Listening With Empathy

March 18, 2012

Call for Participation: Empathy Conference

Filed under: Altruism,Einfühlung,Emotions,Empathy,Ethics,Intentionality,Introspection,mindreading,Neurology,Other Minds,Philosophy,Psychoanalysis,psychotherapy,Self,sympathy — Lou Agosta @ 10:00 am
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What is empathy and what do we need it for?

At Södertörn University August 16-18, 2012, arranged by Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge

The last ten years we have witnessed an exploding interest in the phenomenon of empathy. The wave of empathy studies is psychology, philosophy, psychiatry and other disciplines is linked to a parallel theoretical interest in the phenomena of feeling, selfhood, inter-subjectivity and morality, but also to practical attempts to understand and improve meetings between workers and clients in different professions, such as health care professions, teaching professions, psychotherapy or social work. To be empathic is increasingly viewed as a must for any person working in cooperation with and/or helping other people, although, as is also pointed out, the empathy must be professional in character to not produce destructive intimacy or burn out. The question of what “professional empathy” might be and how it is possible, or, indeed, fruitful to attain such ability is an interesting one in itself.

The theoretical underpinnings of empathy studies roughly divide it into two camps: the theory-theory approaches, and the simulation-theory approaches. The ideas that to have a theory of mind or an ability to put oneself in the shoes of another are necessary for empathy can serve either as philosophical clarifications of empathy or as taken for granted starting points of the empathy studies; in both cases, however, it is becoming increasingly evident by way of empirical results as well as conceptual clarification that the two approaches are relying on ideas of inter-subjective understanding which do not get the relationships between feeling, thought and action in empathy exactly right. To be empathic does not seem to consist in being able to think that the other is like me, or imagining what it is like to be him, in feeling or acting on his behalf. It is true that most adults that show empathy are able to think and imagine that the other is like me and what it would be like to be in his predicament, but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for being empathic. Rather these two abilities can reinforce and develop an empathic attitude which in its basic form is developed as a feeling in its own right.

To talk about affective and cognitive empathy as two parts or stages of the phenomenon does not solve the issue of how the two belong together, and it, indeed, seems to leave the account of action (acting in order to help the person one feels and understands is suffering) out of empathy altogether. Most suffering persons would surely prefer a fellow being who actually does something for them in contrast to just telling them that they understand and feel sorry for them. This issue connects the discussion of what empathy is to ethics. Is empathy a corner stone of morality, perhaps a necessary constituent in the makeup of every moral subject, or is it rather a bad substitute for ethical concepts such as respect and responsibility, allowing people to think and say that they really know what it is to be in the position of the other, and perhaps, also, to feel sorry for the other rather than doing anything about his suffering?

In the conference we want to gather academics and practitioners from different disciplines who try to move beyond (not beside) the theory-theory and the simulation-theory approaches to empathy. We want to address the question of what empathy is from an empirical as well as theoretical perspective, and we want to connect the issue to what role empathy serves in the development of human beings as well as the exercise of human based professions. Abstracts for presentations addressing these issues and not exceeding 600 words should be sent to the conference secretary martin.gunnarson@sh.se no later than the 15 of April (2012). Final program will be distributed in May 2012.

Fredrik Svenaeus and Martin Gunnarson

Keynote speakers:

Lou Agosta, Chicago School of Professional Psychology

Thomas Fuchs, University of Heidelberg

Jodi Halpern, University of California Berkeley

Matthew Ratcliffe, Durham University

Jan Slaby, Freie Universität Berlin

Speaking personally (and this is Lou Agosta speaking), I struggle with a misunderstanding about my work in empathy studies. When I say that I work on empathy that sometimes lands int he listening of the audience as if empathy were only over here with me and “over there” with the audience was a need for more or better or different empathy. This is misunderstanding. Empathy does NOT belong to any one individual. It lives in the relatedness between speaker and listener. It lives in the community. Empathy in any form or context causes expanded empathy in every form and context.

September 14, 2011

The Chicago Empathy Project is Live!

