The trouble with empathy - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Burchell
ANNAN WAS WRITING IN THE YEARS AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR, when the situation of the old propertied classes had changed irrevocably, yet he seems to have assumed that the world view of his "intellectual aristocrats" would flow on forever, like some warbling country brook. And yet his story still has a prescient feel. For if, in one respect, the "aristocrats" were curios of the days of upstairs/downstairs, in another respect they were cultural pioneers. Their intellectual independence, social cohesiveness and disinterest in conventional morality helped define the styles of life of the new liberal professionals and para-professionals of the postwar decades. Like their antecedents, these groups necessarily became accustomed to living with a high degree of "cultural capital", but limited reserves of "real property", in a moral universe defined by complex compounds of private conscience and global concern, where sternly meritocratic professional principles coexisted with globally humanitarian personal ones. And where Bloomsbury and their contemporaries had rebelled in an almost Oedipal fashion against the moral earnestness and social conventionality of their Victorian ancestors, so did the liberal professionals of the 1960s and later rebel against the morals and conventions of what they liked to term, with crushing vagueness, "the fifties".
For the old "intellectual aristocrats", attention to the demands of conscience – whether personal or social – was, in effect, a private matter, to be pursued in the amateur spirit before and after office hours. For the new tertiary-educated professionals and para-professionals of the 1960s and later, however, this amateurism and separation of spheres was a relic of the gentlemanly, hierarchical social culture of past times and they strove to imbue their professional work culture with an ethos derived from their private and intellectual lives. A professionalised notion of empathy played a very significant role in this. To imagine (as the Christian moralists had done and, in large measure, still do) the globe as an unseen community of human souls, reaching out to others in distress, smacked of Victorian do-gooding and high-mindedness.
The term empathy hardly existed in common discourse prior to the 1960s – and even more rarely was it used in a sense familiar to us. Previously, the term had been part of the private language of classical psychoanalysis, where it was usually used to denote one or other of two related psychological maladies – either the tendency to project one's own personality onto another, thus subsuming him or her into oneself, or to subsume oneself into the other, by imagining his or her experiences to be one's own. (Indeed, this sense still lingers on today in the Webster and Oxford dictionaries, even where it has fallen out of common usage.) Freud's famous discussion of Hoffman's fairytale about the "Sandman" – where the hero projects his fears and longings onto an inanimate doll, with tragic results – was a classic treatment of the theme, even though Freud himself never used the term. To this day, Kleinian analysts employ the parallel concept of "projective identification" as an all-embracing explanation of racism and intolerance, even as they allow for empathetic "projections" of a more positive character.
Our sense of empathy – as a heightened capacity for interpersonal sensitivity and understanding – is actually quite recent. Indeed, it really dates back no further than half a century at most. Culturally speaking, it belongs to the new generation of psychology-trained liberal professionals who have graduated from university since the 1960s and early 1970s. More specifically, it may reflect the strongly felt need of liberal and radical therapists and counsellors in the 1960s and after to dissolve (theoretically, at least) the "hierarchical" boundary that separated therapist and client, and to create (imaginatively, at least) the sense of an egalitarian relationship between the two, appropriate to the intellectual equalitarianism of the new first-generation entrants into the university-trained professions. Indeed, the term was sought out precisely because of its implied contradistinction to the ordinary notion of "sympathy" – a term which was felt to have an unworthy history in charity-mindedness.
It's remarkable how many apparently diffuse and spontaneous cultural movements rely, at least initially, upon the hidden efforts of one or a few individuals. In the case of the professional culture of empathy there is one single name that recurs in almost every significant volume on the subject – that of the mid-century American psychologist and educationalist Carl Rogers. In a series of books beginning with his Client-centered Therapy from 1951, and especially in his much-cited (if perhaps less often read) essay on "The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change" from 1957, Rogers more or less single-handedly created a new conception of the counselling process as an empathetic relationship between counsellor and client. In the 1970s, Rogers could still visualise the day he first delivered his paper on "therapeutic personality change" to an audience of academics and clinicians at the University of Michigan some 20 years earlier. "I know that I shocked many by stating that ‘special intellectual professional knowledge' is not essential in psychotherapy ... [and] that a psychological diagnosis is only helpful in making the therapist feel secure," he recalled, with evident satisfaction. The audience knew well "that traditional views had been sharply challenged".
