Empathy

Development, Training, and Consequences

Arnold P. Goldstein, Gerald Y. Michaels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367759988
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000379198
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1985, this book sought to thoroughly examine and better understand a dimension of interpersonal relations which at the time had often proven elusive, confusing, and quite difficult to operationalize. Empathy had been diversely defined, hard to measure, often resistant to change, yet emerged as a singularly important influence in human interaction. The Editors lengthy effort to better understand its nature, consequences and alteration was not an easy journey, yet was a rewarding one. This book presents the fruits of their journey, and thus they hoped the reader would feel equally rewarded.

The several diverse definitions of empathy are sequentially presented and examined in Chapter 1, in an effort to begin this book with a shared understanding of the major historical and contemporary meanings of the construct. The Editors conclude this initial chapter by subscribing themselves to a particular components definition of empathy, a definition they predict will prove particularly useful in enhancing future understanding, investigation, and application of empathic behaviour. This components definition, therefore, substantially influences and shapes much of the content of the rest of the book.

1

Historical and Contemporary Definitions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165095-1

The term ‘empathy’ derives from the Greek word empatheia, which implies an active appreciation of another person’s feeling experience.

(Astin, 1967, p. 57)

Lipps [1907] believed that empathy was a form of inner imitation. An observer is stimulated by the sight of an object and responds by imitating the object. The process is automatic and swift, and soon the observer feels himself into the object, loses consciousness of himself, and experiences the object as if his own identity had disappeared and he had become the object himself.

(Katz, 1963, p. 85)

Empathy means … to glide with one’s own feeling into the dynamic structure of an object … or even of an animal or a man, and as it were to trace it from within, understanding the formation and motoriality of the object with the perceptions of one’s own muscles; it means to ‘transpose’ oneself over there and in there.

(Buber, 1948, p. 97)

Empathy can be described as a process of ‘projection’ or ‘introjection’; both are metaphors referring to the experience of partial identity between the subject’s mental processes and those of another with the resulting insight into the other’s mental state and participation in his emotions.

(Koestler, 1949, p. 360)

Empathy will be used … to denote the imaginative transposing of oneself into the thinking, feeling and acting of another and so structuring the world as he does.

(Dymond, 1949, p. 127)

Empathy is the capacity to take the role of the other and to adopt alternative perspectives vis a vis oneself.

(Mead, 1934, p. 27)

Empathy is the process by which a person momentarily pretends to himself that he is another person, projects himself into the perceptual field of the other person, imaginatively puts himself in the other person’s place, in order that he may get an insight into the other person’s probable behavior in a given situation.

(Coutu, 1951, p. 18)

Empathy ultimately is vicarious introspection—we introject the other person into ourselves and contemplate him inwardly.

(Katz, 1963, p. 93)

empathy … seems the essence of what client-centered therapists have referred to as adopting the patient’s frame of reference, or what psychoanalysts have referred to as transient, controlled identifications.

(Bachrach, 1976, p. 35)

the ability to step into another person’s shoes and to step back just as easily into one’s own shoes again. It is not projection, which implies that the wearer’s shoes pinch him and that he wishes someone else in them; it is not identification, which involves stepping into another person’s shoes and then being unable or unwilling to get out of them; and it is not sympathy, in which a person stands in his own shoes while observing another person’s behavior, and while reacting to him in terms of what he tells you about shoes—if they pinch, one communicates with him, if they are comfortable, one enjoys his comfort with him.

(Blackman, Smith, Brokman, & Stem, 1958, p. 550)

we list four phases in the empathic process, following Theodore Reik’s outline …

1. Identification. Partly through an instinctive, imitative activity and partly through a relaxation of our conscious controls, we allow ourselves to become absorbed in contemplating the other person and his experiences.
2. Incorporation. By this term we mean the act of taking the experience of the other person into ourselves. It is hard to distinguish this phase from the initial act of feeling oneself into the other person … These are two sides of the same process. When we identify, we project our being into others; when we incorporate, we introject the other person into ourselves.
3. Reverberation. What we have taken into ourselves now echos upon some part of our own experience and awakens a new appreciation… We allow for an interplay between two sets of experiences, the internalized feelings of others and our own experience and fantasy.
4. Detachment. In this pase of empathic understanding, we withdraw from our subjective involvement and use the methods of reason and scrutiny. We break our identification and deliberately move away to gain the social and psychic distance necessary for objective analysis.

