Abstract
Empathy, in the patient-clinician relationship, plays a key role. Here we address this issue from a neuroscientific perspective, as neuroscience research attempts are shedding much light on the mechanisms underlying empathy. In particular, we focus on the relationship between clinician and suicidal individuals that represents a difficult category of patients that puts the emotional and empathic regulation capacity to the test. Therefore, we provide the reader with an overview on the current neuroscientific knowledge about empathy, intending to return an interpretative clue and favour new intuitions promoting a better comprehension, based on a scientific use of empathy in the patient-clinician relationship. We then propose the concept of “empathic disconnection” referring to those situations in which the clinician, automatically and unconsciously, puts him/herself in the position of not taking any advantage from the empathic relationship with the patient. We propose the concept of “empathic moment” as a communicative strategy, whose goal is to intentionally use empathic mechanisms to gather information directed at identifying the inner state of the patient. We finally suggest the use of vitality forms as a relevant element for the cognitive analysis of the patient’s inner states. We conclude with some practical-applicative considerations based on what is discussed.
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- 1.
Which gathers data on the inner state of the body and of its organs, such as heart, lungs, stomach and intestine.
- 2.
Additionally, it also appears that those individuals who are better at interoception also have a bigger right insula.
- 3.
Orbicular ocular muscle in particular (orbicularis oculi).
- 4.
See above “characteristics of the observed person” in empathy modulation.
- 5.
Worse in the second case.
- 6.
We need to pay much attention here because with the suicidal patient what can appear as compassion is in fact the reaction to the patient’s potential suicidal, that is, a fear reaction (Pompili 2013).
- 7.
Porges refers to this as to “Neuroception”.
- 8.
Or empathic concern.
- 9.
An example: a doctor with Catholic faith but, at the same time, motivated by treating his patients makes use of embryonic stem cells. He has two conflicting modules. There the interpreter intervenes and resolves the conflict with an explanation: the entities produced through therapeutic cloning are not actual embryos since they do not originate in zygotes, but in “clonotes” (Gazzaniga 2005; McHugh 2004), and, namely, a concept newly invented in order to unify the conflict.
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Donelli, D., Rizzato, M. (2018). Empathy and Empathic Disconnection in Difficult and Uneasy Situations: Facing the Suicidal Individual. In: Pompili, M. (eds) Phenomenology of Suicide. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47976-7_6
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