On Empathy

On Empathy
By Niranjan Casie Chitty

Students of Freud's Civilization and it Discontents are familiar with his rigorous critique of the biblical injunction to "Love thy neighbor as thy self." Yet, this portion of the 'love commandment' does provide a useful base to advance a discussion on the notion of empathy. This scripture is suggestive of a form of empathy that is at the same time, both realistic and limited.

In psychoanalysis the love for "thy self" is termed narcissism, a characteristic innate, in varying degrees, to all humans. Self-love and the other related component of narcissism – also drawn from the myth of Narcissus – 'the reflected image of the self,' appear to be integral to the encounter between the self and the other. There are many demonstrable examples that show how we easily empathize with those who are reflections of ourselves: those who are like us. It is narcissism transmuted – self love projected onto the image of another.

Empathy in this form is to an extent marked by a certain destructiveness. So as to assimilate the other into one's own categories – into a state of sameness – what is different must be denied, mentally eradicated. Is it then a failure of this mental process of empathizing that is at the root of interpersonal cruelty – a failure to see that the other is like us? This is one possible reading of writers such as Virginia Wolf, J. M. Coetzee and John Banville.

Virginia Wolf in a journal states, "The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him." Coetzee's character Elizabeth Costello when contemplating the horror of Nazi death camps concludes, "They did not say, 'How would it be if I were burning?' They did not say, 'I am burning. I am falling in ash." And John Banville's creation, the convicted murderer Freddie Montgomery says of his crime, "This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgiveness: that I never imagined her vividly enough to make her live. Yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that made the others possible."

Each writer advocates a form of empathy that is mediated by the imagination. They appear to be in agreement with Martha Nussbaum's principle that the "imagination…lies at the heart of ethical life" and aids us to "see one another as fully human." This higher-order, cognitively mediated, empathy is familiar to the writer who must imaginatively inhabit the mind of each character about whom he writes. While these authors agree about the importance of the imagination to the empathic act there are also nuances in the statements quoted above that highlight the complexity of the notion of empathy.

Coetzee, for instance, insists we psychically place ourselves in the position of the other: "They did not say, 'How would it be if I were burning?'" This trick of perception – in which the other becomes I – is aligned to Heinz Kohut's ideas on imaginative identification. He defined empathy as "the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person." Kohut recognized, however, that the outcome of the attempt to reconstruct the experience of the 'other' is the understanding of how I would feel in such a situation: it is not possible to know – with certainty – what the other really feels. In this sense the 'love for self' – the desire to nurture and protect oneself – produces an identification with the predicament of the other and places an ethical imperative upon the individual to desist from harming the other: a paradoxical but inevitable solution in which empathy is enabled by a feature of human narcissism.

That John Banville's The Book of Evidence adds a further dimension to the discussion on empathy is not evident at first. It is another instance in which the perpetrator has not asked the question, "What if I were being killed?" She has not become I. All he notices of his victim is that she is a maid and his description of her – as Elke D' Hoker has noted – is replete with servant stereotypes. She is a cliché, not a unique individual. The Nazis in Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello too suffer from this tendency of ascribing culturally constructed stereotypes to their victims. It is a peculiar tendency of the mind to confine the other to a convenient culturally constructed image and this creates an emotional distance. There is a latent volatility, often on a short fuse, if the typecast other reacts to these boundaries, or exceeds them.

After the fact, of murder, Freddie is astonished at his failure of imagination. His redemptive gesture, to recompense for this lack is to try to imagine her and make her live. Though the sequence is skewed and in reverse – kill first, then empathize – for him it is an act of resurrection: a theme that extends to the other books of the trilogy, Ghosts and Athena.

As Freddie ponders, "Must I imagine her from the start, from infancy?" it becomes clear he is attempting to see her, not as a version of himself, but rather as an alien other with unique thoughts and emotions. These sentiments are aligned to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Derek Attridge for whom the ideal empathic encounter transcends the tendency to contain the other within the categories of the self. Levinas suggests, "the acknowledgement of the other's uniqueness…" while Attridge proposes, "working against the mind's tendency to assimilate the other to the same…" In this, Freddie fails. As he imagines her, he constantly regresses to seeing his victim through the lens of his self. The careful reader will notice that her thoughts and feelings frequently resemble Freddie's. Her otherness is dazzling, bewitching and unreadable. In this sense the barrier between the self and the other cannot be removed. We can acknowledge the unique individuality of the other but not know it. The other stands before us in plain view and yet, is hidden.


Niranjan Casie Chitty