like Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry undertaking a full frontal assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner – it was a massacre:

“I do not say this in terms of moral condemnation. I do not say it to rouse pity in your for the black men who were slaves for two and one-half centuries [. . . .] It was the imperial dream of a feudal age that made men enslave others” (1940: 389)

Once again, Mr Max eloquently anticipates the 1619 project (Hannah-Jones 2019):

“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country [….] Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life [….] What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst” (1940: 391).

“Men once oppressed our forefathers to the extent that they viewed other men as material out of which to build a nation; we in turn have oppressed others to such a degree that they, fumblingly as yet, try to construct meaningful lives out of us!” (1940: 398).

“The hate and fear which we have inspired in him [BT], woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness, into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality, have become the justification of his existence” (1940: 400).

This is again an early version and invocation of the ideas that would become the 1619 project. One result of systematic oppression, not just the loss of possibility, but the loss of the possibility of possibility. If one cannot get a job, then that is the loss of possibility; but if one needs and cannot get a work permit, then that is the loss of the possibility of possibility.

Max does not ask for sympathy for BT. Sympathy results in guilt, and people hate those who make them feel guilty, enacting aggression against them. Max asks for empathy, without, however, using the word, which, if granted, would result in community, in belonging, in relatedness. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, people will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 390) and sympathy does precisely that. Max address the court:

“If I should say that he [BT] is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate.”

[Max continues] “Of all things, men to not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but failing that […] they will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 389–390)

BT’s act of murder becomes a cause célèbre in the narrative. The NAACP and the Communist Party get BT a powerful attorney, Mr Max, who resembles the historical Clarence Darrow, taking on unpopular causes.

On background, the reader recognizes historical aspects of the Leopold/Loeb (1924) trial in which two wealthy, privileged University of Chicago students engage in a “thrill killing” of 14-year-old Bobby Franks for no good reason other than the killing itself. The perpetrators had near-delusional fantasies of über-man cognitive superiority and committing the perfect crime. Things do not go well. Leopold drops his reading glasses at the location where the victim’s body is dumped, connecting him to the crime scene. The dumbest mistake possible – and just possibly a “Freudian” slip. So much for cognitive superiority. Their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, engages in a 12-hour presentation at the sentencing hearing, in which, with a penetrating critique of capital punishment, Darrow successfully saves the 18- and 19-year-old murderers from the death penalty (Stone 1971). Darrow’s arguments are still used to today to defend teenage offenders. On background, Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936. Leopold was paroled in 1958.

Less well known is the case of Robert Nixon, who in May 1938 was arrested for murdering a woman with a brick in the course of robbing her apartment (1940: 504; 455 line 17). Nixon was poor and black – was not defended by Clarence Darrow, and was executed in August 1939.

Mr Max talks to BT like a Mensch, like a fellow human being, asking about what he (BT) thought had happened. Max asks a lot of questions, trying to get a sense of what BT had to survive and what motivated him to do what he did.

“Bigger [BT] knew that Max was trying to make him feel that he accepted the way he looked at things and it made him as self-conscious as when Jan had taken his hand and shaken it that night in the car. It made him live again in that hard and sharp consciousness of his color and feel the shame and fear that went with it, and at the same time it made him hate himself for feeling it. He trusted Max” (1940: 346–347)

BT gets in touch with his feelings. Max asks him if he raped Mary. The answer:

“Naw. But everybody’ll say I did. What’s the use? I’m black. They say black men do that. So it don’t matter if I did or if I didn’t” [ . . . .] Mr Max, when folks says things like that about you, you whipped before you born. What’s the use? Yeah; I reckon I was feeling that way [hating Mary] when I was in the room with her. They say we do things like that and they say it to kill us. They draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line. They don’t care if there’s no bread over on your side. They don’t care if you die. And they say things like that about you and when you try to come from behind your line they kill you” (1940: 349, 351).

BT is coming from a life of no possibility – no personal space, no (limited) education, no career, no respect from the community, no self-respect – and living into an imminent future of capital punishment, the electric chair: “Over and over he [BT] had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed” (1940: 345).

“He [BT] breathed softly, wondering about the cool breath of peace that hovered in his body. It was as though he was trying to listen to the beat of his own heart. All around him was darkness and there were no sounds. He could not remember when he had felt as relaxed as this before. He has not thought of it or felt it while Max was speaking to him; it was not until after Max had gone that he discovered that he had spoken to Max as he had never spoken to anyone in his life; not even to himself. And this talking had eased from his shoulders a heavy burden. [….] Max had not compelled him to talk; he had talked of his own accord […] by a curiosity about his own feelings. Max had only sat and listened, had only asked questions” (1940: 359 – 360).

Max gives BT a good listening – gives him empathy – and BT feels “better” – the “heavy burden” is lifted from his shoulders.. His hatred gets dialed down, though not completely extinguished. His inner conflict and hatred are lessened, even as he knows he is not going to get out alive from his self-made predicament:

Max validates BT’s perspective of “no possibility” in a description that also validates how whites are also entangled in systematic racism that lives in unconscious bias, albeit with less harmful effects on whites than blacks:

“And I know that almost every white face you’ve met in your life had it in for you, even when that white face didn’t know it. Every white man considered it his duty to make a black man keep his distance. He doesn’t know why most of the time, but he acts that way” (1940: 346).

In acknowledging how hopeless is the situation, something shifts in BT.

So far BT gets empathic receptivity – another person, Max, is able to take his point of view and have a vicarious experience of how he (BT) feels. In conversation with Max, BT comes to appreciate a new possibility – an empathic possibility. The Other – in this case Max – brings forth the BT’s own humanness, mutilated though it is, by taking the Other’s perspective.

“He [BT] stood up in the middle of the cell floor and tried to see himself in relation to other men, and thing he had always feared to try to do, so deeply stained was his own mind with the hate of others for him. With this new sense of the value of himself gained from Max’s talk, a sense fleeting and obscure, he tried to feel that if Max had been able to see the man in him beneath those wild and cruel acts of his, acts of fear and hate and murder and flight and despair, then he too would have, if he were they, just as now he was hating them and they were hating him. For the first time in his life he felt ground beneath his feet [. . .]” (1940: 361).

BT experiences the emerging ability to “see himself in relation to other men [persons].” Being related to others requires the distinction “self-Other,” open up the possibility of the Other taking a point of view on oneself. This is what Max did for BT in seeing “the man in him [BT] beneath those wild and cruel acts of fear and hate.” If Max can be related to BT, it demonstrates to BT that he can do that for himself and for and with Others, too.

“If he [BT] reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through those stone walls and felt other hands connected with other heart – if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock? Not that he wanted those hearts to turn their warmth to him; he was not wanting that much. But just to know that they were there and warm! [. . . .] And in that touch, response of recognition, there would be union, identity’ there would be a supporting oneness, a wholeness which had been denied him all this life” (1940: 362).

What makes the hands come alive in this image of electrical connection and the shock of the human is precisely “the response of recognition,” which brings strength, energy, and vitality to the human heart. This is the empathic moment for BT, which, however, arrives late in the day as he awaits almost certain execution for his crimes.