(Katz, 1963, p. 41)

the measurement of affective sensitivity or what might be termed generically, empathy. Affective sensitivity is conceptualized as the ability to detect and describe the immediate affective state of another, or in terms of communication theory, the ability to receive and decode affective communications.

(Danish & Kagan, 1971, p. 51)

The way of being with another person which is termed empathic has several facets. It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person … It involves communicating your sensing of his/her world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes.

(Rogers, 1975, p. 4)

Accurate empathy involves more than just the ability of the therapist to sense the client or patient’s private world as if it were his own. It also involves more than just his ability to know what the patient means. Accurate empathy involves both the therapist’s sensitivity to current feelings and his verbal facility to communicate this understanding in a language attuned to the client’s current feelings. It is not necessary—indeed it would seem undesirable—for the therapist to share the client’s feelings in any sense that would require him to feel the same emotions. It is instead an appreciation and sensitive awareness of those feelings.

(Truax & Carkhuff, 1967, p. 46)

The first phase of emphatic behavior begins as the worker perceives the various overt behaviors of the client, including his explicit verbal message and its para-linguistic qualities.

In the second phase of empathic behavior, the worker’s perception elicits both cognitive and feeling responses in himself … In order to achieve high levels of empathy with the client, the worker must allow his initial feeling responses to remain as free as possible from cognitive distortion. Cognitive distortion includes stereotyping, making value judgments, or analyzing perceptions according to a fixed theoretical schema.

In the third phase of empathic behavior, the worker must consciously separate feelings held by himself alone from those sensed and shared with the client. The foregoing … empathic behaviors … all characterize the worker’s receptivity to the client. But accurate reception must be complemented by accurate feedback.

(Keefe, 1976, pp. 11–12)

this model delineated the following empathizer behaviors as the components of empathy: (1) perception of verbal and nonverbal messages from the other person, (2) accurate understanding of the meanings of the other person’s messages …, (3) experience of one’s somatic responses to the messages of the other person while holding complex cognitive elaboration … in temporary abeyance, (4) separation of feelings shared with the other person from those held alone, and (5) accurate communication of reactive feelings back to the other person in harmonious understandable verbal and nonverbal messages.

(Keefe, 1979, pp. 30–31)

CONCEPTUAL DEFINITIONS

The concept of empathy has had a long, varied, and at times conflicting definitional history. This pattern has been true both within and between the diverse fields of inquiry in which empathy has been a significant construct, namely aesthetics, sociology, and psychology. We wish in the sections that follow to trace this definitional history and examine its flow and evolving meaning. As we do so, we seek to reduce the substantial levels of conceptual chaos inherent in this history and move toward that comprehensive definition that later chapters of this book—those examining the consequences of empathy in diverse contexts—begin to demonstrate to be a construct valid and heuristically optimal way of defining this elusive and often confusing concept.

In 1897, Lipps introduced the term Einfuhlung in his writings about aesthetic perception and appreciation. Einfuhlung meant “feeling oneself into,” in German, and was translated as empathy by Tichener in 1910. In examining and contemplating an object (of art, nature, etc.), Lipps believed one projected oneself into the object (e.g., “feeling together with”), established an identification between it and oneself, engaged in a process of inner imitation, and in this manner came more fully to understand and appreciate it. Some years later, Lipps (1926) extended this definitional position to include people and not only objects as the targets of empathic efforts. In doing so, he elaborated further the notion of motor mimicry as the central process constituting Einfuhlung. The perceiver engages, he held, in imitating the target object or person by consciously or unconsciously assuming aspects of its posture and, in the case of target persons, taking on certain of his or her physical stances, gestures, or expressions. In this manner, Lipps posited, inner cues are created in the perceiver that lead to a heightened appreciation and understanding of the object/person and, in the case of target persons, a shared feeling experience. Thus, for Lipps, empathy proceeded by means of projection and imitation, could involve both objects or persons as targets, and consisted largely of heightened understanding of the other through cue-produced shared feelings. As noted earlier, much the same focus is explicitly expressed in definitions of empathy put forth somewhat later by Buber (1948) (“to glide with one’s own feeling into the dynamic structure of an object”) and Koestler (1949) (“the experience of partial identity”).