Filed under: Emotions,Empathy,psychotherapy,talk therapy — Lou Agosta @ 12:24 pm
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The commitment of the Chicago Empathy Project (CEP) is to expand the application of empathy in human relatedness. In particular, the commitment is to provide an opening for the exchange of ideas in a context of empathic human relations by delivering motivational presentations, inspirational conversations, training, workshops, and psychotherapy services to the professionals in the mental health, education, and business communities. This post is a call for participation and an invitation to provide leadership in designing and implementing the Chicago Empathy Project (CEP).

The CEP project acknowledges and promotes the value of empathy engaging competing approaches to restoring emotional well being including Talk Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), and psychopharmacology. All three benefit from a foundation in empathy. The possibilities for interdisciplinary networking and interdisciplinary research are significant based on a foundation in empathy. Lining up the optimum therapy with a given individual remains an interdisciplinary art requiring experience, skill, and learning. However, the pendulum has swung far-too-far away from the breakthrough results of the work on empathy (initiated by Heinz Kohut and his colleagues including Michael Basch, Arnold Goldberg, Mark Gehrie, and Ernest Wolf). Empathy is alive and well at dedicated centers of excellance such as The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis where Kohut made his mark. But few know about this or have access to it, notwithstanding generous out reach programs. Other dedicated mental health professionals are becoming the shoe maker’s children, living off the worried well. Even psychiatrists (MDs) with a psychodynamic interest find it hard to practice talk therapy (psychotherapy) due to market pressures, declining insurance reimbursements, and the mis-education of the public to expect behavior modification and psychotropic pills to be a silver bullet. Personal dissatisfaction, emotional upset, and despair over the future are growth industries.With apologies to Melanie Klein (a famous psychoanalyst), the CEP refuses to endorse the paranoid position. There is nothing wrong. However, there is something missing – empathy. Expanded empathy is the requirement and commitment.

The Chicago Empathy project bears witness to one fundamental approach: absent a warm, generous, empathic listening, psychotherapy is hard to distinguish from dental work. It can be painful. A gracious, generous, empathic listening provides access to the inner, emotional life of the other person and, with conditions and qualifications, can jup start the process of emotional healing and recovery. This extends (once again with conditions and qualifications) to applications of CBT and psychopharmacology, especially given the side effects of the latter. Though empathy is not a silver bullet (even as the search for one continues), empathy makes a profound difference in the quality of the caregiver-patient experience, the quality of the student-teacher relationship, and the quality of the consumer-business engagement. As every mother of a newborn, every parent, and every caretaker knows, empathy is a natural ability with which all human beings are born; no university degree or license is required to be empathic, though training and education can make a substantial difference in developing the competence. The Chicago Empathy project empowers people through conversations, presentations, workshops, and one-on-one psychotherapy to expand the use of empathy in human relatedness. The result is developing zones of human understanding, possibility, relatedness; the unblocking of obstacles to personal growth and the restarting of human potential and growth; and the transformation of suffering and emotional upset into creativity, humor, wisdom, and expanded empathy.  Full disclosure: This project is a work in progress and its creation and implementation are the result of the contributions of the engaged, participating community. Full disclosure: as I write this, I do so as someone who has been on both sides of the therapist/patient interface as well as the therapist/client one. It is going to sound a tad like bragging here at the backend but if not now when? … Additional qualifications for commenting on what to look for in an empathy project is that my works on empathy are footnotes in Goldberg, Wolf, and Basch (see bibliography below).  This project charter is not complete nor is my knowledge and experience; all the usual disclaimers apply; so the reader’s [your] feedback, criticism, experiences, impertinent remarks, and contribution are hereby requested. This project needs – a web site of its own; a high profile leader with name recognition; individual narratives of how empathy makes a difference; brain storming; speaking opportunities; consulting engagements; training assignments; community engagement. Please let me hear from you.

Bibliography

Agosta, Lou. (2010). Empathy in the Context of Philosophy.London: Palgrave/ Macmillan.

__________. (1984). “Empathy and intersubjectivity,” Empathy I, ed. J. Lichtenberg et al.Hillsdale,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Press.

__________. (1980). “The recovery of feelings in a folktale,” Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 1980: 287-97.