Thus, the accusation of early critics (and James Baldwin) against Wright of didacticism and protest literature. Perhaps in our own time, but before the racist jury, judge, mayor, and governor, Max makes the best of a bad situation. The result?

BT gets his vitality and aliveness from the Other, in this case Max. Max is able to “see the man in him” and BT, in turn, is able to see that Max sees the man in him (BT), and that grounds him (BT). The Other brings forth empathy for the one, who, in this example, is trying to see himself in relation to other men. A new possibility opens up – the possibility of possibility – relatedness, connectedness – empathy.

Appendix: A Short “Ted Talk” on the Varieties of Prejudice

One may say, prejudice is prejudice and all prejudices are alike, and there would be truth to saying that. Yet when one looks at the dynamics of prejudice, one cannot simply substitute the underlying dynamics of racism against black people for antisemitism or sexism or for homophobia. A short “Ted Talk” on prejudice will again inform our historical empathy.

The fantasy of black hyper masculinity is repressed as a source of anxiety challenging the white male’s (imagined) inadequate sexual potency. It then gets reversed and projected onto the devalued other, who comes at the white man as white woman’s desire for the stereotyped hyper sexed black man. Elisabeth Young-Breuhl (1996: 367) writes in The Anatomy of Prejudices:

The white male’s mythological contractions of black male sexuality – the images of Negro phallic power, animal lust, and rapaciousness – signal the jealousy and resentment over the black’s defilement pleasure, and they also reflect the white male’s anxiety that white women really desire the black’s aggressive sexuality.

In contrast to the hysterical fantasy of the over-dramatized black male, the Jewish person is made the target of an obsessional paranoid over-intellectualization – the totally fictional worldwide conspiracy of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense. The nonsense continues: In the case of homophobia, one stays with the dynamic of difference for one has to project that, in a certain sense, the boy finds other boys attractive, in that special sexual way, and must defend against being a “fag” by perpetrating acts of aggression. Nor should the sexism and misogyny be overlooked, for BT kills two women – Mary and Bessie – in the one case quasi-accidently and in the other in a cowardly fear of betrayal. In the case of the prejudices of racism (in the narrow sense against blacks) and antisemitism the devalued, despised Other becomes the target of projections one of own inner black and jew in every imaginable positive and negative sense. The differences collapse – inwardly I am the despised Other and get rid of the negative value by externalizing it. In sexism, the dynamic changes, and the anatomical difference between the sexes is such that the difference is impossible to deny, so the Other must be denied, deleted, “killed,” in order to reestablish integrity of the self. In the prejudices stereotype, the Other – the woman in this case – is hated for being inferior cognitively, physically, and so, even as the male harbors an unconscious fantasy of superiority, the power to create life, womb envy.

References

Joseph Campbell. (1990). The Hero’s Journey. Novato, CA: The New World Library.

Nicole Hannah-Jones. (2019). The 1619 Project. New York: One World (NYT Magazine).

Jonathan Lear. (2008). Radical Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Thomas Mann. (1947). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage Books, 1949.

J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090

Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.

Irving Stone (1971). Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Signet.

Richard Wright. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper Perenniel, 1998.

Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Harvard UP

Shoshona Zuboff. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

Photo image credit: Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas in the original Broadway production of Native Son (1941), photographed by Carl Van Vechten.

Cover art: The Song off Our Scars by Haider Warraich

Summer Reading: The Song of Our Scars by Haider Warraich

August 9, 2023 11:43 am / Leave a comment

I have been catching up on my summer reading: Haider Warraich. (2023). The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain. New York: Basic Books, 309 pp.

Haider Warraich, MD, has provided an account of our relationship with pain and suffering that is a “physician heal thyself” moment and narrative. Warraich’s work is a powerful combination memoire and biological-clinical briefing on the distinction between acute and chronic pain. Now an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, the author experienced a life altering back injury while he was in medical school. Suffice to say, the results were an entire encyclopedia of pains, extending from acute to chronic and back, and providing the reader with a compelling narrative of what medical science does not know about pain. Warraich has a way with words and catchy phrases. For example, regarding pain, “The human brain is not just staffing the ticketing booth as the [pain] circus – it is the ringleader” (p. 10). Just so.

Warraich argues: “To course-correct our approach to pain, we need to change the story of chronic pain – pushing back on the voices attempting to convince us all pain is catastrophic and life threatening and needs immediate attention over everything else right now” (p. 253). And yet the good doctor acknowledges that pain puts the person in pain in prison (p. 78). Chronic pain mirrors incarceration (p. 78); and, as for acute pain, the house is on fire and the patient is in it. Summon emergency services!? Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (pp. 232 – 233) is quoted approvingly as additional reading demonstrating that pain presents as requiring urgent attention. Pain resists language, and, when inflicted, for example, in torture, can destroy one’s humanity and integrity and world, requiring long, arduous, and doubtful recovery.

Warraich provides a series of engaging briefings on aspects of pain. The reader gets three basic distinctions differentiating: acute from chronic pain; pain as such versus painful emotions such as fear (e.g., pp. 54, 65), which this reviewer would gloss as “suffering”; and pain in the context of the relationship between mind and body.

Acute pain is exemplified by such experiences as an appendicitis, a broken bone, closing the car door on one’s finger, or dropping a brick on one’s toe. Ouch! In contrast, chronic pain is morning body ache and other intermittent and recurring aches, cramping from irritable bowel syndrome, osteoarthritis, hard-to-describe headaches, or the consequences of multiple back surgeries to the spine. Chronic stress – the boss is a bully, the kids are misbehaving, the spouse is having a midlife crisis,the commute back to the office is unavoidable, the toilet is clogged – results in chronic pain (p. 177). “When people become trapped in the clutches of chronic pain and chronic stress, their lives become engulfed in an eternal, inextinguishable fire – a fire as ferocious as the one that drives the hunger for profit that fuels many modern pharmaceutical giants” (p. 179). Thanks to neuro-plasticity (a key distinction further defined below), chronic pain reorganizes the nervous system. The body expresses the imbalance, the dis-equilibrium, of the mind and its emotions (the latter, admittedly, not distinctions covered in medical school in any detail). Chronic pain stops being a symptom of an injury and it takes on a life of its own, presenting as if the pain were a disease in itself instead of a signal of an underlying or related bodily injury. Chronic pain leads to suffering, a term that Warraich mentions but does not explicitly elaborate. For example, if pain is the dentist hitting an exposed nerve, suffering is being in the waiting room anticipating the dentist hitting the nerve.

