Varieties of Empathy

Introductory Overview

Empathy has become all the rage in some circles. For example, three books in 2009 declared this to be the age of empathy, as pointed out by Ken Fuchsman in “Competing Views of Human Motivation and Psychology,” on page 41. Are we creating an Empathetic Civilization, the title of Jeremy Riftkin’s volume, or has empathy simply become like a “magic balm” for social ills, as stated by Jessica Van Denend in “Empathy and the Benevolent Colonizer,” on page 51? How authors define empathy is quite variable, and when closely examined, it often appears undistinguishable from altruism, caring, compassion, helping, mirroring, or sympathy. Some academics and scientists distinguish between emotional and cognitive empathy; in my opinion, imagination and subjectivity are such important parts of being empathic that I doubt we can now, or even in the future, come up with clear measurements. (Empathic and empathetic are used interchangeably in this essay.) An academic psychologist colleague suggests that there are also psychometrics that attempt to quantify and differentiate empathy. In our society, focused on quantification, people are working, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to gain physical data on what goes on in the brain when the subject is empathic. These neurological studies may be interesting, but I have serious doubts that they could ever accurately measure the experience of empathy as I understand it.

My view of empathy is longstanding and not based on the recent academic and business interest in the subject. Empathy is about imagining and feeling the experience of another to fully understand his or her situation as much as possible without actually having, in the Indian expression, “walked in the moccasins of another.” Tom Gibbs captures empathy in this sense in his poem

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“The Empath,” on page 68, and “The Harrowing Wisdom,” his essay on page 62 about his time connecting with his Alzheimer’s stricken father-in-law in the final stage of life. The concept is easy to grasp intellectually, but it is very hard to actually be empathetic, and perhaps impossible, if one does not have a clear sense of self based upon an excellent, non-abusive childhood and/or a very significant psychotherapeutic experience. Neither narcissists nor those with autism have the capacity to really be empathetic, and people usually cannot consistently maintain empathy for others over long periods of time. This view is based upon my own long analysis, over a quarter century practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy psychohistorical research, and life experience.

When in 1997 the Psychohistory Forum formed the “Empathy and Biography Research Group,” an intellectual historian and two literature academics, all women, exchanged ideas and valuable presentations before it dissolved in 1999 for lack of leadership. Since then, there has been an explosion of interest in studying empathy, although definitions and applications of the term vary enormously. For example, primatologists such as Frans de Waal label some animal behavior as empathic.

Empathy means very different things to psychoanalysts than it does to educators who seek to help children be caring enough to stop bullying others. Academics who make a sharp distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy are represented by Herbert Barry, “Caring about the Self and Others,” on page 22. Business educators want to teach their version of empathy within the corporation to help make it run smoother and make buyers feel understood and more inclined to purchase its products. Some politicians, when they are not stressing a macho image, will “feel the pain” of their constituents, most especially if the potential voters are women. Confidence men want to understand their “marks” and feel trusted so that they can improve their opportunities for thievery. Thus, the term has evolved from its original usage to encompass a wide variety of human behavior and social situations.

From Its Greek Roots to Freud

“Empatheia” is the Greek root of the modern word empathy. Its original meaning was partiality, passion, and physical affection. In the 19^th century, Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) and Robert

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Vischer (1847-1933) created the German word Einfühlung (“feeling into”), which Edward B. Titchener (1867-1927) translated into the English term “empathy” in the early 20^th century. In her article, “The Many Masks of Empathy,” on page 13 in this issue, Merle Molofsky presents a fuller discussion of some of the origins of the term.

According to the Concordance to the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Samuel A. Guttman, et al, eds., Vol. 2, Boston, G.K. Hall & Co., 1980), the founder of psychoanalysis used the term “empathy” on only 12 occasions, half of them in his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Although Freud is inclined to use the term in passing while discussing issues of identification, in his first usage he provides something of a definition. After establishing that the teller of a smutty joke is “naïve,” “we take the producing person’s psychical state into consideration, put ourselves into it, and try to understand it by comparing it with our own. It is these processes of empathy and comparison that result in the economy in expenditure which we discharge by laughing” (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1955, Vol. XIII, 186).

Freud uses the language of cathected energy, as when he writes, “cathectic expenditures…are either brought about in us through empathy into someone else or, without any such relation, are discovered in our own mental processes” (196).

