An Analysis of Empathy in Psychodrama - eScholarship

2014

Empathy is a serious issue for understanding how everyday communication happens, especially for anthropology since it is crucial to the quality of sound fieldwork. This thesis examines marked empathy in the clinical context of psychodrama by focusing on a specific case from a psychodrama group I oversaw. I argue that through six key strategies, a psychodramatist gradually perceives the protagonist's referential totality toward other subjects and the world, helping the psychodramatist better empathize with the total embodied situation of the protagonist (the client). The most fundamental of these techniques is role reversal, through which psychodramatists, protagonists, and group members rebuild the situation of a particular event, and its related subjectivities and intersubjectivity that a protagonist has embodied in the past. This thesis also discovers four basic positions for understanding the essential positions of understanding a particular event in psychodramatic context. Finally, this thesis discusses the difference between intimacy and closeness, which rely upon different bodily horizons and, thus different means of empathizing.

IntechOpen eBooks, 2024

In this chapter, we will seek to determine the role that empathy plays in the relationship between different human beings. In the phenomenological tradition, empathy was often considered the primordial form of relationship with others. According to classical phenomenology, bodily externalizations of inner psychic phenomena play an important role here. In this chapter, we will critically evaluate this approach to empathy. We will argue that empathy presupposes a prior recognition of the other in everyday life. From this perspective, empathy would constitute a second-although fundamental-moment of intersubjective life. The experience of a shared world entails an immediately shared understanding of that world and of those who live in it. Empathy would awaken only when anonymous relationships with other human beings become problematic. In the twentieth century, this concept has been appropriated by psychology on different levels: as a device to analyze how far the lack of empathy may be at the origin of certain pathologies and as a clinical tool that allows the psychologist to gain a deeper insight into the patient's problems. Unfortunately, dialog between the two disciplines around this issue was almost never carried out. This chapter tries to foster the possibilities of such a dialog.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2008

Inquiry, 2012

This paper proposes that adopting a ‘phenomenological stance’ enables a distinctive kind of empathy, which is required in order to understand forms of experience that occur in psychiatric illness and elsewhere. For the most part, we interpret other people’s experiences against the backdrop of a shared world. Hence our attempts to appreciate interpersonal differences do not call into question a deeper level of commonality. A phenomenological stance involves suspending our habitual acceptance of that world. It thus allows us to contemplate the possibility of structurally different ways of ‘finding oneself in the world’. Such a stance, I suggest, can be incorporated into an empathetic appreciation of others’ experiences, amounting to what we might call ‘radical empathy’.

The clinical challenges faced in encountering patients who do not fit the standard treatment of Oedipus conflicts clearly show the limitations of the interpretative method, thus making indispensable the study of clinical concepts and techniques as a way to broaden the psychoanalytic horizons. In order to analyse the different psychopathological problems resistant to traditional clinical approaches, it is necessary to reorganise the technique on the basis of a better understanding of the ways in which subjectivity is rooted in early psychic constitution. In this way, empathy becomes important as a clinical tool. The use of empathy must be understood as a decisive factor in handling clinical cases and situations in which the treatment encounters obstacles that restrict the power of the analyst's verbal interventions. In this case, can we say that the use of empathy interferes directly with and changes the position of the concept of psychic reality? Moreover, as we use empathy, can we also say that the concept of neutrality is transformed, without being abandoned? The intention of this paper is to discuss these questions using clinical material taken from the analysis of borderline clinical cases and situations.

█ Abstract The interplay among neurosciences, philosophy of mind and phenomenology has character-11 ized the current debate on empathy from which derived several definitions of empathy (enlarged, restrict-12 ed, minimalist). Difficulties in defining empathy derive from the priority assigned to its prosocial value, 13 the feature that made it a keyword in our time. Should empathy encompass identity, similarity and affec-14 tive correspondence in order to exploit its role in human relations? What happens when the flow of sensa-15 tions and emotions between humans produces more complex situations in which arise estrangement, un-16 known, and fear of others? A paradigm change needs a new horizon considering empathy not theoretical-17 ly, but practically. We should consider empathies, whose contexts and different manifestations that bring 18 out rejections, limits and failures in understanding each other, gaining a more radical and realistic view of 19 the great challenge our relations with others consist of. 20

Empathy, Intersubjectivity and the Social World: The Continuing Relevance of Phenomenology, 2022

In this paper I explicate the classical phenomenological approach to empathy (an umbrella term for a number of distinct interpersonal experiences of understanding others) to highlight some original and significant aspects of this approach that still have relevance for contemporary debates in the cognitive sciences and in analytical philosophy of mind and action. The focus is on Edmund Husserl, with some discussion of Max Scheler, Edith Stein, and Martin Heidegger. I briefly sketch the history of empathy and then focus on the classical phenomenological treatment of empathy as a direct quasi-perception and not an imaginative projection of simulation. Empathy, for Husserl and Stein, names this experiential sense of grasping another subject and immersing oneself in the other’s subjectivity, leading to an ‘intertwining’ (Verflechtung, Ineinandersein) of subjects (intersubjectivity) and to the constitution of the world as objective ‘world-for-all’. Empathy functions only within an entire social, historical and cultural world.

1999

This paper takes some introductory steps in the direction of sketching the major theme of empathy in Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenologies. A great deal could be written about these subjects. The paper briefly recaps Husserl's position and uses it as an entrée for a presentation of Heidegger's answer in Being and Time. The title of the paper is taken from Heidegger's call for a "special hermeneutic" of empathy which will offset the conscious illusions of separation between human minds and "will have to show how the various possibilities of being of Da-sein themselves mislead and obstruct being-with-one-another and its selfknowledge, so that a genuine "understanding" is suppressed and Da-sein takes refuge in surrogates" (Heidegger, 1996: 117). What this means is a grounding of the empirical practise and theory of psychotherapy, and the human sciences, in an understanding of empathy that is close to the phenomena as they appear after a reduction of previous ontological beliefs and conceptualisations. Other relevant writers are omitted to make a focus specifically on Heidegger's phenomenology and to ascertain what such an approach to empathy might be.