Empathy
by
Empathy is broadly understood as an attunement to the suffering, needs, or experience of another. In health humanities, many see empathic responsiveness as a core value of the field (Johanna Shapiro et al. 2009; Campo 2005; Charon 2001). And yet when it comes to twenty-first-century health care, empathy seems to be that which is too often lacking. This paradox positions us to ask, What exactly is this unique sensibility, and how did it become so entwined—problematically so—with the work of clinicians in our current high-tech medical world? Spliced together from the Greek roots -em and -path to form in-feeling, empathy names the capacity of human beings to feel their way into that which is not them. Despite sounding vaguely Aristotelian, empathy’s far shorter genealogy begins with nineteenth-century philosophy. Einfühlung (the German word for “in-feeling”) involved a dissolving of the felt distinction between self and object that might arise when, for example, viewing a painting or landscape. In 1909, the British-American psychologist Edward Titchener coined empathy to describe a similar experience of spontaneous attunement—not with an inert object but with another person. Titchener describes how this “in-feeling” happens: “Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride,” he writes, “but...
This essay may be found on page 75 of the printed volume.