On Empathy

By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1999 edition) defines empathy as:

"The ability to imagine oneself in anther's place and understand the
other's feelings, desires, ideas, and actions. It is a term coined
in the early 20th century, equivalent to the German Einfühlung and
modelled on "sympathy." The term is used with special (but not
exclusive) reference to aesthetic experience. The most obvious
example, perhaps, is that of the actor or singer who genuinely feels
the part he is performing. With other works of art, a spectator may,
by a kind of introjection, feel himself involved in what he observes
or contemplates. The use of empathy is an important part of the
counselling technique developed by the American psychologist Carl
Rogers."

Empathy is predicated upon and must, therefore, incorporate the
following elements:

1.. Imagination which is dependent on the ability to imagine;
2.. The existence of an accessible Self (self-awareness or self-
consciousness);
3.. The existence of an available other (other-awareness,
recognizing the outside world);
4.. The existence of accessible feelings, desires, ideas and
representations of actions or their outcomes both in the empathizing
Self ("Empathor") and in the Other, the object of empathy
("Empathee");
5.. The availability of an aesthetic frame of reference;
6.. The availability of a moral frame of reference.
While (a) is presumed to be universally available to all agents
(though in varying degrees) - the existence of the other components
of empathy should not be taken for granted.

Conditions (b) and (c), for instance, are not satisfied by people
who suffer from personality disorders, such as the Narcissistic
Personality Disorder. Condition (d) is not met in autistic people
(e.g., those who suffer from the Asperger syndrome). Conditions (e)
is so totally dependent on the specifics of the culture, period and
society in which it exists - that it is rather meaningless and
ambiguous as a yardstick. Condition (f) suffer from both
afflictions: it is both culture-dependent AND is not satisfied in
many people (such as those who suffer from the Antisocial
Personality Disorder and who are devoid of any conscience or moral
sense).

Thus, the very existence of empathy should be questioned. It is
often confused with inter-subjectivity. The latter is defined thus
by "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995":

"This term refers to the status of being somehow accessible to at
least two (usually all, in principle) minds or 'subjectivities'. It
thus implies that there is some sort of communication between those
minds; which in turn implies that each communicating minds aware not
only of the existence of the other but also of its intention to
convey information to the other. The idea, for theorists, is that if
subjective processes can be brought into agreement, then perhaps
that is as good as the (unattainable?) status of being objective -
completely independent of subjectivity. The question facing such
theorists is whether intersubjectivity is definable without
presupposing an objective environment in which communication takes
place (the 'wiring' from subject A to subject B). At a less
fundamental level, however, the need for intersubjective
verification of scientific hypotheses has been long recognized".
(page 414).

On the face of it, the difference between intersubjectivity and
empathy is double:

1.. Intersubjectivity requires an EXPLICIT, communicated agreement
between at least two subjects.
2.. It involves EXTERNAL things (so called "objective" entities).
These "differences" are artificial. This how empathy is defined
in "Psychology - An Introduction (Ninth Edition) by Charles G.
Morris, Prentice Hall, 1996":

"Closely related to the ability to read other people's emotions is
empathy - the arousal of an emotion in an observer that is a
vicarious response to the other person's situation... Empathy
depends not only on one's ability to identify someone else's
emotions but also on one's capacity to put oneself in the other
person's place and to experience an appropriate emotional response.
Just as sensitivity to non-verbal cues increases with age, so does
empathy: The cognitive and perceptual abilities required for empathy
develop only as a child matures... (page 442)

In empathy training, for example, each member of the couple is
taught to share inner feelings and to listen to and understand the
partner's feelings before responding to them. The empathy technique
focuses the couple's attention on feelings and requires that they
spend more time listening and less time in rebuttal." (page 576).

Thus empathy does require the communication of feelings AND an
agreement on the appropriate outcome of the communicated emotions
(=affective agreement). In the absence of such agreement, we are
faced with inappropriate affect (laughing at a funeral, for
instance).

Moreover, empathy does relate to external objects and is provoked by
them. There is no empathy in the absence of an empathee. Granted,
intersubjectivity is intuitively applied to the inanimate while
empathy is applied to the living (animals, humans, even plants). But
this is a difference in human preferences - not in definition.

Empathy can, thus, be re-defined as a form of intersubjectivity
which involves living things as "objects" to which the communicated
intersubjective agreement relates. It is wrong to limit empathy to
the communication of emotion. It is the intersubjective, concomitant
experience of BEING. The empathor empathizes not only with the
empathee's emotions but also with his physical state and other
parameters of existence (pain, hunger, thirst, suffocation, sexual
pleasure etc.).

This leads to the important (and perhaps intractable) psychophysical
question.