The key tenet of Rogers's controversial new attitude to therapy was what he himself termed the "client-centred" approach, but what many of his later supporters liked to call, more grandly and globally, the "person-centred" approach. In Rogers's view, mainstream therapeutic practice had always relied upon a tutelary relationship between therapist and client, according to which the job of the therapist was to diagnose the clients' problems, teach them to recognise them and instruct them in the reform of their personalities so as to remove the problems by degrees. Rogers was instinctively uncomfortable with this approach. As he saw it, moral personhood was a learned accomplishment rather than an innate faculty – and yet, for a person to properly develop the capacity for moral autonomy, he or she had, necessarily, to learn it for him or herself rather than be taught it. The thorny question was how to foster the capacity for moral autonomy without infringing that same autonomy in the process.
A former farm boy from the American Midwest, the young Rogers had thrown over his agricultural studies, first for the seminary and then for teachers' college. Under the combined influence of liberal philosophical pragmatism and radical Protestant theology, he came to emphasise the open-ended character of personal development, the experiential as opposed to the intellectual aspects of the client-therapist relationship, and the absolute necessity for the therapist to cleave to the client through the cultivation of an attitude of "unconditional positive regard". In this respect it was not so much the personality of the client that was at stake in the relationship as the personality of the therapist. Indeed, for Rogers's more zealous followers, unconstrained by his prosaic educational protocols and worldly concerns, therapy could become as much an exercise in self-exploration and self-development as in the personal welfare of the client. In the process, the therapist could become a new kind of spiritual hero.
Rogers's famous essay on "therapeutic personality change" outlined a series of "necessary and sufficient conditions" for such change. Rogers meant these terms precisely: nothing else but these conditions would contribute towards the success of a therapeutic relationship – not even an understanding of the client's problems or the capacity to explain the problems to the client, would make any difference. The final of these conditions was by far the most influential. According to Rogers, for therapy to be successful the therapist must "experience an empathic understanding of the client's internal frame of reference and endeavour to communicate this experience to the client ... to sense the client's private world as if it were his or her own, but without losing the "as if" quality – this is empathy and this seems essential to therapy".
It's probably worth stressing two phrases out of this gnomic formulation. First, the therapist does not communicate to the client his or her understanding of the client's "internal frame of reference" – rather, what he or she requires to communicate is the empathic experience of having understood that frame of reference, since it is the experience, rather than the knowledge derived from it, which possesses the healing power. Second, the therapist requires to "sense the client's private world" as if it were his or her own, without ever letting go of the "as if" quality of this experience. In this way, Rogers separated his professionalised practice of empathy from the earlier psychoanalytic diagnosis of it, according to which the sufferer of empathy tended either to project his or her feelings on to others, or else to lose his or her personality entirely into that of the other. The therapist gives up most of the distance between him or herself and his or her client, but not all of it. Professional distance and personal autonomy harmonise.
If the initial clinical reaction to Rogers's argument was politely sceptical, the broader professional response was almost overwhelming. By the mid-1970s, client-centred approaches had become assimilated into the liberal educational curriculum, and across the full gamut of the new "people-centred" professions based on social work and counselling. Case workers, therapists of various persuasions, nurses, alternative-medicine practitioners, even some members of the nation's police forces and prison staff, have all been weaned for two decades or more now on client-centred therapy and on the empathic imperative. (A friend and neighbour of mine, who was trained as a teacher, recalls undertaking a compulsory unit on empathy in the classroom as early as 1972.) It's become part of the intellectual common sense of the caring professions and of the various less-specialised literatures spawned by them. Today, any handbook of helping or caring worth its salt muses upon the difficulty of truly "entering into the world" of the client, while at the same time stressing the indispensability of the empathetic "way of being" for carers.