__________. (1976). “Intersecting language in psychoanalysis and philosophy,” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Vol. 5, 1976: 507-34.

Basch, Michael F. (1983). “Empathic understanding: a review of the concept and some theoretical considerations,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 31, No. 1: 101-126. (See p. 114.) .

Gehrie, Mark (2011). “From archaic narcissism to empathy for the self: the evolution of new capacities in psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 59, No. 2: 313-333.

Goldberg, Arnold. (2011). “The enduring presence of Heinz Kohut: empathy and its vicissitudes,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 59, No. 2: 289-311. (See  pp. 296, 309.) .

Kohut, Heinz. (1984). How Does Analysis Cure? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wolf, Ernest S. (1988). Treating the Self.New York: The Guilford Press. (See pp. 17, 171.)

This post and all contents of this site (c) Lou Agosta, Ph.D. and the Chicago Empathy Project

January 21, 2010

The Recovery of Empathy in a Folktale

Filed under: autism,Einfühlung,Emotions,Empathy,Hermeneutics,Philosophy,Psychoanalysis,Self — Lou Agosta @ 1:01 pm
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A wonderful example of empathy and its absence is documented in one of the fairy tales (Märchen) of the collection edited by the Grimm Brothers. “The Story of the Youth Who Set Out to Learn Fear” is about a youth – the classic simpleton of the folktale – who tries to learn what shuddering is (i.e., fear in the sense of “goose flesh”). The hero-simpleton tries so hard to feel fear that he is effectively defended against all feelings. He has no feelings, not even fear. He is insensitive to others’ feelings in the everyday sense. Thus, he lacks empathy and the corresponding aspects of his being human (humanness). He is also ontologically cut off from the community of fellow travelers who share feelings empathically and on the basis of which life matters to them (and him). This deficiency occasions a misunderstanding in the narrative with the sacristan at the local church, and the youth throws the latter down the stairs, resulting in the youth’s disgrace and banishment. As in all classic folktales, the hero goes forth on a journey of exploration of both the world and of himself. He becomes a traveler on the road of life, which is the beginning of his ontological adventures to recover his feelings and become a complete human being.

For those interested, here is further detail on the story itself.  Märchen von Einem der auzog das Fürchten zu lernen,  translated as “The story of the youth who went forth to learn what fear was” in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tale, (1814/17), ed. W. Grimm and J. Grimm, tr. M. Hunt and J. Stern. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972: 29f. “Grüseln” means literally “to shudder” or “get the creeps,” “goose bumps,” a classic physical expression of fear. In the Anthropology (1797: §16; 33; 154), Kant calls out “The thrill that comes over us at the mere idea of the sublime and the gooseflesh [grüseln] with which fairy tales put children to bed late at night are vital sensations; they permeate the body so far as there is life in it.” The point is, anyone lacking such an experience, as depicted in the Märchen, is hardly alive, is an emotional zombie.  Bruno Bettelheim does not call out the link with empathy in his treatment of this folktale in his The Uses of Enchantment ((1975) New York: Alfred Knopf: 280-82); though, as I recall, Professor Bettelheim did make the connection in classroom discussion that I attended at the University of Chicago in the Spring of 1975. On the relevance of folktales to philosophy see, L. Agosta. (1978). “Kant’s treasure hard-to-attain,” Kant-Studien, Vol. 69, No. 4, 1978: 422-443; and also L. Agosta. (1980). “The recovery of feelings in a folktale,” Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 1980: 287-97. Meanwhile….

The point is that empathy is not an obscure capability that requires elaborate technology to make it visible, as when researchers deploy a functional magnetic resonance imaging apparatus (fMRI) to correlate mirror neurons (though we can learn from the latter too). Rather empathy hides in plain view. This folktale, this Märchen, is in fact a ghost story, to be told on dark, windy autumn nights. The empathy of the audience is aroused by constellating fearful images of the living dead. This makes for a series of humorous encounters with ghouls and haunted castles as the youth sets about trying to learn shuddering – compulsively saying “I wish I could shudder,” having no idea what it means. The hero performs many brave deeds instead – as he is literally not sensible enough to grasp the distinction “fear” and recognize when he should be afraid. The ghost story provides a framework for images of the disintegration and fragmentation of the self, including literal ghoulish images of bowling with detached heads and a corpse that rises from the dead because the youth gets into bed with it to warm it up – a scenario quite creepy – against which the youth is firmly defended by his complete lack of feeling. None of these images and events matter to him in the way they would matter to an affectively, emotionally whole person. He is surrounded by ghouls and living corpses but, ontologically speaking, he is the one who is an affective zombie, emotionally dead. Without empathy, the individual is emotionally cut-off, i.e., dead.