In writing about Jensen’s Gradiva, Freud notes that the author “wishes to bring the hero closer to us so as to make ‘empathy’ easier” (Vol. IX, 1907, 45). In discussing identification in group psychology, Freud writes that “another suspicion may tell us that we are far from exhausting the problem of identification, and that we are faced by the process which psychology calls ‘empathy [Einfuhlung]’ and which plays the largest part in our understanding of what is inherently foreign to our ego in other people.” He goes on to declare: “But we shall here limit ourselves to the immediate emotional effects of identification, and shall leave on one side its significance for our intellectual life” (108).

In footnote two on page 110, he concludes his references to empathy with, “a path leads from identification by way of imitation

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to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are unable to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life.”

Although by contemporary standards, the use of empathy by the founder of psychoanalysis is not very developed or sophisticated, it did open the door for a concept that has become basic to the therapeutic process. In the safety of the therapeutic treatment room, the analyst sits, listens, and picks up on the feelings of the patient and uses an empathic approach to help effect self-knowledge and the potential for a better life of his patient. Judith Logue, in “Thank You for Crying,” also raises issues of pseudoempathy and its limits on page 37.

Empathy as a Therapeutic Tool

In literature classes as an undergraduate student, I was introduced to the idea of empathy as the ability to put oneself in the position of another. Humans have a special ability to create language, which can serve as a wonderful means of communication and also to cover up true feelings we do not want to reveal to others, or often to ourselves. This has much to do with how we want the world to see us, what thoughts and feelings are deemed “politically correct,” and how our socialization, emotional states and reaction formations impinge upon our knowing and expressing our actual feelings. That academic psychology now refers to “negative feelings” represents a reason for further inhibitions based upon political correctness.

The reality is that human beings transmit feelings by our body language, vocal intonation, and even by our very presence. The fine psychoanalyst Harold Searles (1918-) sat with catatonic patients in the Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland for months on end, saying next to nothing beyond occasionally what feeling he experienced as present in the room. A well-trained clinician will pick up on the feelings the patient is out of touch with or thinks it inappropriate to express, just as very close siblings, lovers or spouses may know what the other is feeling more than that person is consciously aware. Of course, well-trained psychoanalysts— people with enough depth analysis that they have a good sense of their separate self and can readily differentiate their feelings from that of others—have unique tools available.

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Psychoanalytic training represents a unique opportunity to learn about empathy and its limits. Case presentations were my favorite part of this unique education. One of the six members of our class would present a case and we would each share our thoughts on it. Several patterns became apparent through this exercise. The ideas of whatever analytic theorist a psychoanalytic candidate was reading would show up in their interpretation, as would aspects of their personality. The instructor was nonjudgmental as the candidates came to understand their own projective fields, or how they inclined to see the world. Individual supervision greatly furthered this process. A fifth year seminar on induced countertransference was extremely valuable in helping us learn whether feelings coming forth in the treatment room were ones we brought in ourselves based on what was going on in our own lives, or were induced by our client. We learned to do a better job of being empathic with our clients without merging with them. Our clients came to trust us more as we could help them own disclaimed and often frightening feelings.

A very large and robust 41-year-old man with paranoid thoughts was referred to me at the low cost psychoanalytic clinic because the female intake social worker, who was frightened of the delusions he spoke of, assumed that I would have an easier time with him, as a six-foot tall man rather than a female analyst-in-training. The interesting thing is that he never induced fear in me. I experienced him as an immature, good-natured, frightened child who slipped into violent, paranoid delusions, upon which he did not act, but rather acknowledged an unconscious fear of being homosexual. As he came to see me as a trustworthy health professional who understood him, his need for the paranoid delusions diminished. Feeling empathized with helped lessen, but did not eliminate, his symptoms. At the time, Heinz Kohut (1913-81), who is sometimes credited with introducing the emphasis on empathy in psychoanalysis—as expressed by Lou Agosta, “Folk Wisdom and Kohut: Empathy is Being Human,” on page 24—was widely read, but did not have a specific influence on my approach to therapy. Kohut’s work has been built on extensively. For example, Frank Summers, currently president of the American Psychological Association’s large psychoanalytic division, argues in “The New Psy-

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choanalytic Ethic,” that because of his emphasis on empathy in the development of the self, we can now build psychoanalytic ethics based on empathy. See page 33.

