Stephen Sparks talks to Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about the connection between shame and empathy:
SS: Do you think that your sensitivity to shame can lead one to be more empathetic? To take an example from the book, I think of “Devil’s Bait,” on Morgellons disease. Many of the people with Morgellons suffer from a double burden of shame: the physical toll of the disease (apparent on their skin) and the fact that it’s not officially recognized, that it’s written off as psychological—it’s real, but not quite. In reflecting on their suffering, you also reflect on your response to that suffering, which moves you into a consideration of the role that reason plays in empathizing. This is another big question: where does reason stand in relation to shame? To empathy? I want to say that thinking through another’s suffering will move one closer toward an understanding of it, but there’s a nagging part of me that’s skeptical. …
LJ: I think you’re so right about the double shame of Morgellons, and it’s fascinating to parse it that way because the two shames are both simultaneous and oppositional—physical damage promises the possibility of proof that suffering is “real” but also compounds and deepens the isolating effects of that suffering. Which gets back to the question of reason—whether it always deepens empathy or whether it sometimes gets in the way.
I felt how strange it was to look at scarred skin and feel several reactions at once—the brute, gut feeling of sadness; the scars proof that suffering had happened, no matter why or how—but also the curiosity of those scars, how they had gotten there, to what extent we might call them self-inflicted. And in those moments, the reasoning mind did feel like radio static interrupting the reception of pain with its nagging questions. This was a nice word of yours: nagging. So often good ethical impulses start as nagging—like a little kid tugging on a shirt or a finger, until we stop and pay attention.
Have you read Paul Bloom’s piece in The New Yorker, “The Baby in the Well: A Case Against Empathy”? He posits a very different kind of relationship between reason and empathy. Basically, he argues that empathy can get in the way of sound moral reasoning, and we ought to supplant it—or at least leaven it—with reasoning. Often the situations that call forth our instinctive sympathies aren’t really the ones we should be acting towards: a little girl caught in a well arouses more collective sympathy than the anonymous millions starving in Africa—but we owe so much to the suffering that hasn’t been or can’t be compressed neatly into narratives that tug our heartstrings.
Previous Dish on Jamison and The Empathy Exams here and here.
The Dish 