Intersubjectivity relates to external objects but the subjects
communicate and reach an agreement regarding the way THEY have been
affected by the objects.

Empathy relates to external objects (the Others) but the subjects
communicate and reach an agreement regarding the way THEY would have
felt had they BEEN the object.

This is no minor difference, if it, indeed, exists. But does it
really exist?

What is it that we feel in empathy? Is it OUR emotions/sensations
merely provoked by an external trigger (classic intersubjectivity)
or is it a TRANSFER of the object's feelings/sensations to us?

Such a transfer being physically impossible (as far as we know) - we
are forced to adopt the former model. Empathy is the set of
reactions - emotional and cognitive - to triggering by an external
object (the other). It is the equivalent of resonance in the
physical sciences. But we have NO WAY to ascertain the "wavelength"
of such resonance is identical in both subjects. In other words, we
have no way to verify that the feelings or sensation invoked in the
two (or more) subjects are one and the same. What I call "sadness"
may not be what you call "sadness". Colours have unique, uniform,
independently measurable properties (like energy). Still, no one can
prove that what I see as "red" is what another calls "red" (as is
the case with Daltonists). If this is true where "objective",
measurable, phenomena are concerned - it is infinitely true in the
case of emotions or feelings.

We are, therefore, forced to refine our definition:

Empathy is a form of intersubjectivity which involves living things
as "objects" to which the communicated intersubjective agreement
relates. It is the intersubjective, concomitant experience of BEING.
The empathor empathizes not only with the empathee's emotions but
also with his physical state and other parameters of existence
(pain, hunger, thirst, suffocation, sexual pleasure etc.).

BUT

The meaning attributed to the words used by the parties to the
intersubjective agreement known as empathy is totally dependent upon
each party. The same words are used, the same denotates - but it
cannot be proven that the same connotates, the same experiences,
emotions and sensations are being discussed or communicated.

Language (and, by extension, art and culture) serve to introduce us
to other points of view ("what is it like to be someone else" to
paraphrase Thomas Nagle). By providing a bridge between the
subjective (inner experience) and the objective (words, images,
sounds) -language facilitates social exchange and interaction. It is
a dictionary which translates one's subjective private language to
the coin of the public medium. Knowledge and language are, thus, the
ultimate social glue, though both are based on approximations and
guesses (see George Steiner's "After Babel").

But, whereas the intersubjective agreement regarding measurements
and observations concerning external objects IS verifiable or
falsifiable using INDEPENDENT tools (e.g., lab experiments) - the
intersubjective agreement which concerns itself with the emotions,
sensations and experiences of subjects as communicated by them IS
NOT verifiable or falsifiable using INDEPENDENT tools. The
interpretation of this second kind of agreement is dependent upon
introspection and an assumption that identical words used by
different subjects still possess identical meaning. This assumption
is not falsifiable (or verifiable). It is neither true nor false. It
is a probabilistic statement with no probabilities attached. It is,
in short, a meaningless statement. As a result, empathy itself is
meaningless.

In human-speak, if you say that you are said and I empathize with
you it means that we have an agreement. I regard you as my object.
You communicate to me a property of yours ("sadness"). This triggers
in me a recollection of "what is sadness" or "what is to be sad". I
say that I know what you mean, I have been sad before, I know what
it is like to be sad. I empathize with you. We agree about being
sad. We have an intersubjective agreement.

Alas, such an agreement is meaningless. We cannot (yet) measure
sadness, quantify it, crystallize it, access it in any way from the
outside. We are totally and absolutely reliant on your introspection
and my introspection. There is no way anyone can prove that
my "sadness" is even remotely similar to your sadness. I may be
feeling or experiencing something that you might find hilarious and
not sad at all. Still, I call it "sadness" and I empathize with you.

This would not have been that grave if empathy hadn't been the
cornerstone of morality.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1999 Edition:

"Empathy and other forms of social awareness are important in the
development of a moral sense. Morality embraces a person's beliefs
about the appropriateness or goodness of what he does, thinks, or
feels... Childhood is ... the time at which moral standards begin to
develop in a process that often extends well into adulthood. The
American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg hypothesized that people's
development of moral standards passes through stages that can be
grouped into three moral levels...

At the third level, that of postconventional moral reasoning, the
adult bases his moral standards on principles that he himself has
evaluated and that he accepts as inherently valid, regardless of
society's opinion. He is aware of the arbitrary, subjective nature
of social standards and rules, which he regards as relative rather
than absolute in authority.

Thus the bases for justifying moral standards pass from avoidance of
punishment to avoidance of adult disapproval and rejection to
avoidance of internal guilt and self-recrimination. The person's
moral reasoning also moves toward increasingly greater social scope
(i.e., including more people and institutions) and greater
abstraction (i.e., from reasoning about physical events such as pain
or pleasure to reasoning about values, rights, and implicit
contracts)."