IN THE LIGHT OF THIS POTTED HISTORY, THEN, IT'S PERHAPS NOT SO SURPRISING that the sympathetic view in our asylum-seekers debate has been dominated (at least in public) by such a familiar gallery of faces, and has been presented, argumentatively, in such a distinctive manner. There is, after all, a kind of loose social coalition of the empathetic. There are those (the direct heirs of the "intellectual aristocrats", as it were) whose professional and academic culture has a deep and long-established preoccupation with individual conscience and moral responsibility. There are those in the "caring professions" whose sense of conscience and responsibility is mediated by their training in person-centred approaches to the professional-client relationship. And there are the cultural workers whose conception of their own artistic identity is deeply infused by empathetic-psychological accounts of creative inspiration. (The novelist who "gets under the skin" of his or her characters, the actor who "lives" his or her role, the artist whose work "taps into" some aspect of the human condition, and so on.) Put together, these groups are far less tight-knit and cohesive than the original intellectual aristocrats. Yet – like all well-functioning cultural groups – they respond in a similar fashion to shared intellectual stimuli. The problem, as I suggested at the outset, is that they exhibit to a high degree the natural human presumption of members of cultural groups that their shared intellectual and emotional responses are somehow natural responses – and even that they are part of our nature as human beings.
Listen, for instance, to the tenor of these comments by former Labor frontbencher (and trained psychologist) Carmen Lawrence in her online weblog, as filed in The Sydney Morning Herald's online archive. In an article based upon an address to the Sydney branch of the Australian Psychological Society in June 2003, but modified for popular consumption, Lawrence invited Australians to "exercise their empathic imagination" towards the occupants of the detention centres, despite the efforts of the Government to prevent them from doing so.
Contemplate for a moment the care you lavish on your children; your thoughtfulness in protecting them from exposure to violence and suffering; your careful planning of their ... access to opportunities to learn, to explore the world from a secure, loving base. How can your children safely explore the world from behind barbed wire? ... We don't need elaborate research to conclude that asylum seekers are going to be damaged by these experiences. It's obvious to anyone prepared to examine their own responses, to think about what would happen to their families if they were put under the sort of stress experienced daily in the detention centres.
It's a simple and immediate message, which probably reverberates among anyone possessed of what is nowadays pejoratively termed a "hand-wringing" approach to social issues. And yet, for all that, there is a quite specific moral language at work here. There is the conviction in the capacity of empathy to transgress the ordinary boundaries of self; the authorial search for a language that serves to connect lived experiences across the counsellor-client boundary; the seeming irrelevance of empirical data or clinical knowledge in the face of immediate intuitive experience. (Asked in February 2005 whether a deputation of parliamentarians would be allowed to see the true face of the Baxter detention centre, Lawrence replied "Probably not", but insisted that "just having a look at the physical environment and imagining how I would feel and how others might feel placed in that environment" might suffice.) To anyone trained in a post-Rogers professional world, these cries from the heart are bound to have struck a chord. Whether they struck chords elsewhere is more doubtful. Indeed, it's not entirely clear how much of a chord Lawrence expected to be struck, given that in the more technical version of the same paper she described public opinion in the asylum seekers' crisis as a product of pathological tendencies in the public psyche.
Or take the SBS-funded telemovie So Close to Home, released late in 2003 as part of a wave of artistic interventions into the refugee debate. So Close to Home was clearly intended as a political allegory – even though, as ABC radio's Julie Rigg put it, "it plays as a mystery". In a promotional interview for the Australian Film Commission, director Jessica Hobbs summarised the plot:
We meet Maggie ... on a train. Her solitude is broken by Azra, a young Albanian refugee, who comes into her train carriage and who, on their arrival in Sydney, trails after Maggie. Maggie is unsure of what the girl wants but decides, on the spur of the moment, to take the girl home with her. Maggie's relationship with her emotionally manipulative and needy mother, Ramona, means Azra has to fight to get Maggie to take her to where she insists she wants to go, the Opera House. Ultimately, it is Azra who takes Maggie on a humbling journey of self-discovery and revelation.
On the face of it this is a broadly human moral fable: Hobbs's intention was probably to give a sense of universal humanity to the idea of the refugee-outsider. And yet again it's a moral tale with a quite particular currency. Maggie is lonely and unfulfilled. Her mother (let's take a stab and see her as an incarnation of Australian values from "the 1950s") demands her single-minded emotional commitment and denies her the discovery of other parts of herself. But the mysterious foreign refugee, arriving apparently out of nowhere, at once evokes her compassion and opens her up to self-discovery. The entire story "works" best if you presume – as quite a few of its viewers no doubt did – that empathy and self-discovery, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, all form a kind of seamless emotional fabric.