An accomplished friend, who once won an award for her fine work on the intellectual origins on the concept of empathy, sometimes wonders if she has “too much empathy” or “hyper empathy.” She is a first-born twin who has always been “the good girl” looking after her twin sister. She accepted this childhood role throughout her life, joking that it began in utero. She credits good therapists for helping her build a separate identity. Now, rather than feeling compelled to care first for others, she tells me she is learning to recognize her own needs and say “no” when necessary—to her sister, her friends, and even the editor of this journal. He had hoped she would write on empathy, a subject she is most knowledgeable about.

Is the development of a separate identity a precondition for having real empathy? When I think about how often parents are only able to accept their children as separate human beings after they have had considerable therapy of their own, I’m inclined to think that this is the case. Certainly, we have to know where we stop and the other human being begins if we are to truly feel for them without being symbiotically attached.

Empathy as an Invaluable Tool for the Psychobiographer

During doctoral training, history seemed to be all about economics, politics, social forces, and treaties. The graduate students were most interested in and energized by discussion of individuals such as Alexander the Great, Darwin, Freud, Hitler, Jefferson, Marx, Napoleon, Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci. Yet the graduate school professors were inclined to dismiss biography as somehow beneath the concern of a professional historian, so some students cloaked their focus on biography in the language of larger causes while remaining fascinated by the individuals behind them. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training enabled some historians to empathize with our subjects in ways that made us much better historians, because we could have feeling for our subjects and do better work. As Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Guns of August wrote, “Every thoughtful historian is a psychohistorian.”

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In analytic training, I learned that to be an effective therapist, I had to confront elements of the client within myself. So if the client was fearful, I had to examine my own fear; if narcissistic, my own narcissism; if grandiose, my own grandiosity, and so forth. The result was that I became a much better biographer, especially since I was freed from idealizing my subjects as if they were statues in a park to be worshipped, or knocked off their pedestals, rather than understood as fellow human beings.

I use this idea in teaching undergraduate or graduate students. I stress that whatever subject they write about, they must relate to, understand, and show the real human being they are researching and presenting. While this is much more work for them, and for me in teaching them how, it makes their forays into history far more meaningful. Similarly, in teaching literature to freshman and sophomore students in a Readings in the Humanities course, I find that it is invaluable to teach the students to relate to and hopefully empathize with what they’re reading. So, while reading the story of Cain and Abel in the Old Testament, they would also write a short thought paper on sibling rivalry in their own lives and among their friends. They go from the personal to the historical. Before reading Medea, we discuss infanticide—what they’ve heard about in the news, on the Internet, or through the rumor mill of someone who killed their newborn baby rather than accepting responsibility for it. Wherever possible, my goal is to help students see themselves in the shoes of the individuals they’re examining while also teaching them about cultural context.

Dreams have the power to reveal the human unconscious with great clarity. However, psychoanalytic dream interpretation was much less fruitful than I had hoped, mostly because clients looked too much to the analyst for the meaning of their dreams and not enough to themselves. Montague Ullman’s group dream work avoided this problem by having small groups empathetically work with the dreamer, offering their own projections and insights. Feeling safe and empathized with, dreamers delved more into their associations and unconscious. Feeling empathized with and safe with a trusted professional is quite therapeutic.

Empathy in Parenting and Education

Psychoanalytic treatment is primarily reparative work, help-

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ing analysands get past the traumas of their childhood and move on to more satisfying lives. These days there is a movement developing to teach parents and teachers to nurture empathy in children as a step toward their development as caring and sensitive individuals. Boundaries must be established by both parents and educators so that children feel safe. Within those boundaries, the young need to feel cared for, understood, and loved, even while hearing the word “no.” There is a growing movement in educational circles to teach empathy as a means of combating bullying. In the situation of bullying, which is often role-played in this education, the emphasis is much more on caring, helping and feeling sympathetic than in the way I have traditionally used empathy. However, anything that sensitizes people to the feeling and needs of others is certainly for the better of society (see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/daily_videos/babies-bring-lessons-of-empathy-to-classrooms/). Heiderose Brandt Butscher brings home this point in “Approaches to a Collaborative and Reciprocal Process” on page 18.