But, if moral reasoning is based on introspection and empathy - it
is, indeed, dangerously relative and not objective in any known
sense of the word. Empathy is a unique agreement on the emotional
and experiential content of two or more introspective processes in
two or more subjective. Such an agreement can never have any
meaning, even as far as the parties to it are concerned. They can
never be sure that they are discussing the same emotions or
experiences. There is no way to compare, measure, observe, falsify
or verify (prove) that the "same" emotion is experienced identically
by the parties to the empathy agreement. Empathy is meaningless and
introspection involves a private language despite what Wittgenstein
had to say. Morality is thus reduced to a set of meaningless private
languages.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"... Others have argued that because even rather young children are
capable of showing empathy with the pain of others, the inhibition
of aggressive behaviour arises from this moral affect rather than
from the mere anticipation of punishment. Some scientists have found
that children differ in their individual capacity for empathy, and,
therefore, some children are more sensitive to moral prohibitions
than others.

Young children's growing awareness of their own emotional states,
characteristics, and abilities leads to empathy--i.e., the ability
to appreciate the feelings and perspectives of others. Empathy and
other forms of social awareness are in turn important in the
development of a moral sense... Another important aspect of
children's emotional development is the formation of their self-
concept, or identity--i.e., their sense of who they are and what
their relation to other people is.

According to Lipps's concept of empathy, a person appreciates
another person's reaction by a projection of the self into the
other. In his Ästhetik, 2 vol. (1903-06; 'Aesthetics'), he made all
appreciation of art dependent upon a similar self-projection into
the object."

This may well be the key. Empathy has little to do with the other
person (the empathee). It is simply the result of conditioning and
socialization. In other words, when we hurt someone - we don't
experience his pain. We experience OUR pain. Hurting somebody -
hurts US. The reaction of pain is provoked in US by OUR own actions.
We have been taught a learned response of feeling pain when we
inflict it upon another. But we have also been taught to feel
responsible for our fellow beings (guilt). So, we experience pain
whenever another person claims to experience it as well. We feel
guilty.

In sum:

To use the example of pain, we experience it in tandem with another
person because we feel guilty or somehow responsible for his
condition. A learned reaction is activated and we experience (our
kind of) pain as well. We communicate it to the other person and an
agreement of empathy is struck between us.

We attribute feelings, sensations and experiences to the object of
our actions. It is the psychological defence mechanism of
projection. Unable to conceive of inflicting pain upon ourselves -
we displace the source. It is the other's pain that we are feeling,
we keep telling ourselves, not our own.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"Perhaps the most important aspect of children's emotional
development is a growing awareness of their own emotional states and
the ability to discern and interpret the emotions of others. The
last half of the second year is a time when children start becoming
aware of their own emotional states, characteristics, abilities, and
potential for action; this phenomenon is called self-awareness...
(coupled with strong narcissistic behaviours and traits - SV)...

This growing awareness of and ability to recall one's own emotional
states leads to empathy, or the ability to appreciate the feelings
and perceptions of others. Young children's dawning awareness of
their own potential for action inspires them to try to direct (or
otherwise affect) the behaviour of others...

...With age, children acquire the ability to understand the
perspective, or point of view, of other people, a development that
is closely linked with the empathic sharing of others' emotions...

One major factor underlying these changes is the child's increasing
cognitive sophistication. For example, in order to feel the emotion
of guilt, a child must appreciate the fact that he could have
inhibited a particular action of his that violated a moral standard.
The awareness that one can impose a restraint on one's own behaviour
requires a certain level of cognitive maturation, and, therefore,
the emotion of guilt cannot appear until that competence is
attained."

That empathy is a REACTION to external stimuli that is fully
contained within the empathor and then projected onto the empathee -
is clearly demonstrated by "inborn empathy". It is the ability to
exhibit empathy and altruistic behaviour in response to facial
expressions. Newborns react this way to their mother's facial
expression of sadness or distress.

This serves to prove that empathy has very little to do with the
feelings, experiences or sensations of the other (the empathee).
Surely, the infant has no idea what it is like to feel sad and
definitely not what it is like for his mother to feel sad. In this
case, it is a complex reflexive reaction. Later on, empathy is still
rather reflexive, the result of conditioning.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica quotes fascinating research which
dramatically proves the object-independent nature of empathy.
Empathy is an internal reaction, an internal process, triggered by
external cue provided by animate objects. It is communicated to the
empathee-other by the empathor but the communication and the
resulting agreement ("I know how you feel therefore we agree on how
you feel") is rendered meaningless by the absence of a monovalent,
unambiguous dictionary.