The subtext of the story is that the individual cannot recover his humanity on his own. He requires the participation of another – and a relationship with the other – to restore the being human (humanness) of his feelings – and to teach him how to shudder. Having raised the curse on the haunted castle and won the hand of the fair princess, the hero finally stops trying to shudder. Only then is he overcome by shuddering at the first opportune occasion. On the morning after his wedding night – his new wife teaches him shuddering – no, this is not going where you think – she teaches him shuddering in a pun that cleverly masks the physical and sexual innuendo – she throws bowl of cold water filled with gold fish on him with the flipping gold fish included – he wakes up exclaiming that “Ach, yah, now finally I know shuddering!” Now he is finally a whole, enriched, and complete human being. Here is the original essay – caution the word “emapthy” does not occur in this essay. However, I suggest that empathy is what immediately underlies the capacity for feeling that forms the pivotal challenge faced by the protagonist in the folktale. For more details see -

JRHRecoveryFeelingFolktaleAgosta

January 7, 2010

Engaging Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy for Self Psychology – the presentation

Filed under: Einfühlung,Empathy,Hermeneutics,Philosophy,Psychoanalysis,Self — Lou Agosta @ 12:05 pm
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This is a presentation engaging Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy from the perspective of Heinz Kohut’s Self Pscyhology. A shortened version of this is scheduled to be delivered at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis on Wednesday Feb 24th at 1:30 PM (13th floor 122 S. Michigan Ave). Open to the public – though it is always advisable to call ahead to verify the logistics and if you want to get the service lerning unit – right now, the snow is coming down in big globs here in Chicago. This is a draft. If you have any questions/inquiries that you would like me to address in the talk, please post a comment and I will address the matter in the talk (or if the answer is too long or complex, I will communicate the details separately via an email (so provide one)). Makes sense? 

  • This work takes its start from

– One idea in Kohut: the loss of the selfobject’s empathy leaves one apathetic, lethargic, depressed, a sense of not being human (e.g., p. 200 (How Does Analysis Cure))  and from …

- One line in Heidegger’s Being and Time where he calls for “a special hermeneutic of empathy [Einfühlung]” but does not give one – this talk is NOT psycho-biography, but (if it were) one might say that empathy was what was missing from the biography (and the psyche)…Please see attached for the PDF of the ppt… LFCAgostaEmpathy20090212

December 7, 2009

Debunking Metzinger on the Self

Filed under: Philosophy,Self — Lou Agosta @ 5:10 pm
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Nothwithstanding the critical result of this review (essay), Thomas Metzinger’s contribution to the rehabilitation of introspection and the phenomenology of experiential consciousness is substantial. The rehabilitation of introspection is critical path for my own work on empathy, since one approach to empathy is as ‘vicarious introspection’ [see Heinz Kohut and other articles on this site]. Metzinger’s contribution is “over the top” and cannot be under-estimated or neglected. I am taking him to task for a rhetorically excessive position he does not really need – except perhaps for marketing purposes. IMHO. For the neurophenomenologist, Thomas Metzinger, the self does not exist – there are no selves, only the naively realistic misunderstanding that a phenomenal self appears in consciousness. This review argues that the main problem with Metzinger’s approach is that he is working with an anachronistic, though celebrated, definition of the self, a thinking thing, which he then, naturally, finds unsatisfactory. Three issues with this position are explored, and what is valid in Metzinger’s otherwise rhetorically excessive contribution is recovered. Several positive accounts of the self are indicated, but not developed in this piece (but elsewhere on this site).   PhilPsychPPDebunkingMetzinger20091015Agosta [This post and related articles (c) Lou Agosta, Ph.D.]