According to Warraich, medicine is very good at anesthetizing the mammalian nervous system against such acute pain, but the use of the same anesthetics and analgesics against suffering is a deal with the devil. It might work in the short term; but be sure to read the fine print. The road to hell is paved with such agreements, which, it turns out, is a redescription of the opioid epidemic. In the following, Warraich writes “pain”, but it would be more accurate to say he means “suffering”: “The confluence of advances in medicine and a barrage of pharmaceutical companies marketing directing to doctors and patients birth a movement that deemed suffering unacceptable. As spiritual voids gaped inside those economically left behind and loneliness became a way of life, people in pain [i.e., suffering] kept being sent exclusively to doctors’ offices and pharmacies [for opioids to numb the pain]” (p.147). Loneliness is indeed painful, and poverty is definitely bad for one’s health, but not in the same way as a toothache or appendicitis – loneliness and poverty are chronic and make a person cry real tears of frustration, isolation, neglect, and anger. Yet the suffering is not localized like a toothache or peripheral injury, but seems to pervade the head and chest, calling forward a sense of being burdened by something imponderable and diffuse throughout one’s upper body. In chronic pain and the suffering brought forth by chronic pain, instead of the injured organism telling the brain of the peripheral injury in the limb by means of a pain signal upward to the brain, the brain (or, to be exact, the thoughts in it) are sending the signal in the other direction – downward – telling the organism to hurt. This may be specific, if there is a specific injury able to express the suffering, but more likely the pain points are diffuse and mobile – hard to define lower back pain (e.g., Warraich’s injuries), headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disorders. In short, acute pain is the organism telling the brain it (the skin or peripheral limb) is hurting; whereas chronic pain is the brain telling the organism it is hurting. However, the message is highly susceptible of distortion. In some ways, chronic pain can become the memory of pain, which may or may not indicate a current injury. Chronic pain can become the fear of pain itself, expanding into pain in the here and now. In short, opioids are effective in treating acute pain but are ineffective and harmful – I would say “a deal with the devil” – in treating chronic pain (p. 174).

The poster child that not all pains are created equal is phantom limb pain. Documented as early as the American Civil War by Silas Weir Mitchell, individuals who had undergone amputation, felt the nonexistent, missing limb to itch or cramp or hurt. The individuals experienced the nonexistent tendons of the missing limb as cramping and even awakening the person from the most profound sleep due to pain (pp. 110 – 111).

Fast forward to modern times and Ron Melzack’s gate control theory of pain marshals such phantom limb pain as compelling evidence that the nervous system contains a map of the body and its pains point, which map has not yet been updated to reflect the absence of the lost limb. In effect, the brain is telling the individual that his limb is hurting using an obsolete map of the body – the memory of pain. Thus, the pain is in one’s head, but not in the sense that the pain is unreal or merely imaginary. The pain is real – as real as the brain that is indeed in one’s head and signaling (“telling”) one that one is in pain.

One question that has not been much asked is whether it is possible to have something similar to phantom limb pain even though the person still has the limb functionally attached to the body. For example, the high school football player who needs the football scholarship to go to college because he is weak academically but actually hates football. He really incurs a painful soft tissue sports injury, which gets elaborated emotionally and psychologically, leaving him on crutches for far-too-long and both physically and symbolically unable to move forward in his life. Thus, due to the inherent delays in neuroplasticity – the update to the map is not instantaneous and one does not have new experiences with a nonexistent limb – pain takes on a life of its own. That is the experience of chronic pain – pain has a life of its own – pain becomes the dis-ease (literally), not the symptom. What then is the treatment, doctor?

Warraich radicalizes the issue of pain that takes on a life of its own before suggesting a solution. After providing a short history of opium and morphine and opioids, culminating “in the most prestigious medical school on earth, from the best teachers and physicians, we [medical students] were unknowingly taught meticulously designed lies” (p. 185), that is, prescribe opioids for chronic pain. The reader wonders, where do we go from here? To be sure opioids have a role in hospice care and the week after surgery, but one thing is for certain, the way forward does not consist in prescribing opioids for chronic pain.

After reviewing numerous approaches to integrated pain management extending from cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to valium, cannabis and Ketamine – and calling out hypnosis (hypnotherapy) as a greatly undervalued approach (no exteranl chemicals are required, but the issue of susceptibility to hypnotic suggestibility is fraught) – Dr Warraich recovers from his own life changing back injury in a truly “physician heal thyself” moment thanks to dedicated PT, physical therapy (p. 238). If this seems stunningly anti-climactic, it is boring enough to have the ring of truth earned in the college of hard knocks, but it is a personal solution (and I do so like a happy ending!), not the resolution of the double bind in which the entire medical profession finds itself (pp. 188 – 189). The way forward for the community as a whole requires a different, though modest, proposal.

Let us allow Dr Warraich to speak for himself: “I have come to believe a good doctor has an almost magical quality to feel what their patients feels – to see how they view the world, understand where they have been and what they’ve have seen all in an instant – as well as the knowledge and expertise to respond ethically to what they see from the other side. This superpower has a name: empathy” (p. 238). Never underestimate the power of a good listening. “’Mental distress may be perhaps the most intractable pain of all,’ she [Cicely Sanders] wrote, and the answer to it was not always more drugs, because for some ‘the greatest need is for a listener’” (p. 159).

Putting pain in the context of the relationship between soul and body, the body in pain expresses the suffering of the soul. While psychiatry and neurology do not even believe in the soul, they do begrudgingly allow that there is such a thing as “mental status,” which, for example, can be compromised by the hormonal imbalance of puberty, existential anxiety, jet lag, alcohol, delirium, or other insults to the organism such as blunt trauma, which, in turn, implies a conscious mind to have such a mental status. Here’s the issue: humans are neurons “all the way down,” but then the neurons start to generate consciousness – consciousness generates meaning – meaning generates language and relatedness, language and relatedness generates community, culture, art, literature, science, and humanity. However, there are numerous details that need to be filled in here, which are still the target of inquiry and ongoing research, and you won’t learn or be allowed to study them in medical school. I hasten to add that if you are experiencing a compromised mental status due to delirium, don’t call a hippie or professor of comparative literature – you need a medical doctor!

Notwithstanding my whole-hearted endorsement of Dr Warraich’s contribution – get multiple copies of this book and give it to your friends to read – this is not a softball review. Three criticisms come to mind.

First, Warraich rightly criticizes Rene Descartes’ (1596 – 1650) abstraction of the mind (including consciousness and consciousness of pain) from the body. Having divided the unity of the human being into two parts, mind (soul) and body, Descartes then needed a way to explain the communication between them. The mind obviously does not direct the body the way the pilot of a boat steers the craft. Absent neuro-pathology, the mind and the body are a near perfect unity. The body is the perfect servant of the mind – it prepares a cup of tea without my having to communicate the desire as if to a separate entity. It just knows and starts boiling the water. Descartes solution was to propose the pineal gland as the seat of the soul in the body. Warraich does Descartes one better by developing an entire narrative about the brain’s posterior insular cortex and anterior insula, identifying a novel kind of neuron, a von Economo neuron (p 63), from which pain emerges as an emotion generated by a physical sensation. An ingenious solution, which, however, is still a category mistake. What is missing – and here it is not Warraich’s issue but a general shortcoming of philosophy of science – is an account of emergent properties such as, for example, how mental states come forth from physical processes and, just as importantly, how mental states cause physical ones (as when one literally worries oneself sick).

Second, as regards the personal parts of the author’s narrative, pick a story and stick to it. The personal narrative starts out that the potentially life changing back injury is described as tissue damage (p. 5) – the painful consequences of which should never be underestimated. But by page 91 this is redescribed as a “broken back.” Literally? The value here is in describing how the patient’s relationship to pain influences his life and how Warriach has to transform his relationship to pain in order to recover his life as a medical doctor and his contribution to healing. Of course, one could have both tissue damage and a broken back. Here highly recommended reading, in comparison to which Warraich is a modest contribution, is Arthur Kleinman’s The Illness Narratives. Stories about how chronic pain transforms one’s life, including (for example) how repeated surgeries result in a “failed back” (which technically is different than a “broken back”). Such narratives are bound to give the reader pause that medical science (or even comparative literature) understands the relation between mind and body.