"An extensive series of studies indicated that positive emotion
feelings enhance empathy and altruism. It was shown by the American
psychologist Alice M. Isen that relatively small favours or bits of
good luck (like finding money in a coin telephone or getting an
unexpected gift) induced positive emotion in people and that such
emotion regularly increased the subjects' inclination to sympathize
or provide help.

Several studies have demonstrated that positive emotion facilitates
creative problem solving. One of these studies showed that positive
emotion enabled subjects to name more uses for common objects.
Another showed that positive emotion enhanced creative problem
solving by enabling subjects to see relations among objects (and
other people - SV) that would otherwise go unnoticed. A number of
studies have demonstrated the beneficial effects of positive emotion
on thinking, memory, and action in pre-school and older children."

If empathy increases with positive emotion (a result of good luck,
for instance) - then it has little to do with its objects and a lot
to do with the person in whom it is provoked.

ADDENDUM - Interview granted to the National Post, Toronto, Canada,
July 2003

Q. How important is empathy to proper psychological functioning?

A. Empathy is more important socially than it is psychologically.
The absence of empathy - for instance in the Narcissistic and
Antisocial personality disorders - predisposes people to exploit and
abuse others. Empathy is the bedrock of our sense of morality.
Arguably, aggressive behavior is as inhibited by empathy at least as
much as it is by anticipated punishment.

But the existence of empathy in a person is also a sign of self-
awareness, a healthy identity, a well-regulated sense of self-worth,
and self-love (in the positive sense). Its absence denotes emotional
and cognitive immaturity, an inability to love, to truly relate to
others, to respect their boundaries and accept their needs,
feelings, hopes, fears, choices, and preferences as autonomous
entities.

Q. How is empathy developed?

A. It may be innate. Even toddlers seem to empathize with the pain -
or happiness - of others (such as their caregivers). Empathy
increases as the child forms a self-concept (identity). The more
aware the infant is of his or her emotional states, the more he
explores his limitations and capabilities - the more prone he is to
projecting this new found knowledge unto others. By attributing to
people around him his new gained insights about himself, the child
develop a moral sense and inhibits his anti-social impulses. The
development of empathy is, therefore, a part of the process of
socialization.

But, as the American psychologist Carl Rogers taught us, empathy is
also learned and inculcated. We are coached to feel guilt and pain
when we inflict suffering on another person. Empathy is an attempt
to avoid our own self-imposed agony by projecting it onto another.

Q. Is there an increasing dearth of empathy in society today? Why do
you think so?

A. The social institutions that reified, propagated and administered
empathy have imploded. The nuclear family, the closely-knit extended
clan, the village, the neighborhood, the Church- have all unraveled.
Society is atomized and anomic. The resulting alienation fostered a
wave of antisocial behavior, both criminal and "legitimate". The
survival value of empathy is on the decline. It is far wiser to be
cunning, to cut corners, to deceive, and to abuse - than to be
empathic. Empathy has largely dropped from the contemporary
curriculum of socialization.

In a desperate attempt to cope with these inexorable processes,
behaviors predicated on a lack of empathy have been pathologized
and "medicalized". The sad truth is that narcissistic or antisocial
conduct is both normative and rational. No amount
of "diagnosis", "treatment", and medication can hide or reverse this
fact. Ours is a cultural malaise which permeates every single cell
and strand of the social fabric.

Q. Is there any empirical evidence we can point to of a decline in
empathy?

Empathy cannot be measured directly - but only through proxies such
as criminality, terrorism, charity, violence, antisocial behavior,
related mental health disorders, or abuse.

Moreover, it is extremely difficult to separate the effects of
deterrence from the effects of empathy.

If I don't batter my wife, torture animals, or steal - is it because
I am empathetic or because I don't want to go to jail?

Rising litigiousness, zero tolerance, and skyrocketing rates of
incarceration - as well as the ageing of the population - have
sliced intimate partner violence and other forms of crime across the
United States in the last decade. But this benevolent decline had
nothing to do with increasing empathy.
The statistics are open to interpretation but it would be safe to
say that the last century has been the most violent and least
empathetic in human history. Wars and terrorism are on the rise,
charity giving on the wane (measured as percentage of national
wealth), welfare policies are being abolished, Darwininan models of
capitalism are spreading. In the last two decades, mental health
disorders were added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the
American Psychiatric Association whose hallmark is the lack of
empathy. The violence is reflected in our popular culture: movies,
video games, and the media.

Empathy - supposedly a spontaneous reaction to the plight of our
fellow humans - is now channeled through self-interested and bloated
non-government organizations or multilateral outfits. The vibrant
world of private empathy has been replaced by faceless state
largesse. Pity, mercy, the elation of giving are tax-deductible. It
is a sorry sight.


Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com