Introduction

Cummings, Lindsay B.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59326-9_1

Introduction

Lindsay B. Cummings²

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First Online: 13 July 2016

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Abstract

During the intermission of a 2009 performance of Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City, I overheard an usher ask a man sitting in the row in front of me what he thought of the character of the king. My fellow audience member replied that he did not admire the king. In Ionesco’s play, King Berenger refuses to accept his mortality, even as his mind, body, and kingdom crumble around him. The usher responded, “But do you empathize with him?” His tone implied that this was the truly important question, the ultimate litmus test for theatrical engagement. The man answered, “Yes, I do. I have a daughter.” Since he did not further explain his reasoning, I assume that he meant he would not want to leave her on her own, and thus he could understand the king’s strong desire to continue his life.

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Notes

1.
Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, eds. Empathy and its Development (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3.
2.
The term, or other forms of it, appears prior to Vischer’s usage. I discuss this history in greater detail later in the chapter. See Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Introduction to Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, eds. Mallgrave and Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994); Laura Hyatt Edwards, “A brief conceptual history of Einfühlung: 18th-Century Germany to Post-World War II U.S. Psychology,” History of Psychology 16.4 (2013), DOI: 10.1037/a0033634.
3.
Reik is quoted in George W. Pigman, “Freud and the History of Empathy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995), 237.
4.
Obama used the phrase “empathy deficit” on several occasions in 2006 and 2007, including a commencement speech at Northwestern University and an interview with National Public Radio. His inclusion of empathy as a quality he sought in a Supreme Court justice occurred in 2009, and dominated the media surrounding his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. After the backlash caused by the Sotomayor nomination, Obama’s use of the term decreased notably. See “Obama to Graduates: Cultivate Empathy,” June 19, 2006, http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2006/06/barack.html; “Does America Have an ‘Empathy Deficit?”, National Public Radio, March 7, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7755013; Peter Slevin, “Obama Makes Empathy a Requirement for Court,” The Washington Post, May 13, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/12/AR2009051203515.html. All articles accessed March 30, 2015.
5.
The DSM-5 offers two models for diagnosing personality disorders—one following current clinical practice and a new, “alternative” approach. The “alternative model” uses empathy far more often as a diagnostic criterion and catalogs a range of empathic impairments beyond the “lack of empathy” described in the older diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. The newer model, for instance, describes the following as empathic “impairments”: “Lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others; lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another”; “Preoccupation with, and sensitivity to, criticism or rejection, associated with distorted inference of others’ perspective as negative”; “Compromised ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others associated with interpersonal hypersensitivity (i.e., prone to feel slighted or insulted)”; “excessively attuned to reactions of others, but only if perceived as relevant to self; over or underestimation of own effect on others”; “Difficulty understanding and appreciating the ideas, feelings, or behaviors of others.” American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition, http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org. (See, in particular, the section “Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders.”)
6.
David Howe, Empathy: What it is and Why it Matters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3.
7.
Ibid., 24.
8.
Simon Baron Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 153, emphasis in original.
9.
Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 268.
10.
Charles Edward Gauss, “Empathy,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 85.
11.
Amy Shuman, Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 4.
12.
This particularly famous instance of direct address in fiction is, of course, from Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Beth Newman (Boston and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 437.
13.
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 225.
14.
Patrick Anderson, “I Feel for You,” Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, eds. Lara D. Nielson and Patricia Ybarra (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 92, 93.
15.
