Empathy?

"the paradox of human knowing: that the more we understand a person, the more acutely we become aware of the ways in which we do not know him or her. The struggle that anthropologists and psychoanalysts have in common, then, is the struggle to come to terms with a sense of partial failure" (450)"Analysts and anthropologists want to know what it is like to think like the other person, to assume that person's analogies, play in her/his idioms, anticipate her/his startlement" (450)"The analysts, of course, have also a therapeutic aim, which the anthropologists, at least explicitly, do not. But they both want to know what it would be to live as another person lives" (450)"At some point, the most expert observer falls short of a complete understanding of another person" (451)"The psychoanalytic writing seemed to have a less provocative quality, and there seemed to be less overt controversy around the ideas than there was in the anthropological writing. The psychoanalysis who write in this vein wrote as if it were straightforward that an interpretive sensibility and the acceptance of uncertainty made them better analysts. The anthropological writing was attended by a turbulent ocean of outrage" (451)"Anthropology could best be understood as an interpretive enterprise, not as a science. Geertz had been trained by people who collected "data," but he saw himself as being for the cultures he studied an interpreter in every sense of the word: he translated, he explained, and he imposed his own artistry upon the explanation... It drew on new arguments, mostly French (Ricoeur was one of Geertz's primary influences), which argued that social life could be understood as a text" (452)"The authors of Writing Culture ask how the fact that anthropologists write ethnographies is relevant to the anthropological production of ethnographic knowledge, particularly in a cultural climate in which the right of marginalized people to speak for themselves has become a charged political issue. If I had to summarize the claims of this collection, they would be these: 1) that ethnographers are situated in the ethnographic context, that they cannot see all that context, that their presence alters it, that they have a certain political and psychological relationship with it and to it; 2) that the way in which you write about something reflects an implicit truth claim or assertion about what you know and how you know it; and 3) that culture is not some coherent set of propositions or symbols shared and acted upon by all members of a society, but that different members of a culture have varied interpretations and experiences of whatever culture is" (455)"After all, the limited (but useful) vantage point is what the phrase "participant observation" implies: that the observers see more because they participate, but that their participation will affect what they see" (455)"When Evans-Pritchard makes generalizing assertions along the lines of "The Azande believe that X," he asserts his superiority and dominance; he speaks for the Azande, as if he knew them better than they know themselves; he colludes - so goes the implication - with colonialism and with racism" (455)"Edward Said [1992], for instance, remarked that anthropology carries "as a major constitutive element, an unequal relationship of force between the outside Western ethnographer-observer and the primitive, or at least different, but certainly weaker and less developed non-European, non-Western person" ([p. 56])" (456)"What came to be seen as one of the underlying motivations of anthropological postmodernism in this and other works was far more subversive: to challenge the very possibility of anthropological fieldwork and anthropological knowledge by labeling that attempt as hegemonic, authoritative, and morally bankrupt" (456)"There is a mainstream, ego-psychological, psychoanalytic literature which seems to respond to the same intellectual climate as does Writing Culture. There is the same sophistication about being situated and so limited in one's perceptions, about using rhetoric to persuade, about being trapped within one's own history" (457)"As in anthropological theory, these patient-centered writings take authority from the professional observer and give it to the observed subject... The psychoanalysis of the 1980's and early 1990's was carried out in the shadow of disciplinary debates about self psychology, about Jacques Lacan, and in a Zeitgeist of literary theory which privileged uncertainty" (457)"Empahty is a very complicated process, with the same vulnerability to skepticism as the fieldwork process (which, after all, depends in large part on empathy). Empathy is supposed to refer to the listener's capacity to feel at the moment, to some extent, what it is that the analysand is feeling. It is to be able to understand, from the inside, what the analysand's experience is like. When analysts empathize they experience themselves as feeling the analysand's feeling" (458)"In psychoanalysis, this emphasis on shared intimacy is the more striking because during the analytic hour, the analyst and the analysand cannot see each other" (460)"What I, as an observer, find fascinating is that these authors do not use their doubts to question the validity of psychoanalysis, nor do I believe that their papers are read as a threat to psychoanalysis. On the contrary, in their discipline, these doubts are used as part of an account of how to do and understand psychoanalysis more deeply" (461)"[Steven Cooper] has edited a symposium entitled "What Does the Analyst Know?." which featured two articles, one which relied heavily upon Rorty's understanding of philosophy as an inherently inconclusive conversation about an unknowable reality, and another which argued that the transference is always, in a literary sense, a fiction. Cooper's introduction is baldly entitled "Hermeneutics and You"" (461)"Schafer is sometimes called a constructivist, by which it is meant that he understands analysands' of their experience to be constructed in the interaction between analyst and analysand. Schafer understands the analytic process as an interaction between two people who are different in this dyad from the way they are in nonanalytic contexts" (462)"Schafer is less interested in the relationship between word and in-the-world reference - in what one thinks of as the "truth" of an analytic theory - than he is in the transformative power of empathizing with the fictive interaction. It is the retelling of the analysand's life, rather than the analyst;s understanding of that life, which is the heart of Schafer's conception of the analytic attention. "Psychoanalysts may be described as people who listen to the narrations of analysands and help to transform these narrations into others that are more complete, coherent, convincing and adaptively useful than those they have been accustomed to constructing" (1983, 0. 