More specifically, the fable works best if the viewer understands the refugee character as a kind of (in Freud's terms) "uncanny" figure who serves to disrupt, by his or her very presence, the taken-for-granted assumptions of Australians' mundane lives. (A very similar role, it's worth mentioning, was played by the Afghan refugee Randa, the hero Hal's beloved, in John Doyle's ABC TV series Marking Time.) Perhaps this artistic preoccupation with the "uncanny" outsider explains why David Marr, at the 2003 Sydney Writers' Festival, thought it made sense to call upon writers, directors and artists to rouse the conscience of the nation in the pro-asylum-seeker cause. And yet, the emotional language of the "uncanny", like that of its close sibling, the empathetic, requires a very specific kind of response. It's possible for the enthusiast of the arts to grossly overestimate the number of Australians who feel their sense of personal identity and awareness to be enlarged by a spiritual engagement with "the other", however defined. Indeed, most Australians, confronted with this kind of scenario, are probably liable to respond in a fashion similar to Freud's response to the idea of the uncanny (the unheimlich): it simply doesn't "work" for them.
INDEED, FREUD MIGHT HAVE FOUND A WRY INTEREST IN VARIOUS "UNCANNY" ASPECTS of our current political turmoils. For over the past few years our great cultural discontents seem to have found their own "Sandman" – in the deceptively humdrum person of our present prime minister. As the stuff-shirted Victorian public man was to the Edwardian aesthete; as "the 1950s" were to the flower children; so, it seems, John Howard has become to us. Refugee advocates, rankled by what they feel to be the moral insensibility of their country folk, have cottoned onto the PM's supposed "dog-whistle" politics as the real culprit. (Howard whistles, it seems, and the nation jumps yapping into his lap.) Howard seems almost to have become the human confluence of our many streams of anxiety. To passionate opponents of the war in Iraq he has become almost the personification of the American Alliance. Republicans see in him a kind of Menziesesque Second Coming, all ermine and Earl Grey, slouching towards Westminster to be born. And to the arts community he is a throwback to our supposed national heritage of cultural philistinism.
One symbolic moment, though, clearly stands out above all the others. When the Prime Minister refused steadfastly to apologise for the historic mistreatment of the country's indigenes – justifying this refusal with implausible allusions to unspecified legal consequences – he created for himself a permanent reputation among his critics as a man without heart or compassion. This reputation followed him through the asylum-seekers' crisis (even though there it was Phillip Ruddock who obligingly played the role of the emotionless bureaucrat), and through the war in Iraq. Indeed, John Howard's public personality and the ideal of emotional self-containment have become almost synonymous. His momentary lapse of decorum during his victory speech after the October 2004 election became a matter of journalistic tittle-tattle. And when in early 2005 the PM refused, again, to apologise for the mistaken detention of Cornelia Rau, the media coverage resembled a fusion of the "Sorry" campaign and the asylum-seekers' crisis, all rolled into one.
And yet, abhorred and despised though he may be by many who count themselves as astute followers of politics, the Prime Minister has become, to a quite unexpected extent, one of the dominating political figures of his generation. Emotionless or otherwise, his grasp of the public mood – of its generosity and of the limits upon it; the public's desire for stability and reassurance, and the limits of that desire – is far stronger than most of his critics can bring themselves to acknowledge. As, it should be added, is his capacity for recognising political errors. After all, the self-styled "most conservative prime minister ever" of 1996 has become, by 2005, the very model of the modern political pragmatist.
One source for the prevailing intellectual contempt for the Prime Minister may be the sheer prosaicness of his mode of appeal. It was the complicated – and ultimately counterproductive – strategy of asylum-seeker supporters to want to persuade Australians to their point of view by arousing shame in them. Carmen Lawrence, in the same weblog article cited above, spoke feelingly of how we, "as a nation", had rejected the world's "most traumatised people" and "added to their suffering". These were people who had come to our shores "to beg our compassion and help"; yet we had "yet to justify their faith in us or to earn the description as a fair and humane people". To many people, of course, such sentiments amounted to a personal affront. They saw themselves as being in full possession of a natural allotment of human compassion but as being unwilling to have it "tricked" out of them in a controversial cause by people who seemed to assume for themselves a special empathetic vocation.