Finally, regarding the magical quality of empathy, I am a strong advocate of empathy, having published extensively on its applications. Never underestimate the power of empathy, and Warraich properly calls out the “empathy gap” in medicine (p. 244). But Warraich gives empathy a bad name in that he leaves empathy vulnerable to the critique that the above-cited magical power of empathy leads to compassion fatigue, empathic distress, and burn out. It can and does. This requires treatment too. Human beings are a complex species. They can be kind, generous, and empathic; but, as painfully demonstrated by the opioid epidemic, they can also be greedy, grasping, aggressive, territorial, bullying, experts in know-it-all-ism that obstructs listening, and exploiters of politics in the negative sense. The short empathy training is to drive out all these negatives, and empathy naturally and spontaneously comes forth. People (i.e., doctors) want to be empathic and will be so if given half a chance. The challenge is that the healing professions are constantly exposed to pain, suffering, trauma, and patients who can be difficult and unempathic precisely because they are in pain – or because they were difficult people prior to getting sick or hurt. A rigorous and critical empathy knows it can be wrong, breakdown, or misfire, so such an empathy also knows it can be validated. This reviewer believes Warraich’s compelling narrative may usefully have begun where it ends – with empathy and how empathy made a difference in his recovery and his daily life in the world of corporate medicine and at the Veteran’s Administration (VA). The VA has been criticized – “taken heat” – for not addressing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) until it is dismissed and returns as substance abuse, but, based on Warriaich’s reports (p. 248), the VA is doing breakthrough work in integrated pain management, meditation and hypnotherapy, ACT, reduction in prescribing opioids, and they may become a model for other providers. Dr Warraich’s matriculation in the college of hard knocks of chronic back pain gives him standing to elaborate such an empathic approach, and perhaps he will do so in a follow up publication.

Additional Reading

Lou Agosta. (2018). Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pairs Press.

Arthur Kleinman. (1988). The Illness Narratives. New York: Basic Books.

Elaine Scarry. (1985). The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thomas Satterwhite: Noble Margaret Garner

Beloved on Juneteenth in the context of empathy

June 28, 2023 3:09 am / Leave a comment

I am catching up on my summer reading. I finished Toni Morrison’s transfiguring classic Beloved on Juneteenth. Since another week was required to write the review, a belated joyous Juneteenth to one and all! I hasten to publish before the 4^th of July. For those who may require background on this new federal holiday, June 19th – Juneteenth – it was the date in 1865 that US Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in Texas some two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution definitively established this enshrining of freedom as the law of the land and, in addition, the 14^th Amendment extended human rights to all people, especially formerly enslaved ones. This blog post is not so much a book review of Beloved as a further inquiry into the themes of survival, transformation, liberty, trauma – and empathy.

“Beloved” is the name of a person. Toni Morrison builds on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person, who escaped with her two children even while pregnant with a third, succeeding in reaching freedom across the Ohio River in 1854. However, shortly thereafter, slave catchers (“bounty hunters”) arrived with the local sheriff under the so-called fugitive slave act to return Margaret and her children to slavery. Rather than submit to re-enslavement, Margaret tried to kill the children, also planning then to kill herself. She succeeded in killing one, before being overpowered. The historical Margaret received support from the abolitionist movement, even becoming a cause celebre. The historical Margaret is named Sethe in the novel. The story grabs the reader by the throat – at first relatively gently but with steadily increasing compression – and then rips the reader’s guts out. The story is complex, powerful, and not for the faint of heart.

The risks to the reader’s emotional equilibrium of engaging with such a text should not be underestimated. G. H. Hartman is not intentionally describing the challenge encountered by the reader of Beloved in his widely-noted “Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” but he might have been:

The more we try to animate books, the more they reveal their resemblance to the dead who are made to address us in epitaphs or whom we address in thought or dream. Every time we read we are in danger of waking the dead, whose return can be ghoulish as well as comforting. It is, in any case, always the reader who is alive and the book that is dead, and must be resurrected by the reader (Hartman 1995: 548).

Though technically Morrison’s work has a gothic aspect – it is a ghost story – yet it is neither ghoulish nor sensational, and treats supernatural events rather the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez does – as a magical or miraculous realism. Credible deniability or redescription of the returned ghost as a slave who escaped from years-long sexual incarceration is maintained for a hundred pages (though ultimately just allowed to fade away). Morrison takes Margaret/Sethe’s narrative in a different direction than the historical facts, though the infanticide remains a central issue along how to recover the self after searing trauma and event even beyond trauma. The murdered infant had the single word “Beloved” chiseled on her tombstone, and even then the mother had to compensate the stone mason with non-consensual sex. An explanation is required. Let us take a step back.

Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. “Implicature” is an indirect speech act that suggests an idea, even though the thought is not literally expressed. Conversational implicature lets the empathy in – and out – to be expressed. Such implicature expands the power and provocation of communication precisely by not saying something explicitly but hinting at what happened. The information is incomplete and the reader is challenged to feel her/his way forward using the available micro-expressions, clues, and hints. Instead of saying “she was raped and the house was haunted by a ghost,” one must gather the implications. One reads: “Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (Morrison 1987: 5 – 6). Then a causal conversation resumes about getting a different house as the reader tries to figure out what just happened. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (1987: 6). One of the effects is to get the reader to think about the network of implications in which are expressed the puzzles and provocations of what really matters at fundamental level. (For more on conversational implicature see Levinson 1983: 97 – 165.)

In a bold statement of the obvious, this reviewer agrees with the Nobel Committee, who awarded Morrison the Novel Prize in 1988 for this work. This review accepts the high literary qualities of the work and proposes to look at three things. These include: (1) how the traumatic violence, pain, suffering, and inhumanity as well as drama, heroics, and compassion of the of the events depicted, interact with trauma and transform into moral trauma; (2) how the text itself exemplifies empathy between the characters, bringing empathy forth and making it present for the reader’s apprehension; (3) the encounter of the reader with the trauma of the text transform and/or limit the practice of empathizing itself from standard empathy to radical empathy.

So far as I know, no one has brought Morrison’s work into connection with the action of the Jewish Zealots at Masada (73 CE). The latter, it may be recalled, committed what was in effect mass suicide rather than be sold into slavery by the Roman army. The 960 Zealots drew lots to kill one another and their wives and children, since suicide technically was against the Jewish religion. On brief background, after the fall of Jerusalem as the Emperor Titus put down the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 73 CE, a group of Jewish Zealots escaped to a nearly impregnable fortress at Masada on the top of a steep mountain. (Note Masade was a television miniseries starring Peter O’Toole (Sagal 1981).) Nevertheless, Roman engineers built a ramp and siege tower and eventually succeeding in breaching the walls. The next day the Roman soldiers entered the citadel and found the defenders and their wives and children all dead at their own hands. Josephus, the Jewish historian, reported that he received a detailed account of the siege from two Jewish women who survived by hiding in the vast drain/cistern that served as the fortress’ source of water.