With the work of George Mead (1934), however, the definitional focus of empathy shifted in two important directions. A cognitive component in the form of “an ability to understand” was added to the earlier affective emphasis. And, furthermore, the blending or merging of identities notion yielded to a self-other differentiation in which the empathizer temporarily “took the role of the other” or “put themselves in the other’s place” as the heart of the empathic process. As Deutsch and Madle (1975) observe: “Empathy was no longer viewed as purely a perceptual awareness of an individual’s affect or sharing of feeling, but rather an ability to understand a person’s emotional reactions in consort with the context” (p. 270). The “imaginitive transposing,” “momentary pretending,” “introjection of the other,” and “adopting the other’s frame of reference” described, respectively, in the Dymond (1949), Coutu (1951), Katz (1963), and Bachrach (1976) definitions of empathy provided earlier each fully reflect the role-taking or perspective-taking essence of Mead’s (1934) view of the meaning of empathy.

This temporary, momentary, as if, borrowing-in-order-to-understand quality remained a feature of the definition of empathy as its target more fully and explicitly became the ongoing emotional state of the other. In the Reik (see Katz, 1963) definition, for example, note how the Identification, Incorporation, and Reverberation stages of the empathic process combine to provide the empathizer with an extended opportunity to “try on” the target person’s ongoing emotional experience prior to the Detachment stage, in which the empathizer seeks to gain distance from the other in order to engage in more objective, cognitive analysis. Beyond this joint affective and cognitive focus, the several affective sensitivity definitions of empathy—presented earlier in this chapter—that have emerged more recently (Danish & Kagan, 1971; Rogers, 1975; Truax & Carkhuff, 1967) added yet a new component. The act of empathizing, according to each of these definitions, involved not only the ability to sensitively comprehend the other’s affective world, but also to accurately and sensitively communicate this understanding to the target other; that is, empathy for these persons involved “communicating your sensing” (Rogers, 1975), “detecting and describing” (Danish & Kagan, 1971), and “facility in communicating this [affective] understanding” (Truax & Carkhuff, 1967).

These affective-cognitive-communicative features of what we view as a comprehensive definition of empathy are reflected most fully in the phase definition of empathy offered by Keefe (1976, 1979) and depicted in Fig. 1.1.

FIG. 1.1. Behaviors comprising empathic skill

Keefe (1976) suggests that the first phase of the empathic process begins as the worker perceives (c) the feeling state and thoughts of the other (a) by means of the overt behavioral cues displayed by the other (b). In the second phase, the worker’s perceptions generate both cognitive and affective responses in himself (d). Here, in a manner consistent with Reik’s notion of reverberation, the worker seeks to avoid stereotyping, value judgments, the formulation of hypotheses, or other forms of cognitive analysis. Instead, he or she seeks to hold such cognitive processes in abeyance while allowing and encouraging a largely unfettered, as-if, experiencing of the other’s affective world (e). In the next, detachment (Reik, 1949) and decoding (Danish & Kagan, 1971) phase, the worker seeks to distinguish among, sort out and label his or her own feelings and those he or she perceives as being experienced by the other person (f). Finally, as we noted is true for other, more recent definitions of empathy, in Keefe’s view the worker communicates accurate feedback to the target person as the final phase of the empathic sequence (g). Keefe (1976) summarizes this sequence:

The foregoing four empathic behaviors—perceiving accurately the client’s gestalt, allowing a direct feeling response to arise, holding qualifying or distorting cognitive processes in abeyance, and separating his own feelings from those shared

with the client—all characterize the worker’s receptivity to the client. But accurate reception must be complimented by accurate feedback, (pp. 12–13)

Macarov (1978) observes that empathy has three contemporaneous meanings. Consistent with Keefe and others, our more comprehensive affective-cognitive-communication stance is that empathy is optimally defined by all three of these meanings combined:

1. Taking the role of the other, viewing the world as he or she sees it, and experiencing his or her feelings.
2. Being adept at reading nonverbal communication and interpreting the feelings underlying it.
3. Giving off a feeling of caring, or sincerely trying to understand in a nonjudg-mental or helping way. (p. 88)

RELATED CONSTRUCTS

Having now traced the definitional history of empathy and defined it in terms of what it is, our understanding of the meaning of empathy will be enhanced further if we differentiate it from what it is not, by examining a number of related constructs wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Historical and Contemporary Definitions
• 2. Development of Empathy
• 3. Perceptual and Affective Reverberation Components
• 4. The Cognitive Analysis Component
• 5. Psychotherapeutic Consequences
• 6. Educational Consequences
• 7. Parenting Consequences
• 8. Training
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index