Psychohistorian and psychoanalyst Eva Fogelman found, in researching the comparatively small group of individuals who took the incredible step of risking their own lives and families to help Jews under Nazism, that an important characteristic of rescuers was having nurturing childhoods based upon empathetic parenting (Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust, 1994, pp. 253-267). Peter Petschauer, in “Identifying with the Victim in Nazi Dominated Europe,” on page 55 provides three examples of rescuers. Although Americans have at times been tempted to focus on evil in Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany, it has certainly come to the United States in the form of terrorism, as reflected on by Howard Stein’s “Double Vision: Thoughts on the Boston and Oklahoma City Bombings,” on page 64.

Teachers at all levels need to care about their students, even though there is a strong tendency to become jaded and look down on those still learning, as instructors feel they have a thorough mastery of their subject and lose some of the early enthusiasm that comes with the profession. By empathizing with their students and getting lots of feedback from them, they can fight this tendency, which has been diminishing in higher education, especially in comparison to what Charles Darwin experienced. I am reminded of the

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great biologist’s complaint that some of his Edinburgh University professors, during his abortive medical training in 1825-27, were “intolerably dull” (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1969 [1887], 47).

When the professor chooses to metaphorically step into the shoes of students, there is less inclination to see them as lazy incompetents who don’t want to bother mastering the material, and more willingness to accept the complexities of the learning process. A technique I have used to combat the “burned out” professor syndrome is to teach a variety of different courses, including ones that are new to me, so that I realize just how time-consuming it is to learn and master new material. This fall, I will be offering a first year seminar focused on the impact of the electronic world on the consciousness and lives of students. My goal is to gather students who are much more proficient in electronic communication than I am and have them teach me certain things as a way to both help them feel in control and help me recognize how much time and one-on-one instruction is required to master what is simple for others. Aside from structuring the course and its readings on the social and psychological impact of our electronic universe, my job will be to help the students think about the profound issues. From long experience, I know I will be better able to empathize with the often slow pace of student learning as I face this challenge.

Teaching students to put themselves in the shoes of historical figures is greatly facilitated by utilizing historical reenactments. For about 20 years, I put enormous energy into teaching students how to empathize with historical subjects, learn everything they could about these individuals through diligent research, and then do historical re-enactments of them. In preparing to reenact their lives, the students realized just how little they knew about their subjects, which spurred them on to further research. At one point, a group of my students came to the International Psychohistorical Association’s annual meeting to re-enact events from the childhood of Adolf Hitler. Eventually, I discontinued the student re-enactments because they took so much class time and my own energy needed to be used elsewhere.

The ability to feel empathy for mass murderers and sadists is a question that came up on the Clio’s Psyche listserv discussion

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group after the Newtown shooting. An accomplished colleague declared that he could empathize with the victims of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, but not with these individuals, and others agreed. I understand his response, since I find it far easier to empathize with and re-enact elements from the lives of Viktor Frankl, Flora Hogman, Sam Pisar, and other victims of the Holocaust than to step into the shoes of Josef Mengele, since I did not like the feeling of my own sadistic impulses as I role-played him to my classes. However, empathy is a tool that should not be reserved for only those who suffer, if we are to understand the nature of evil.

At our college, a psychologist colleague, who runs the Faculty Resource Center that sponsors our writing group, expresses great concern over the impact of online communications on our students. Do they have real relationships with others, making empathy possible? The younger generation is constantly connecting with each other and with their parents through blogging, Facebook and Twitter, instant messaging, Skype, and texting. Utilizing these media, they can project almost any image they want to, especially if they have no direct face-to-face contact with each other. Unless they use Skype or another webcam service that provides video, they can even present themselves as being a totally different person, bringing others into their fantasy. The person at the other end of the communication may be none the wiser. When a student in one of my classes declared, rather gratuitously, that she would have no friends without the Internet, I immediately wondered if she really has friends at all. The situation was clarified for me when she declared, “I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I only have friends on the Internet.” The literature on the subject describes alexithymia as a deficiency of empathy, since if you don’t know your own feelings, how can you know other people’s feelings?

