Empathy
By exploring the theories that underpin our participants’ experiences, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how these frameworks apply in practical settings.
Summary
- Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings or experiences without losing your own perspective. It helps caregivers build trust and better relationships by ‘putting themselves in someone else’s shoes’.
- However, this traditional view of empathy has been criticised because it focuses only on the caregiver’s role. It ignores how empathy can sometimes lead to misunderstandings or even power imbalances in caregiving.
- Empathy isn’t just the caregiver’s responsibility—patients also play a role in creating mutual understanding. It’s a shared process where both people connect to better understand each other.
- True empathy means focusing on the other person while still maintaining a clear sense of your own perspective, so you don’t mistakenly take on their experiences as your own.
Empathy has since long been seen as a quintessential virtue in care professionals such as doctors or nurses. Empathy is traditionally defined as the ability to resonate affectively or imagine cognitively the experience or situation of another person, without taking over the other’s experience or losing sight of one’s own position. The idea is that empathy enables caregivers to ‘place themselves in the shoes of the other’, thereby facilitating better understanding, trust and good care relationships. This classic understanding of empathy as a one-sided activity (from the caregiver) has been criticised, however, for overlooking relational dimensions of empathy, failing to see that empathy can also result in unwanted projection and disregarding the risk of power abuse given that caring relationships are inherently asymmetrical.
Alternatively, phenomenological and care-ethical approaches to empathy stress that empathy is an inherently relational practice. It can refer to an ability or act, to an experience, or to an expression or communication. It has affective, cognitive as well as perceptive dimensions and emerges through a process of relational co-creation in which both participants take place. So, it is not just the care professional that has to be empathetic to the patient, but the patient is also part of the creation of an empathetic understanding, both in a cognitive and an effective manner. In this co-creational process, people connect with each other’s experiential world, hoping to gain a better understanding. It is by no means self-evident that this process will succeed, however. Many attempts at empathetic understanding result in projection or identification instead. Empathy requires being oriented to the other, but it also implies that we are constantly aware of the distinction between ourselves and the other, in order to avoid ‘taking over’ the other’s experiences.
In the context of healthcare, striving to engage in the relational practice of empathy can strengthen the relationship between caregiver and care recipient and establish better trust and connection. However, it requires constant self-reflection from the healthcare professional and a clear awareness of boundaries and risks involved in this relational process.
Further reading
- Stein, Edith. (1964). On the problem of empathy. Dordrecht: Springer.
- Slote, Michael (2007). The ethics of care and empathy. London: Routledge.