A NEW THEORY OF EMPATHY AND ITS RELATION TO IDENTIFICATION.

Abstract

The subject of empathy is of considerable interest to several disciplines, wtably aesthetics (the study of beauty), psychoanalysis, psychosomatic mediciae, and social psychology. Freud observes, for example, that in identification we are faced with the process of empathy. “A path,” he says, “leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life.”l6 By “empathy” I mean the concept as defined in Warren’s59 Dictionary of Psychology: “the imaginal or mental projection of oneself into the elements of a work of art or into a natural object.” The term has been expanded in recent years to denote nonverbal communication, a mode of interpersonal relating, for example, the act of the infant picking up anxiety from the anxiety of the mother.19. 46, 50 I deal directly only with the dictionary-defined concept, which is the central one. Any light falling on this concept is bound to illuminate the newer one. In 1954 Allport had this to say about the then current status of empathy, and the situation has not changed appreciably in the intervening few years: “The process of emputhy remains a riddle in social psychology. It would seem to be genetically and conceptually basic to social learning and to lie at the heart of any theory of imitation. Some motor mimicry.. . appears to precede and to be a precondition of learning. The nature of the mechanism is not yet understood. It is obvious that the process of perception itself entails motor adjustments (e. g., of the eyes) that are ‘imitative’ of certain properties of the perceived object. This fact may give the clue we need.” A reader who rapidly leafs through these pages looking at the captions may jump to the conclusion that this article is two-thirds balcony and only onethird Romeo. In my defense, I submit that this subject presents a peculiar problem. The theory of empathy here proffered lays under contribution and integrates upward of twenty different lines of thought. These fall under three headings: (1) those coming from the arts, (2) those coming from the sciences, and (3) those devised by the writer. I cannot take it for granted that the scientist-reader is familiar with material from the arts, nor the arts-reader with material from the sciences; with C. P. Snow, I wish these two worlds were not so sharply split. -4 fortiori, the reader cannot possibly be familiar with the writer’s own concepts. Also, none of the concepts drawn upon are honed to that degree of precision that I simply can name them, e. g., “disinterested perception,” or “attention,” or ((projection,” and be sure that the reader and I are