EMPATHY is not the same as kindness or compassion: it is our capacity to understand another person’s experience and feel it. If we feel, if we understand, we might show care for them.
The word is relatively new in English. Modelled on the older “sympathy” (the ancient Greek word for compassion), it is a reworking of the German expression Einfühlung (“in-feeling”). Originally applied to aesthetics, “empathy” refers to the way in which a viewer might experience a work of art as if they were inside it, living and feeling it vicariously as somebody else. Later, it was adopted by psychologists, with the same idea of deep integration of feeling and connection between one person and another.
We tend to fare best in society when we take care of others in our environment. There is a great deal of evidence to show that treating others with respect, honouring them with the kind of treatment which we might hope for ourselves, brings a flush of the feel-good hormone oxytocin, strengthening the bonds between humans and gluing us together as a species.
As someone who had — for the whole of my life — thought of empathy as a positive feature of human experience, I was surprised to learn that the concept was considered by some people to be a problem, and had been described as a toxic or parasitic plague in our society.
Their argument is not that caring or feeling for another individual is necessarily wrong or bad, but that the idea can be taken too far, and that, used to excess, empathy can feed a cascade of “competitive victimhood”. These critics believe that too much empathy ends up manipulating those who offer it. A surfeit of empathy, they argue, threatens to makes society too open-ended and inefficient, preventing people from setting limits, and even causing them to go off the rails.
In The Guardian last month, Julia Carrie Wong wrote an informative piece, “Loathe thy neighbour”, in which she detailed some of the ways in which empathy has become scorned and derided. Some Christian voices are now persuaded that too much compassion can be a bad thing: that it takes people off-message, and even leads them away from scriptural doctrine.
When something that is inherently good, such as the way in which we relate to the pain and suffering of others, can be treated with such suspicion, we should be concerned.
The claim, advanced by Elon Musk and others, that empathy is taking over our minds — like a “parasite” or “woke mind virus” — is disturbing. We can act in ways that are self-destructive, but it seems that, in this instance, a natural and important facet of the fabric of humanity has been hijacked for other purposes.
PSYCHOTHERAPISTS are keen on empathy. It plays an important part in therapeutic relationships. The great power of empathy is that it can lead to understanding, sometimes bringing change in intractable situations.
Riana Betzler’s article “Empathy in a Time of War” (Psychology Today, 2023) refers to the work of Carl Rogers, who developed person-centred therapy. In the 1970s, he set up encounter groups during the hostilities between Irish Protestants and Roman Catholics, espousing the importance of “unconditional positive regard”. For a designated period, all parties were required to commit themselves to a process of active listening to another without judgement.
If the stakes are high, empathy needs to be given some help, and the parties concerned need to be willing to engage in a wider process, with other conditions in place. In a war situation, this might mean ending hostilities and finding designated and protected safe spaces in which no one is fearful of attack.
To listen to another’s position, which may be very different from our own, can be very difficult. The organisation Parents Circle Families Forum is engaging with such processes in the Middle East, chaired by two facilitators — one Israeli, one Palestinian — who have lost someone in the conflict. We may imagine that empathy can be agonisingly difficult to find when a person is hurting, angry, and devastated inside.
A little empathy can go a long way. I recently heard a beautiful and simple story about this: “A friend regularly went on the same route to walk his dogs, and would pass the time of day with a woman in her front garden. After a while, she no longer appeared in the garden, though he still looked out for her. Then, one day, he noticed her looking out from an upstairs window. He could tell from her appearance that she had been going through chemotherapy. He took the dogs home, went to Tesco’s, bought a bunch of flowers, returned to the woman’s house, and knocked on her door.”
In that moment, the man had little to lose, apart from his time, and his simple gesture showed real care for another person. Hearing that story, we might ask ourselves, if we were that woman, what we would feel. What do you think about this man’s response to his neighbour? What do you feel about the story, which illustrates empathy at an instinctive level? It seems to me to illustrate the very best of humanity.
ONE thing is certain: humans certainly have the capacity to act without empathy. We sometimes hear of horrendous acts committed not only without remorse, but with added derision — against helpless victims or corpses, for example. People who do things like these sometimes say that they feel nothing, are hollowed out, that they have run out of empathy, or that, in the face of intractable conflict, it is too late for empathy. The historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari has said that, when we are full of our own pain, we no longer see another’s.
How are we to make sense of this loss of empathy? The technical term is dissociation. Our brains have a circuit-breaker, or cut-off mechanism, designed to protect us from too much pain or overwhelm. It is possible that, when we are overwhelmed and survival fight mode takes over, our minds become disconnected from feelings, including empathy. I wonder whether those who are critical of empathy have suffered a deficit of it.
We live in a traumatised world that urgently needs us to care for it and all within it. Empathy is really a variation on love, and, without that, the human race is surely impoverished. At its best, empathy is a two-way street. The individual self is perhaps a myth of the Western world. As the African philosophical concept of ubuntu has it, “I am because we are.”
How can a world with little empathy be squared with the gospel imperative to love one another as God has loved us? Let us not pick on empathy, but, instead, use it to build bridges and connections. Let us allow empathy to flourish: it may be our best hope. Julia Carrie Wong concludes her Guardian article: “Empathy is not a sin, a toxin, or an evolutionary dead end. It is a tool, and like all tools it can be a weapon. We are going to need it.” I could not agree more.
Philippa Smethurst is a UKCP registered and BACP senior accredited psychotherapist. Her latest book, Twenty Ways to Break Free From Trauma: From brain hijacking to post-traumatic growth, is published by Jessica Kingsley.