Does this mean that empathy cannot be transmitted by electronic communication? Of course not. Though most of my exchanges on the Internet are rather businesslike, I also have very heartfelt and touching communications, generally with people who I have known and met in person. But one can never be sure that apparent electronic empathy is something real, rather than a stance.

Con Men, Politicians, and Political Correctness

Con men, politicians, psychopaths, and seducers use the

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mask of empathy to further their own objectives. People who feel understood by others are much more likely to have their money seduced away by confidence men. Lonely old retirees, who feel the world may have passed them by, are more prone to this maneuver, as they’re manipulated into providing their credit card number or signing on the dotted line of a contract where the print is too small for them to even read. Mirroring techniques—reflecting a person’s words, concerns, and feelings back to them—are used not only by psychotherapists to help their clients come to trust them as a step toward cure, but also by psychopaths. Sexual seducers tap into the narcissism of targets who may well wake up the next day feeling used, abused, and perhaps even pregnant.

Psychologically inclined political scientists have been writing for decades about the sexualization of the political process, by which a handsome candidate seduces the voter by promising them what they want, which was much easier in eras before national communications, in the hope of becoming “their man.” Politicians want people to think they understand and care about them, that they have empathy for them. In the 2012 presidential election, there was talk of Barack Obama’s “empathy edge” over Mitt Romney, since the Republican presidential aspirant was less able than the President to project a sense of understanding the common voter. However, Obama was accused of lacking empathy for Israel. As a presidential psychobiographer, I know that the perception of a politician “feeling for” the ordinary voters is enormously important in the electoral process. Yet, how much can a politician really feel for a multitude of voters? When I hear the word empathy and politician in the same breath, the question that comes to mind is, “Is there some real caring for others or is it a mask of empathy?”

If a president is elected who genuinely wants to do the right thing for voters by listening carefully to their needs, he is very likely to be severely criticized. When Barack Obama was elected president, there was considerable evidence that he genuinely wanted to hear the feelings and needs of his American constituents, including his opponents. In my opinion, empathy is not quite the right word to describe this. However, the voters mostly want to see their president as being strong and decisive. Obama’s attempt at “leading from behind,” as it was called by many of his critics,

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played a crucial role in the crisis of his presidency that followed from the 2010 election of a hostile Republican House of Representatives. The desire for a strong, protective leader takes precedence over the wish for a caring one.

The enormous contempt for President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore expressed in the 1990s by right wing talk show hosts was often centered upon their expressions of empathy. Clinton would say, “I feel your pain,” and a right wing talk show host would then declare that he wanted Clinton to feel “his pain,” meaning the pain he and his followers wanted to inflict. Throughout his life, Clinton has had many generous impulses. In a town hall meeting one could sense that he really believed what he was saying regarding his concern for ordinary and hurting people, but then I remember the Arkansas union leader who dealt with him for many years and said that Governor Clinton would put his arm around him in warm support while “pissing down his leg”—metaphorically of course. As an author of several articles on our 42^nd president, I would argue that he believed what he was saying to people when he said he felt their pain, even if it often did not translate into policies geared toward actually lessening it.

There is a movement to teach empathy in the business world that many academics and therapists relate to ambivalently. Consider new books such as The Empathy Factor: Your Competitive Advantage for Personal, Team, and Business Success (2011) by Marie Miyashiro and Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy (2009). Joyce Rosenberg writes negatively about this approach, as well as its detrimental impact on analysands, on page 29. Certainly, people listening to each other and fostering a climate of caring within institutions is for the better. But how real can empathy be in a corporate environment that is often cutthroat? On the face of it, a focus on empathy in this environment may be no more than another form of political correctness.

Conclusion

There are certainly many varieties of empathy, though some approaches, such as distinguishing cognitive empathy from emotional empathy, clearly do not resonate with me. A clearer definition of the term is sought in academia, even as we use it as clini-

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cians, readers, and researchers to gain deeper insights into the inner worlds of our subjects. Its greater appearances in popular culture and academia in recent years pose the key problem of whether empathic understanding is always a tool to genuinely and helpfully relate to the feelings of others, or a method of gaining advantage in, for example, business and politics. I look forward to learning much from the work on empathy that is being carried out these days by people in such a variety of fields. This special issue on the psychology of empathy should induce readers to think of empathy from perspectives that they may not have previously considered.

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