The distinctions I draw between affect and emotion are fairly widely used, but for a good discussion of these terms see Erin Hurley, Theatre & Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
16.
Laura Hyatt Edwards, “A brief conceptual history of Einfühlung: 18th-Century Germany to Post-World War II U.S. Psychology,” History of Psychology 16.4 (2013), DOI: 10.1037/a0033634, 271.
17.
Quoted in Laura Hyatt Edwards, 272.
18.
I am indebted to Patrick Anderson for this genealogy. See Anderson, 85, as well as Rohan D’O. Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1942). Butler notes that Herder understood the potential dangers of his own nationalism, and stated that, while each nation was different, none stood above the rest as a “chosen people” (28).
19.
See Ernest K. Mundt, “Three Aspects of German Aesthetic Theory,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17.3 (March 1959), 291, http://www.jstor.org/stable/427810.
20.
Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Introduction to Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, eds. Mallgrave and Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994), 22. Gustav Jahoda argues that Einfühlung, the noun, was used before Vischer, but I cannot corroborate this. What is clear is that variations of the word were in circulation before Vischer’s essay, which, if not responsible for coining Einfühlung, at the very least launched it into popular usage. Gustav Jahoda, “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy,’” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences vol. 41 no. 2 (Spring 2005), 153.
21.
Laura Hyatt Edwards, 274.
22.
For more information on these aesthetic theories, see Mallgrave and Ikonomu, and Mundt.
23.
Mallgrave and Ikonomou, 20.
24.
He was building on others’ work as well. As Michael Fried explains, Diderot also wrote about the act of viewing a painting as one of physically entering (that is, imaginatively projecting oneself into) the work of art, a process that he associated most with pastoral painting. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
25.
Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1983–1893, eds. Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1990), 90.
26.
Vischer, 103.
27.
The physical resonances of empathy are retained in early psychological texts, but tend to drop out of the discourse until they are revived in more recent, cognitive neuroscience studies. For a discussion of the body in relationship to empathy, see Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
28.
Ibid., 104.
29.
Ibid., 109.
30.
Ibid., 107.
31.
In her early writing, Lee uses the term “sympathy” to describe this idea. She later adopts the term Einfühlung, translating it as empathy and crediting Titchener with the translation. Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 62.
32.
Gerald A. Gladstein, “The Historical Roots of Contemporary Empathy Research,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences vol. 20 no. 1 (January 1984).
33.
These phrases are quoted by George W. Pigman. Lipps’s theory is striking in that it seems to anticipate cognitive neuroscience and the discovery of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are so called because the same neurons fire in response to observing an action as undertaking that action, leading many cognitive neuroscientists to posit this automatic, inner-imitation as the basis for empathy. I discuss the mirror neuron system in greater detail later the chapter. Pigman, 242.
34.
Gladstein, 41.
35.
Lauren Wispé, “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in Empathy and its Development, eds. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 20.
36.
Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Process (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 21.
37.
Quoted in Wispé, 22.
38.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, Trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hauge: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 111. Emphasis in original. Husserl carefully qualifies the word “analogy,” noting that it is not an act of cognition, but rather a process through which all prior encounters inform subsequent encounters.
39.
Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltrout Stein (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1964), 11.
40.
Ibid., 116.
41.
Ibid., 89.
42.
Rüdiger Campe, “An Outline for a Critical History of Fürsprache: Synegoria and Advocacy,” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift (2008), 357.
43.
Foster, 217.
44.
David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206.
45.
Foster, 231.
46.
Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 59.
47.
Foster, 256.
48.
Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014), 26.
49.
