In an interview about her new book The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison addresses whether it’s wrong to empathize with those who’ve made others suffer:
I think that trying to understand someone’s state of being or feeling doesn’t necessitate condoning or agreeing with their point of view. Getting inside someone’s mind doesn’t mean thinking what they think; it only means realizing what they’re thinking. This gets to another question or distinction that has come up in various conversations I’ve had—with psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists—about empathy: should we empathize with sociopaths? With evil? And I think we should try precisely because empathy doesn’t have to catalyze complete agreement or convergence—only an entry and a reckoning. Andrew Solomon’s recent New Yorker profile of Peter Lanza—father of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza—is a perfect illustration of this distinction: he offers his readers the chance to empathize fully with this father and yet—also, improbably—with the figure of this boy, whose actions might seem to place him outside the realm of empathy entirely.
On a related note, Joanna Bourke contemplates how pain fosters connection:
Talking about pain is a way of cementing interpersonal bonds: when people ‘suffer with’ their loved ones, they are bearing testimony to their closeness to that person. Witnesses to pain often find the experience agonising themselves, which can lead them to further intimacy with sufferers. This is what Claire Tisdall alluded to in her memoir based on the First World War. Tisdall, a nurse, admitted she’d been ‘burning with the agony of losing a dearly loved brother at Ypres’ and so her ‘feelings towards them [Germans] were less than Christian’. Nevertheless, one day she was given the job of looking after some German prisoners on their way to the hospital. One ‘very young, ashen-faced boy’ with a leg-wound looked up at her and murmured ‘Pain, pain’, an episode about which Tisdall wrote: ‘a bit of the cold ice of hatred in my heart… softened and melted when that white-faced German boy looked up at me and said his one English word – “Pain”.’
More than half a century earlier, the physician Samuel Henry Dickson in his Essays on Life, Sleep, Pain, Etc (1852) put the case more strongly: ‘Without suffering there could be no sympathies,’ he concluded, ‘and all the finer and more sacred of human ties would cease to exist.’ At the very least, pain exposes our fragile connection to other people and serves as a reminder of our need for those around us.
Meanwhile, in a profile of James Doty – who helped form the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, or CCARE – Bonnie Tsui describes the science behind “helper’s high”:
When we help someone else or give something valuable away, the pleasure centers of the brain, or mesolimbic reward system, activated by stimuli such as sex, food, or money, provides emotional reinforcement. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies by the National Institutes of Health have shown that the reward centers are equally active when we watch someone give money to charity and when we receive it ourselves; in addition, giving something valuable away activates the subgenual area, a part of the brain that is key in establishing trust and social attachment in humans and other animals, as well as the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be highly involved in the complexities of altruistic decision-making. What researchers call the “helper’s high” may be aided by the release of endorphins. By virtually every measure of health we know—reducing blood pressure, anxiety, stress, inflammation, and boosting mood—compassion has been shown to help us. These are some of the ways we are encouraged to establish trust and community, which have long been necessary to human survival.
The Dish 