The example of the Jewish resistance at Masada provides a template for those facing enslavement, but it does not solve the dilemma that killing one’s family and then committing suicide is a leap into the abyss at the bottom of which may lie oblivion or the molten center of the earth’s core. So all the necessary disclaimers apply. This reviewer does not claim to second guess the tough, indeed impossible, decisions that those in extreme situations have to make. One is up against all the debates and the arguments about suicide. Here is the casuistical consideration – when life is reduced from being a human being to being a slave who is treated as a beast of burden and whose orifices are routinely penetrated for the homo- and heteroerotic pleasure of the master, then one is faced with tough choices. No one is saying what the Zealots did was right – and two wrongs do not make a right – but it is also not obvious that what they did was wrong in the way killing an innocent person is wrong, who might otherwise have a life going about their business gardening, baking hallah bread, or fishing. This is the rock and the hard place, the devil and deep blue sea, the frying pan or the fire, the Trolley Car dilemma (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem). This is Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, who after the unsuccessful attempt in June 1944 to assassinate Hitler (of which Rommel apparently had knowledge but took no action), was allowed by the Nazi authorities to take the cyanide pill. This is Colonel Custer with one bullet left surrounded by angry Dakota warriors who would like to slow cook him over hot coals. Nor as far as I know is the case of Margaret Garner ever in the vast body of criticism brought into connection with the suicides of Cicero and Seneca (and other Roman Stoics) in the face of mad perpetrations of the mad Emperor Nero. This is a decision that no one should have to make; a decision that no one can make; and yet a decision that the individual in the dilemma has to make, for doing nothing is also a decision. In short, this is moral trauma.

A short Ted Talk on trauma theory is appropriate. Beloved is so dense with trauma that a sharp critical knife is needed to cut through it. In addition to standard trauma and complex trauma, Beloved points to a special kind of trauma, namely,moral trauma or as it sometimes also called moral injury, that has not been much recognized (though it is receiving increasing attention in the context of war veterans (e.g. Shay 2014)). Without pretending to do justice to the vast details and research, “trauma” is variously conceived as an event that threatens the person’s life and limb, making the individual feel he or she was going to die or be gravely injured (which would include rape). The blue roadside signs here in the USA that guide the ambulance to the “Trauma Center” (emergency department that has staff on call at all times), suggest an urgent emergency, in this case usually but not always, a physical injury. Cathy Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience. The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not experience it as something the person experienced. The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization. At the risk of oversimplification, Caruth’s work aligns with that of Bessel van der Kolk (2014). Van der Kolk emphasizes an account that redescribes in neuro-cognitive terms a traumatic event that gets registered in the body – burned into the neurons, so to speak, but remains sequestered from the person’s everyday sense of self. For both Caruth and van der Kolk, the survivor is suffering from an unintegrated experience of self-annihilating magnitude for which the treatment – whether working through, witnessing, or (note well) artistic expression – consists in reintegrating that which was split off because it was simply too much to bear.

For Dominick LaCapra (1999), the historian, “trauma” means the Holocaust or Apartheid (add: enslavement to the list). LaCapra engages with how to express in writing such confronting events that the words of historical writing and literature become inadequate, breakdown, fail, seem fake not matter how authentic. And yet the necessity of engaging with the events, inadequately described as “traumatic,” is compelling and unavoidable. Thus, LaCapra (1999: 700) notes: “Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or revenant.” Without intending to do so, this describes Beloved, where the infant of the infanticide is literally reincarnated, reborn, in the person named “Beloved.” For LaCapra, working through such traumatic events is necessary for the survivors (and the entire community) in order to get their power back over their lives and open up the possibility of a future of flourishing. This “working through” is key for it excludes denial, repression, suppression, and advocates for positive inquiry into the possibility of transformation in the service of life. Yet the working through of the experiences, memories, nightmares, and consequences of such traumatic events result in repetition, acting out, and “empathic unsettlement.” Key term: empathic unsettlement. The empathic unsettlement points to the possibility that the vicarious experience of the trauma on the part of the witness leaves the witness unwilling to complete the working through, lest it “betray” the survivor, invalidate the survivor’s suffering or accomplishment in surviving. “Those traumatized by extreme events as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it” (DeCapra 2001: 22). This “unsettlement” is a way that empathy may breakdown, misfire, go off the rails. It points to the need for standard empathy to become radical empathy in the face of extreme situations of trauma, granted what that all means requires further clarification.

For Ruth Leys (2000) the distinction “trauma” itself is inherently unstable oscillating between historical trauma – what really happened, which, however, is hard if not impossible to access accurately – and, paradoxically, historical and literary language bearing witness by a failure of witnessing. The trauma events are “performed” in being written up as history or made the subject of an literary artwork. But the words, however authentic, true, or artistic, often seem inadequate, even fake. The “trauma” as brought forth as a distinction in language is ultimately inadequate to the pain and suffering that the survivor has endured, (“the real”). Yet the literary or historical work is a performance that may give the survivor access to their experience. The traumatic experience is transformed – even “transfigured” – without necessarily being made intelligible or sensible by reenacting the experience in words that are historical writing or drawing a picture (visual art) or dancing or writing a poem or a literary masterpiece such as Beloved. The representational gesture – whether a history or a true story or fiction – starts the process of working through the trauma, enabling the survivor to reintegrate the trauma into life, getting power back over it, at least to the extent that s/he can go on being and becoming. In successful instances of working through, the reintegrated trauma becomes a resource to the survivor rather than a burden or (one might dare say) a cross to bear. To stay with the metaphor, the cross becomes an ornament hanging from a light chain on one’s neck rather than the site of one’s ongoing torture and execution. Much work and working through is required to arrive at the former.

Though Beloved has generated a vast amount of critical discussion, it has been little noted that the events in Belovedrapidly put the reader in the presence of moral trauma (also called “moral injury”). Two levels of trauma (and the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)) are concisely distinguished (for example by the Diagnositic and Statistical Manual(5^th edition) of the American Psychiatric Association (2013). There is standard trauma – one survives a life changing railroad or auto accident and has nightmares and flashbacks (and a checklist of other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)). There is repeated trauma, trauma embedded in trauma, double-bind embedded in double bind. One is abused – and it happens multiple times over a course of months or years and, especially, it may happen before one has an abiding structure for cognition such as a stable acquisition of language (say to a two-year-old) or happens in such a way or such a degree that words are not available as the victim is blamed while being abused – resulting in complex trauma and the corresponding complex PTSD.