240)" (463)"Schafer writes of the analytic process as "worldmaking," borrowing Nelson Goodman's term, and with philosophical and literary sophistication argues that the way we conceive of ourselves in the world is intertwined with the way we feel and behave" (463)"Schafer argues that it is wrong to say that in the transference the analysand repetitively relives the past. "Another... better account," he says, "tells of change of action along certain lines; it emphasizes new experiencing and new remembering of the past that unconsciously has never become the past" (p. 220). Analysands who break into torrential weeping upon remembering of the past that unconsciously has never become the past" (p. 220). Analsyands who break into torrential weeping upon remembering their father's actions in the past are not reliving the past; they are altering their understanding and memory of that past and relating it to the present in a different way" (463-464)"Analysis, he says, is an interpretive enterprise, not a natural science, and its interpretive nature is what enables it to change the narrative self-account of its participants. Its interpretive nature is what enables it to cure" (464)"One's analytic job is to listen, Schwaber says again and again, and anything - anything at all - that interferes with that listening must be derogated in the interest of the more important job, which is understanding what the patient's experience is for the patient. "If... a patient (with no organic visual abnormality) sees a red dress where the analyst is wearing beige, we may assess the inaccuracy in the specification of color. But this is a matter different from a judgment about the correctness in the experienced reality..." (1992, p. 1042)" (465)"from Schwaber's perspective what one learns is not that the patient has made a mistake so much as that one does not yet understand the patient" (465)"To Schwaber, it is extremely difficult to understand someone else, and there is an enormous temptation in psychoanalysis to use analytic theories and to use one's own experience to interpret and to judge the other. The analyst's interest in theory or in her or his own experience of the patient must not override the focus on the patient's physical reality. And it is this focus, and the shared recognition of the patient's experience, which is therapeutic" (466)Luhrmann’s account of Schwaber reminds me of radical pedagogy."Helene Deutsch and Margaret Mead, to take prominent exemplars, conceived of themselves as practicing scientists who collected data, developed theory, and spoke as knowledgeable experts about the patients and cultures they surveyed" (466)"The anthropological reaction to postmodern anthropology has been stormed and doom-ridden" (467)"The analysts' writings are in some sense a reflection on a professional commitment that they continually renew with each patient they agree to treat; after tenure, the anthropologists' professional commitment need rewen itself only in teaching, and in any event to teach and write from a position of deep skepticism is a time-honored style within the academy. Moreover, it is hard to attack anthropologists' status as anthropologists if they have doctorates in anthropology ad jobs in anthropology departments, whereas psychoanalysts, no matter what their institutional affiliations, are always vulnerable to the argument that they are "not doing psychoanalysis"" (467-468)"By "moral character," I mean the sharp awareness of what counts as a good or bad peformance of the craft of the discipline, and even more, the emotional response to a performance which signals whether it is in accord with or violates the field's expectations of right behavior" (468)"the good potter uses the clay as it "ought" to be used, with respect for its substance and the demands of its skill. These evaluations are tied in specific ways to the achievement of the potter's goals. The good historian, as Bernard Cohn (1987) informs us, is "solid": he or she is thorough, has exhausted the archives, and has competence in his or her domain" (469)"Anthropologists see their main task as producing the public, published description of the people they have studied. Fieldwork is a means to an end, which is the dissertation or the book, which is then reviewed in print for its accuracy in getting the description right. Any suggestion that the description may be inherently flawed is bound to be met with intense feeling, for that suggestion states that the goals of the field cannot be met by the methods it has chosen and, thus, implicitly argues that the methods of the field are morally corrupt - as the essays in Writing Culture were interpreted to imply, although that is not what their authors necessarily intended to state" (469)"For the psychoanalyst, the reverse is true. Book-writing, theory-developing, and fact-finding may all be important, but the psychoanalyst is a clinician first and foremost" (469)"Given a forced choice, most American psychoanalysts would probably choose therapeutic efficacy over theoretical orthodoxy or even consistency. That is, the "bottom line" in psychoanalysis is the health of the patient - not the analyst's knowledge of the patient or the analyst's theoretical sophistication. What really matters is whether the analyst can help the analysand to achieve greater self-knowledge and greater ease" (469)"Self psychology argued that analysts were using the wrong techniques to help their patients. Orthodox Freudians understood their patients to be emotionally conflicted, and held that cure emerged through insight (broadly speaking); the analyst's role, then, was to interpret the conflict to the patient. Kohut argued that many patients were troubled not by conflict, but by deficit, and that the point of the therapy was (again, broadly speaking) to reparent them, or to restructure their emotional insufficiencies by engaging in a certain kind of relationship with them" (469-470)"Anthropologists and psychoanalysts both rely on empathy to some degree as a central methodological tool. The achievement and denial of empathy is the heart of participant observation - a phrase used by all anthropologists, and by psychoanalysis at least since Sullivan, to describe their enterprise" (470)"Self psychology suggested that analysts do their work differently; that methodological innovation created schisms and fights in abundance. The psychoanalytic work discussed here, epistemologically shocking though it may be, can be read as an affirmation to analysts to tell them to do as they have always tried to do; to listen to the patient, to understand the patient's point of view" (471)"Anthropology, by contrast, is founded on the belief that emphatic connection - the anthropologist's experience of partially identifying with the group she or he has come to study - produces publically verifiable information about that group. As a result, these arcane epistemological arguments about narration tear directly at the basic fabric of the enterprise. Anthropological self-hood is founded on the notion that good fieldworkers connect with their fieldsubject, share their experience to some degree (they empathize with the Bedouin woman who recites poetry when she is gloomy), and from this experience produce good ethnography" (471)This reminds me of Galatzer-Levy’s warnings about empathy. Empathy as a process of knowing that takes itself as secure in its knowledge — knowing a situation and thus sharing it. But do we actually know?"Both these responses reveal something about the deep moral fashionings of our disciplinary construals of self" (472)