Some theorists, like Martin L. Hoffman, have proposed that empathy occurs in different “levels.” For Hoffman, the most “advanced” level involves a self–other distinction, as well as a critical awareness of the other’s personality and life situation, rather than simply their immediate situation. While I find this description of empathy helpful, I am resistant to categorizations like Hoffman’s, which distinguish levels along a scale that indicates hierarchy. I take the position that empathy is complex and ever-shifting, and to divide it into levels or stages oversimplifies the situation. See Martin L. Hoffman, “The Contribution of Empathy to Justice and Moral Judgment,” in Empathy and its Development, eds. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 47–80.
50.
Gail S. Reed, “The Antithetical Meaning of the Term ‘Empathy’ in Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Empathy, eds. Joseph Lichtenberg, Melvin Bornstein, and Donald Silver (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1984), 20, emphasis in original.
51.
Make Love, Karen Finley Live (Perfect Day Films, 2004).
52.
The last-minute perception shift is one way of unsettling our confidence in our interpretations. Martin McDonagh uses this technique in plays like The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Pillowman.
53.
Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), 19.
54.
I am aware that there are numerous differences between Buber and Bakhtin’s theorizations of dialogue. When dividing dialogue theorists into “camps,” Buber is generally identified as a liberal humanist, concerned with respectfully engaging others in order to reach new understanding, while Bakhtin is categorized as a postmodernist, emphasizing the never-ending proliferation of meaning. I nevertheless see both theorists as promoting a notion of dialogue in which meaning and the self are contingent, emerging through exchange. For an explanation of different schools of dialogue theory, see Stanley Deetz and Jennifer Simpson, “Critical Organizational Dialogue: Open Formation and the Demand of ‘Otherness.’” For a consideration of Buber’s theory as compatible with more postmodern notions of dialogue, see Kenneth N. Cissna and Rob Anderson, “Public Dialogue and Intellectual History.” Both essays can be found in Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, eds. Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna (London: Sage, 2004).
55.
Julia T. Wood, “Foreword: Entering into Dialogue,” in Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, eds. Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna (London: Sage, 2004), xvii.
56.
Carl Rogers, “Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being,” The Counseling Psychologist vol. 5 no. 2 (1975), 4.
57.
Anderson and Cissna argue that Rogers saw dialogue therapy as “at best a matter of ‘moments.’” See Anderson and Cissna, 30–31.
58.
Rogers, “Empathic,” 4.
59.
Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 8.
60.
Ibid., 275–279.
61.
Rob Anderson and Kenneth N. Cissna, The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogues: A New Transcript with Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 41.
62.
Buber in Rob Anderson and Kenneth N. Cissna, The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogues: A New Transcript with Commentary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 41.
63.
Ibid. See Anderson and Cissna’s commentary on p. 53.
64.
Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology vol. 22 no. 3/4 (2005): 455–479, Academic Search Premier, DOI: 10.1080/02643290442000310, 458. Mirror neurons do make a self-other distinction. They fire more strongly for actions performed by the self than for actions observed in the other. See Marco Iacobani, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girouz, 2008), 133.
65.
Iacoboni, 33–34.
66.
For examples of this argument in theatre and performance studies, see, for example, Rhonda Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Bruce A. McConachie, “Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 553–577; and Amy Cook, “Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Scientific Approach to Theatre,” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 579–594.
67.
Iacoboni, 94–95.
68.
Howe, 52–53.
69.
Ibid., 53. Actually, some experiments have suggested that the mirror neuron system does help us understand intention—at least on some level. See Iacoboni, 33–34.
70.
Foster, 278, 279.
71.
Iacoboni, 270.
72.
I am grateful to the work of Jodi Halpern, a professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at UC Berkley, for the term “resonate” in relation to empathy and emotional response. See Jodi Halpern, “What is Clinical Empathy?” Journal of General Internal Medicine 18 (Aug. 2003): 670–674, doi 10.1046/j.1525-1497.2003.21017.x, 671.
73.
I am following, here, the widely used distinction between affect as an automatic, visceral, preverbal response to one’s environment and emotion as the projection or display of feeling in a socially readable and namable way. I am also following theorists like Martha Nussbaum, who note that empathy requires us to acknowledge the “qualitative difference” between ourselves and another in order to understand how their reaction to events may be different from ours, due to the particularities of culture, history, and personal experience. See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly the section “Empathy and Compassion,” 327–342.
74.