But this distinction, standard versus complex trauma (and the correlated PTSD), is inadequate in the case of moral trauma, where the person is both a survivor and a perpetrator. For example, in a Middle East War zone, the sergeant sees an auto racing towards the check point manned by US soldiers. The sergeant thinks the auto is loaded with explosives – a car bomb. The sergeant gives the order to fire at the auto. After the auto is stopped by the fusillade, it turns out to contain family rushing to the hospital because the wife is giving birth. The now orphaned children are treated for their grave injuries in a military hospital. The result may indeed be like standard PTSD – nightmares, flashback. The resulting loss of their parents may result in complex trauma and complex PTSD. Meanwhile, the private who pulled the trigger believed he was following a valid military order, which if he did not obey would result in he and his platoon being blown up by a car bomb (and a court marshal for disobeying a valid order), but in obeying the order has catastrophic consequences. The private is not physically injured. Yet he shuts down emotionally, and is dishonorably discharged. He ends up wordlessly abandoning his family, living on the street, and no one knows what is bothering him. The military authorities ask him, but he has no words. “Moral trauma.” With no time to gather additional data, the soldier was put in an impossible situation – a double-bind. So he decided to follow orders (why shouldn’t he? he was under attack) and deeply enshrouded in the fog of war on a clear day, technicaly speaking, he committed a war crime, killing innocent civilians. Little did he know in the moment of the classic, tragic double-bind, “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”; the rock and the hard place; the devil and the deep blue. The soldier is now damned – he is a perpetrator. He was forced to make a decision that no one should have to make; that no one can (really) make; and yet that he did make. This perpetrator is also a now a survivor. Moral trauma.

Another example of moral trauma? An escaped slave makes it to freedom. One Margaret Garner is pursued and about to be apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Act. She tries to kill herself and her children rather than be returned to slavey. She succeeds in killing one of the girls. Now this soldier’s choice is completely different than the choice faced by Margaret/Sethe, and rather like the inverse of it, dependent on not enough information rather than an all-too-knowledgeable acquaintance with the evils of enslaement. Yet the structural similarities are striking. One significant difference between the soldier and Sethe (and the Jewsih Zealots) is their answer to the question when human life ceases to be human. A clarification is in order. If human life is an unconditional good, then, when confronted with an irreversible loss of the humanness, life itself may not be an unconditional good. Life versus human life. The distinction dear to Stoic philosophy, that worse things exist than death, gets traction – slavery, cowardice in the face of death, betraying one’s core integrity. The solder is no stoic; Sethe is. Yet both are suffering humanity.

However, one may object, even if one’s own human life may be put into play, it is a flat out contradiction to improve the humanity of one’s children by ending their humanity. The events are so beyond making sense, yet one cannot stop oneself from trying to make sense. So far, we are engaged with the initial triggering event, the infanticide. No doubt a traumatic event; and arguably calling forth moral trauma. But what about trauma that is so traumatic, so pervasive, that it is the very form defining the person’s experiences. Trauma that it is not merely “unclaimed, split off” experience (as Caruth says). For example, the person who grows up in slavery – as did Sethe – has never known any other form of experience – this is just the way things are – things have always been that way – and one cannot imagine anything else (though some inevitably will and do). This is soul murder. So we have moral trauma in a context of soul murder. Soul murder is defined by Shengold (1989) as loss of the ability to love, though the individuals in Beloved retain that ability, however fragmented and imperfect it may be. Rather soul murder is defined as the loss of the power spontaneously to begin something new – the loss of the possibility of possibility of the self, leaving the self without boundaries and without aliveness, vitality, an emotional and practical Zombie. By the way, Shengold (1989) notes, “Soul murder is a crime, not a diagnosis.” Though Morrison does not say so, and though she might or might not agree, enslavement is soul murder.

Beloved contains actual murders. For example, the friend and slave Sixo is about to be burned alive by the local vigilantes, and he gets the perpetrators to shoot him (and kill him) by singing in a loud, happy, annoying voice. He fakes “not givin’ a damn,” taking away the perpetrators’ enjoyment of his misery. It works well enough in the moment. His last. Nor is it like one murder is better (or worse) than another. However, in a pervasive context of soul murder, Sethe’s infanticide is an action taken by a person whose ability to choose is compromised by extreme powerlessness. Yet in that moment of decision her power is uncompromised. Note one continues to try and justify or make sense out of what cannot have any sense. Sethe is presented with a choice (read it again – and again) that no one should have to make – that no one can make (even though the person makes the choice because doing nothing is also a choice). This is the same situation that the characters in classic Greek tragedy face, though a combination of information asymmetries, personal failings, and double-binds. Above all – double-binds. This is why tragedy was invented (which deserves further exploration, not engaged here).

Now bring empathy to moral trauma in the context of soul murder. Anyone out there in the reading audience experiencing “empathic unsettlement” (as LaCapra put it)? Anyone experiencing empathic distress? If the reader is not, then that itself is concerning. “Empathic unsettlement” is made present in the reader’s experience by the powerful artistry deployed by Beloved. Yet this may be an instance in which empathy is best described, not as an on-off switch, but as a dial that one can dial up or down in the face of one’s own limitations and humanness. This is tough stuff, which deserves to be read and discussed. If one is starting to break out in a sweat and thinking about putting the book down, rather than become hard-hearted, the coaching is temporarily to dial down one’s practice of empathy. While one is going to experience suffering and pain in reading about the suffering and pain of another, it should be a vicarious experience – a sample – a representation – a trace affect – not the overwhelming annihilation that would make one a survivor. Dial the empathy down in so far as a person can do that; don’t turn it off. Admittedly, this is easier said than done, but with practice, the practitioner gets expanded power over the practice of empathizing.

As noted, Morrison is a master of conversational implicature. Conversational implicature allows the empathy to get in – become present in the text and become present for the reader engaging with the text. The conversational implicature expresses and brings to presence the infanticide without describing the act itself by which the baby is killed. Less is more, though the matter is handled graphically enough. The results of the bloody deed are described – “a “woman holding a blood soaked child to her chest with one hand” (Morrison 1987: 124) – but not the bloody action of inflicting the fatal wound itself. “Writing the wound” sometimes dances artistically around expressing the wound, sometimes, not.

Returning to the story itself, the moment at which the authorities arrive to attempt to enforce the fugitive slave act is described: “When the four horsemen came – schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff – the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late” (Morrison 1987: 124). Conversational implicature meets intertextuality in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament. The four horsemen of the apocalypse herald the end of the world as we know it and that is what comes down on Sethe at this point. Perhaps not unlike the Zealots at Masade, she makes a fatal decision. Literally. As Hannah Arendt (1970) pointed out in a different political context, power and force (violence) stand in an inverse relation: when power is reduced to zero, then force – violence – comes forth. The slaves power is zero, if not a negative number. Though Sethe tries to kill all the children, she succeeds only in one instance. The boys recover from their injuries and, in the case of Denver (Sethe’s daughter named after Amy Denver, the white girl who helped Sethe), Sethe’s hand is stayed at the last moment.

Beloved is a text rich in empathy. This includes exemplifications of empathy in the text, which in turn call forth empathy in the reader. The following discussion now joins the standard four aspects of empathy – empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness. The challenge to the practice of empathy is that with a text and topic such as this one, does the practice of standard empathy need to be expanded, modified, or transformed from standard to radical empathy? What would that even mean? Empathy is empathy. A short definition of radical empathy is proposed: Empathy is committed to empathizing in the face of empathic distress, even if the latter is incurred, and empathy, even in breakdown, acknowledges the commitment to expanding empathy in the individual and the community.