These were the sentiments to which Howard appealed so effectively – albeit inelegantly – in the aftermath of the tsunamis of Boxing Day 2004. Rather than call upon Australians to respond to the plight of the homeless and dispossessed of South Asia, Howard took the opportunity to laud the "essential decency" of the country and its citizens. And rather than congratulating Australians for their compassion towards hordes of suffering individuals, Howard chose to invoke the humdrum language of neighbourliness. "On this occasion we have not been moved by the bonds of empire and kinship, but by something deeper and truer and better ... these are our neighbours."
For in truth the immediate and unconditional extension of a bond of empathy to a previously unknown other, seen as in need of our help and succour, is not in ordinary circumstances an easy human reaction. It may seize us when we are thrust together with strangers as part of a vast calamity – like war or tsunami. In ordinary circumstances, though, most people most often extend their sympathy and helping hand most readily to those they know, or recognise, or treat as "neighbours". The view that all people, as people, are our neighbours, or that people who seem otherwise foreign or alien to us ought in reality to excite as much (or even more) sympathy than those who are close to us, is a trained reaction. Historically, it has most commonly been produced by a strong religious commitment (to "all God's children", as it would once have been put) or by an intense adherence to a set of formal philosophical principles – the kind of transcendental attachment, in short, that most people simply do not possess. When Trollope's Mr Crawley bemoans the limited spiritual capacities of humans to extend their sympathies to "those we have not seen in the flesh", and the failure of most people to properly "nurture their heart[s]", he speaks out of this tradition – albeit in somewhat antiquated terms.
And yet Mr Crawley's complaint serves to oversimplify the situation. In fact, it's too neat to oppose, on the one hand, a mundane moral universe shaped out of the familiar material of neighbours, kith and kin; and, on the other, a ghostly transcendental community of humans identified with purely on the grounds of their humanity. In practice, most people – even those of the loftiest moral fibre – tend to move from the first in the direction of the second. After all, refugee advocates themselves tried to argue for seeing the detainees as would-be fellow Australians, rather than simply as suffering people. And the parallel sympathy extended by many refugee supporters to David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib – individuals who seem to have almost become refugees themselves, in the confusion of emotions of the past few years – was derived not merely from their peculiar situation as internees without charge, but on account of their Australianness. The same may be true of the mentally disturbed immigration centre detainee Cornelia Rau, whose case reignited the passions of asylum-seeker advocates in February 2005. Rau's ordeal undoubtedly aroused the greatest sympathy among those critics who, like Carmen Lawrence, strove to imagine themselves in her place. Yet as asylum-seeker advocate David Marr put it, in the Sydney Morning Herald, Rau became a cause celebre beyond the ranks of the committed in large measure because she "turns out to be one of us".
Indeed, on the whole, people naturally tend to imagine the existence of wider communities as potential recipients of sympathy and understanding by a process of extension from the communities they do know, rather than simply by juxtaposition with them. This was the nub of Howard's appeal on January 16. We don't usually think of the people of Aceh as our neighbours. But in reaching out to them, a natural way of extending the bond of sympathy is to imagine a growing set of communities around us, like the ripples spreading from a pebble thrown in a pond – or, come to that, like a benign counterpart of the tsunamis themselves, as if seen from a fortuitously placed weather satellite out in space. This kind of movement of the sympathies appears to those who experience it to be natural and untutored. It doesn't appear to demand, on the one hand, an enlarged spiritual capacity – which Mr Crawley, in any case, believed beyond the limits of our human frailty. Nor does it require a special moral equipment derived (or at least believed to be derived) from a particular form of education or professional training, or the inheritance of a rare and treasured way of understanding the world.
Machiavelli once quipped that, in politics, one judges by the result. He might have added that, in politics, one is judged by the effect. Speaking from one's own heart – no matter how natural it may seem to those whose hearts call to them in this fashion – is rarely an effective means of communicating the needs of a political situation. Prime Minister Howard's political testament – compounded of his characteristic blend of wily pragmatism and almost willful mean-spiritedness – will be a decidedly chequered one. Yet on the question of the nation's heart, his critics should swallow their pride and take notes. ♦