Warren S. Poland, “The Limits of Empathy,” American Imago vol. 64 no. 1 (2007): 87–93, Project Muse, 90, emphasis added.
75.
Ian Watson, “The Dynamics of Barter,” Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate, ed. Ian Watson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 94.
76.
See Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), particularly chapters two and three. I am reminded, too, of Frank X. Walker’s poem, “Death by Basketball,” which describes the sport as “a dream/that kills legitimate futures” for young black men. Frank X Walker, “Death by Basketball,” Affrilachia (Lexington, KY: Old Cove Press, 2000), 26.
77.
Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 91.
78.
Ibid., 106.
79.
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 25.
80.
Willet, footnote in Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 16.
81.
Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 37.
82.
Vischer, 109. Augusto Boal adopts this aspect of Brecht’s critique of empathy, focusing in particular on how identification with the character deprives the spectator of the will to act: “the spectator assumes a passive attitude and delegates the power of action to the character. Since the character resembles us (as Aristotle indicated), we live vicariously all his stage experiences. Without acting, we feel that we are acting. We love and hate when the character loves and hates.” Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 34.
83.
Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” Art Bulletin vol. 88 no. 1 (2006), stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067229, 150.
84.
While it is often claimed that the Short Organum summarized the work of The Messingkauf Dialogues, there is much included in the Dialogues that does not appear in the Organum, including extensive discussion on the place of emotions in Brecht’s theatre. For further discussion on the writing of The Messingkauf Dialogues and its place in Brecht’ oeuvre, see Mary Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
85.
Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, ed. and trans. John Willet (London: Methuen Drama, 1965), 47, emphasis added.
86.
Ibid., 88, emphasis added.
87.
Ibid., 50.
88.
Ibid., 100.
89.
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, “The Uses of Empathy: Theatre and the Real World,” Theatre History Studies 25 (2005), EBSCOhost, 19.
90.
Howe, 18; Eisenberg and Strayer, 11.
91.
Paul Bloom, “Against Empathy,” Boston Review, September 10, 2014, http://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy, accessed April 1, 2015.
92.
I am referring here to a study conducted by psychologist Daniel Batson, as well as a follow-up by Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne. These studies are referenced in Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William A. Cunningham, “Empathy is Actually a Choice,” The New York Times, July 10, 2015.
93.
Poland, 89. While the DSM V does introduce empathy as one of the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder, some studies have questioned this link. See Bloom, “Against Empathy.”
94.
Rogers quoted in Anderson and Cissna, 30.
95.
Numerous studies suggest that people empathize with those they find similar to themselves, or who they are encouraged to see as similar to themselves. These studies are somewhat problematic in that they tend to equate a heightened sense of vicarious emotion with greater empathy, leading to an understanding of empathy that is more or less synonymous with compassion. See, for example, C. Daniel Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 1991); or Dennis Krebs, “Empathy and Altruism,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32.6 (1975): 1134–1146.
96.
Wood, xvii.
97.
For a discussion about whether or not it is possible to empathize with a character, which is a construction developed, in part, by the actor, see the exchange between John Wesley Hill and Rhonda Blair, “Stanislavsky and Cognitive Science,” TDR: The Drama Review 54.3 (Fall 2010): 9–11.
98.
Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht, and William A. Cunningham, “Empathy is Actually a Choice,” The New York Times, Sunday Review, July 10, 2015.
99.
Dorian Peters and Rafael Calvo cite fMRI studies showing that compassion for the suffering of others actually produces positive affect. They distinguish compassion from empathy, but they also define empathy as shared emotion, and thus assume that empathy with suffering will lead to emotional distress. My point is not that empathy is the same as compassion, but rather that a non-identificatory view of empathy might lead to a wide range of neurochemical response—both positive and negative. See Dorian Peters and Rafael Calvo, “Compassion vs. Empathy: Designing for Resilience,” Interactions 21.5 (Sept. 2014): 48–53. DOI 10.1145/2647087.

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Lindsay B. Cummings

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Cummings, L.B. (2016). Introduction. In: Empathy as Dialogue in Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59326-9_1

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