We start with a straightforward example of empathic receptivity – affect matching. Now radical empathy is required here. An example of standard empathic receptivity is provided in the text, and the dance between Denver and Beloved is performed (1987: 87 – 88):

“Beloved took Denver’s hand and place another on Denver’s shoulder. They danced then. Round and round the tiny room and it may have been dizziness, or feeling light and icy at once, that made Denver laugh so hard. A catching laugh that Beloved caught. The two of them, merry as kittens, swung to and fro, to and fro, until exhausted they sat on the floor. “

The contagious laughter is entry level empathic receptivity. Empathy degree zero, so to speak. This opening between the two leads to further intimate engagement with empathic possibility. But the possibility is blocked of further empathizing in the moment is blocked by a surprising discovery. At this point, Denver “gets it” – that Beloved is from the other side – she has died and come back – and Denver asks her, “What’s it like over there, where you were before?” But since she was killed as a baby, the answer is not very informative: “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here.” (1987: 88) Beloved is the age she would have been had she lived.

The narrative skips in no particular order from empathic receptivity to empathic understanding. “Understanding” is used in the extended sense of understanding of possibilities for being in the world (e.g., Heidegger 1927: 188 (H148); 192 (H151)): “In the projecting of the understanding, beings [such as human beings] are disclosed in their possibility.”Empathic understanding is the understanding of possibility. What does the reader’s empathy make present as possible for the person in her or his life and circumstance? What is possible in slavery is being a beast of burden, pain, suffering, and early death – the possibility of no possibility of human flourishing. In contrast, when Paul D makes his way to the house of Sethe and Denver (and, unknown to him, the ghost of the baby), the possibility of family comes forth. In the story, there’s a carnival in town and Paul D, who knew Sethe before both managed to escape from the plantation (Sweet Home), takes her and Denver to the carnival. “Having a life” means many things. One of them is family. The possibility of family is made present in the text and the reader

“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust hold hands. May be he [Paul D] was right. A life. Watching their hand-holding shadows [. . . ] because she could do and survive things they believed she should neither do nor survive [. . . .] [A]ll the time the three shadows that shot out of their feet to the left held hands. Nobody noticed but Sethe and she stopped looking after she decided that it was a good sign. A life. Could be.” (Morrison 1987: 67)

Within the story, Sethe has her own has a justification for her deed. She is rendering her children safe and sending them on ahead to “the other side” where she will soon join them. “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (Morrison 1987: 193). The only problem with this argument, if there is a problem with it, is that it makes sense out of what she did. Most readers are likely to align with Pau D, who at first does not know about the infanticide. Paul D learns the details of Sethe’s act from Stamp Paid, the former underground rail road coordinator, who knows just about everything that goes on, because he was a hub for the exchange of all-manner of information. Stamp feels that Paul D ought to know, though he later regrets his decision. Stamp tells Paul D about the infanticide – showing him the newspaper clipping as evidence and explaining the words that Paul D (who is liberate) cannot read. Paul D is overwhelmed. He cannot handle it. He denies that the sketch (or photo) is Sethe, saying it does not look like her mouth. Stamp tries to convince Paul D: “She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out hurt the hurter” (1987: 276). Paul D asks Sethe about the infanticide reported in the news clipping, and she provides her justification. Paul D is finally convinced that she did what she did, yet unconvinced it was the thing to do and a thunderhead of judgment issues the verdict: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four […] and right then a forest sprung up between them trackless and quiet” (1987: 194).^[1] Paul D experiences something he cannot handle, whether it is empathic distress or choking on moral judgment or all of the above, and he moves out of the house where he was living with Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. In a breakdown of empathic receptivity, Paul D takes on Sethe’s shame, and instead of a decision to exit the relationship for cause, he runs away, makes an escape. Stamp blames himself for driving Paul D away by disclosing the infanticide to him (of which he had been unaware), and tries to go to explain it to Sethe. But the door is closed and locked against him.

At this point the isolation of the woman inspires a kind of mad scene – or at least a carnival of emotion. Empathic interpretation occurs as dynamic and shifting points of view. The rapid-fire changing of perspectives occurs in the three sections beginning, “Beloved, she my daughter”; “Beloved is my sister”; “I am Beloved and she is mine” (Morrison 1987: 236; 242; 248). These express the hunger for relatedness, healing, and family that each of the women experience. For the reader, encountering the voices has the rhythmic effect of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The voices are disembodied, though they address one another rather than the reader (as is often the case in Woolf). The first-person reflections slip and slide into a free verse poem of call and response. The rapid-fire, dynamic changing of perspectives results in the merger of the selves, which, strictly speaking, is a breakdown of empathic boundaries. There is no punctuation in the text of Beloved’s contribution to the back-and-forth, because Beloved is a phantom, albeit an embodied one, without the standard limits of boundaries in space/time.

In a flashback of empathic responsiveness: Sethe is on the run, having escaped enslavement at Sweet Home Plantation. She is far along in her pregnancy, alone, on foot, barefoot, and is nearly incapacitated by labor pains. A white girl comes along and they challenge one another. The white girl is named Amy Denver, though the reader does not learn that at first, and she is going to Boston (which becomes a running joke). These are two lost souls on the road of life if there ever were any. Amy is barely more safe or secure than Amy, though she has the distinct advantage that men with guns and dogs are not in hot pursuit of her. Sethe dissembles about her own name, telling Amy it is “Lu.” It is as if the Good Samaritan had also been waylaid by robbers, only not beaten as badly as the man going up to Jerusalem, who is rescured by the Samaritan. Amy is good with sick people, as she notes, and practices her arts on Sethe/Lu. Sethe/Lu is flat on her back and in attempt to help her stand up, Amy massages her feet. But Sethe/Lu’s back hurts. In a moment of empathic responsiveness, Amy describes to Sethe/Lu the state of her back, which has endured a whipping with a raw hide whip shortly before the plan to escape was executed. Amy tells her:

“It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the tunk – it’s red and spit wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You go a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What god have in mind I wonder, I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this” (1987: 93).

This satisfies the definition of empathic responsiveness – in Amy’s description to Lu of what Amy sees on Lu’s back, Amy gives to Lu her (Amy’s) experience of the state of Lu’s back. Amy’s response to her (Lu) allows / causes Lu to “get” that Amy has experienced what her (Lu’s) experience is. Lu (Sethe) of course cannot see her own back and the result of the rawhide whipping which is being described to her. On background, early in the story, Sethe tells Paul D: “Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher [actually a teacher, but mostly a Simon Legre type slave owner, and the brother of Mrs Garner’s late husband] made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still” (1987:20). The reader wonders, What is she talking about? “Made a tree”? The conversational implicature – clear to the participants in the story, but less so to the reader – lets the suspense – and the empathy – come out. The “tree” finally becomes clear in the above-cited passage. Nothing is lacking from Morrison’s artistry, yet the description gave this reader a vicarious experience of nausea, empathic receptivity, especially with the white puss. Once again, not for the faint of heart. This a “transfiguring” of the traumatic.