November 15, 2009

Heidegger’s Special Hermeneutic of Empathy, the Essay

Filed under: Einfühlung,Empathy,Hermeneutics,Philosophy,Self — Lou Agosta @ 11:12 am
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The article at the end of this post is a rough draft – very rough – of material eventually worked into my book of the same title, Empathy in the Context of Philosophy (Palgrave 2010). It is useful in that it contains chatty, informal discussions that had to be cut [edited] out as not being adequately serious and significant as befits a philosophical monograph (and also due to limitations of word count). In Heidegger’s Being and Time the alternative of inauthentically being with other people is contrasted with authentically being alone in the face of death, one’s own individualizing and inevitable demise. The third choice of authentically being with other human beings is neglected, pushed down into a few parenthetical remarks that dismiss empathy [Einfühlung]. The possibility of authentic human being with others is delimited but, for the most part, not developed. This chapter gathers together those remarks and amplifies them with an analysis of human being with other human beings by applying the basic Heideggerian distinctions of affectedness, understanding, interpretation, assertion, and speech to an interpretation and implementation of empathy. Insight from the later Heidegger is integrated. An analysis of empathy is produced in the spirit of Heidegger’s distinctions. This results in clearing the way for an implementation of empathy as the foundation of human interrelatedness and the implementation of the missing chapter from Being and Time on Heidegger’s “Special Hermeneutic of Empathy.” For further details, distinctions, and discussion see attached – EmpathyHermeneuticsHeidegger

November 13, 2009

The Validation of Empathy in Psychoanalysis

Filed under: Empathy,Hermeneutics,Psychoanalysis,Validation — Lou Agosta @ 8:55 am
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The argument of this blog post is that empathy can adequately be validated by formulating one’s empathic receptivity in an interpretation, which, in turn, is subject to confirming or refuting experiences, responses, reactions, replies. The unpacking of the term “empathy” into receptive and interpretive phases of a hermeneutic circle contains the key to answering the question of how to validate empathy. Note that this approach to validation involves a flanking movement through which the possibilities of understanding and misunderstanding emerge simultaneously. 

The issue of the validation of empathy goes to the heart of what it means for an intellectual discipline to be a science. At the same time that Heinz Kohut was preparing his definitive paper (Kohut 1959) defining the scope and limits of psychoanalysis as a science based on empathy and introspection, Heinz Hartmann and Ernest Nagel (Hartmann 1959; Nagel 1959) were squaring off for a separate debate about the scientific status of psychoanalysis.[1] While some of the ideals of science as rigorous mathematical discipline to which all others should aspire have faded since then, the aura of respectability – and its contrary – lack of scientific respectability – continue to haunt psychoanalysis. In many ways, this debate was the original “trauma,” to which Kohut was a witness but in relation to which he was just a “voice crying in the wilderness.” His contribution was overlooked at least until his 1977 Restoration of the Self, on which a detailed drill down of the scientific position of psychoanalysis was performed in the context of empathy and introspection.[2] Consideration of the perspective of empathic data gathering would have made a difference in specific ways that can only and best be appreciated by laying out the terms of the debate as well as the response that occurred as Paul Ricoeur entered the fray in 1970.[3]  Please see the attachment for further discussion, argument, quotations, and details – CHEmpathyValidation

 

[1] H. Kohut. (1959). “Introspection, empathy, and psychoanalysis.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7, No. 3: 459-83. Heinz Hartmann. (1959). “Psychoanalysis as a scientific theory.” Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. S. Hook. New York: New York University Press, 1963: 3-37; E. Nagel. (1959). Methodological issues in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. S. Hook. New York: New York University Press, 1963: 38-56.

[2] See Chapter ___ on Empathy and Introspection. See also Heinz Kohut. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press. When I say “the contribution was overlooked,” I mean “overlooked” as a contribution to the scientific foundation of psychoanalysis; obviously the appreciation of two new kinds of transference and related issues about the self were immediately appreciated if no less controversial for all that. Also Heinz Kohut. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press, 1977.

[3] P. Ricoeur. (1965). Freud and Philosophy, tr. D. Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

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