A further reflection on “transfiguring” is required. If one takes the term literally – transforming the figure into another form without making it more or less meaningful, sensible, or significant, than one has a chance of escaping the aporias and paradoxes into a state of masterful and resonant ambiguity. For example, in another context, when the painter Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) makes two rondos of Medusa, the Gorgon with snakes for hair, whose sight turns the view to stone, was he not transfiguring something horrid and ugly into a work or art? The debate is joined. The inaccessible trauma – what happened cannot be accurately remembered, though it keeps appearing in nightmares and flashback – is the inaccessible real, like Kant’s thing in itself. The performing of the trauma, the work of art – Caravaggio’s self-portrait as the Medusa^[2] or the encounter of Amy and Sethe/Lu or Morrison’s Beloved in its entirety – renders the trauma accessible, expressible, and so able to be worked through.

However, the myth of the Medusa itself suggests a solution, albeit a figurative one. In the face of soul murder embedded within moral trauma (and vice versa), the challenge to standard empathy is to expand, unfold, develop, into radical empathy. That does not add another feature to empathy in addition to receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, but it raises the bar (so to speak) on the practice of all of these. Radical empathy is committed to the practice of empathizing in the face of empathic distress. What does empathic distress look like? It looks like the reaction to the traumatic vision of the snake-haired Gorgon that turns to stone the people who encounter it. A clarification will be useful

The reader may recall that the hero Perseus succeeded in defeating this Medusa without looking at her. (Remember, had he seen the Medusa straight on, it would have turned him to stone too.) Perseus would have been traumatized by the traumatic image and rendered an emotional zombie – lacking in aliveness and vitality. Beyond empathic unsettlement and empathic distress, moral trauma (moral injury) and soul murder stop one dead – not necessarily literally but emotionally, cognitively and practically. Is there a method of continuing to practice empathizing in the face of such unsettlement? Recall that Perseus used a shield, which was also a magic reflective mirror, indirectly to see the Medusa as a reflection without being turned to stone and, thus, defeat her. The shield acted as a defense against the trauma represented by the Medusa, enabling him to get up close and personal without succumbing to the toxic affects and effects. There is no other way to put it – the artistic treatment of trauma is the shield of Perseus. It both provides access to the trauma and defends against the most negative consequences of engaging with it. The shield does not necessarily render the trauma sensible or meaningful in a way of words, yet the shield takes away the power of the Gorgon/trauma, rending it unable to turn one to stone. In the real-world practice of trauma therapy, this means rendering the trauma less powerful. The trauma no longer controls the survivor’s life. One gradually – by repeated working through – gets one’s power back as the trauma shrinks, gets smaller, without, however, completely disappearing.

The question for this inquiry into Beloved is what happens when one brings literary language, refined language, artistic language, beautiful language, to painful events, appalling events, ugly events, dehumanizing events, traumatic events? The literary language has to dance around the traumatic event, which is made precisely present with expanded power by avoiding being named, leaving an absence. The traumatic events that happened were such that the language of witnessing includes the breakdown of the language of witnessing. As Hartman notes in his widely quoted study:

It is interesting that in neoclassical aesthetic theory what Aristotle called the scene of pathos (a potentially traumatizing scene showing extreme suffering) was not allowed to be represented on stage. It could be introduced only through narration (as in the famous recits [narrative] of Racinian tragedy) (Hartman 1995: 560 ftnt 30).

Once again, less is more. The absence of the most violent defining moment increases its impact. Note this does not mean – avoid talking about it (the trauma). It means the engagement is not going to be a head on attack, but a flanking movement. In the context of narrative, this does not prevent the reader from engaging with the infanticide. On the contrary, it creates a suspense that hooks the reader like a fish with the rest of the narrative reeling in the reader. The absence makes the engagement a challenge, mobilizing the reader’s imagination to fill in the blank in such a way that it recreates the event as a palpable vicarious event. It is necessary to raise the ghost prior to exorcising it, and this does just that.

If this artistic engagement with trauma is not “writing trauma” in LaCapra’s sense, then I would not know it:

“Trauma indicates a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects in what I termed traumatic and post-traumatic writing (or signifying practice in general). It involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to [it] [. . . ] – processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms. Writing trauma is often seen in terms of enacting it, which may at times be equated with acting (or playing) it out in performative discourse or artistic practice” (LaCapra 2001: 186–187).

If the writing (and reading) of the traumatic events is a part of working through the pain and suffering of the survivors (and acknowledging the memory of the victims), then the result for the individual and the community is expanded well-being, expanded possibilities for aliveness, vitality, relatedness, and living a life of satisfaction and fulfillment. Instead of being ruled by intrusive flashbacks and nightmares, the survivor expands her/his power over the events that were survived. This especially includes the readers engaging with the text who are survivors of other related traumatic events, dealing with their own personal issues, which may be indistinguishable from those of fellow-travelers in trauma. That is the situation at the end of Beloved when Paul D returns to Sethe and Denver (Sethe’s daughter) after the community has exorcised the ghost of Beloved. It takes a village – a community – to bring up a child; it also takes a village to exorcise the ghost of one.

References

Anonymous. (2012). Trolley problem (The trolley dilemma). Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [checked on 2023-06-25]

Hannah Arendt. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Caty Caruth. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Geoffrey H Hartman. (1995). On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies New Literary History , Summer, 1995, Vol. 26, No. 3, Higher Education (Summer, 1995): 537 – 563 .

Martin Heidegger. (1927). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trs.). New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Toni Morrison. (1987). Beloved. New York: Vintage Int.

Dominick LaCapra. (1999). Trauma, absence, loss. Critical Inquiry, Summer, 1999, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer, 1999): 696–727

Dominick LaCapra. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, John Hopkins Unviersity Press.

Stephen Levinso. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ruth Leys. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Boris Sagal, Director. (1981). Masade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada_(miniseries) [checked on 2023-06-25).

J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090

Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.

Bessel van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin.

^[1] For those readers wondering how Sethe regained her freedom after being arrested for murder (infanticide), Beloved provides no information as to the sequence. During the historical trial an argument was made that as a free woman, Margaret Garner should be tried and convicted of murder, so that the Abolitionist governor of Ohio could then pardon her, returning here to freedom. Something like that needs to be understood in the story, though it is a fiction. It is a fiction, since in real life, Garner and her children were indeed returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act. Moral trauma within soul murder indeed.

^[2] Caravaggio was a good looking fellow, and he uses himself as a model for the face of the Medusa. This does not decide anything. Arguably, Caravaggio was arguably memorializing – transfiguring – his own life traumas, which were many and often self-inflicted as befits a notorious manic-depressive.

Tower of Babel: Frans Breugel, the Elder (1563): under construction

Protected: In the beginning was the word – empathy!

May 19, 2023 3:03 pm

Lou Agosta, Ph.D., Listening With Empathy

Tag Archives: empathy

Empathy and Greek Tragedy – Connecting the Dots

Noted in passing: Anna Ornstein (1927-2025)

Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology

Abstract

Recommended Citation

How I changed my relationship with pain

Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide is now an ebook – and the universe is winking at us in approval!

Top Ten Empathy Trends 2024

Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son

Summer Reading: The Song of Our Scars by Haider Warraich

Beloved on Juneteenth in the context of empathy

Protected: In the beginning was the word – empathy!

Post navigation

Tag Archives: empathy

Abstract

Recommended Citation

Subscribe to continue reading

Post navigation