Caring? Love? Sympathy?

• Responses to First Learning about Affect Theory by Jim Duffy a.k.a. J.C.D., 2/28/97
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    • What is Sympathy? Parts I, II, III, and IV by Jim Duffy, 3/21/97
      
      

We agree that the attitudes you describe are worthy, and that many of them are needed in order for one to be a competent therapist. Much of the conflict between the varied disciplines that make up our field may be traced to the differences in definitional systems chosen by each. You point out that "Wispe defines sympathy as having two parts: (a) heightened awareness of the feelings of the other person and (b) an urge to take whatever actions are necessary to alleviate the other’s plight." My interest in the psychology and biology of affect forces me to ask how the sympathetic one's awareness became heightened. In our system, awareness itself is brought by affect, and if that affect has been heightened, it must be either by some script (idological, most likely in this case) or simply from the fact that the broadcaster is putting out more affect than usual. If, then, Wispe is referring to the state in which the affect system of one person is taken over temporarily by the affect broadcast by another, then this is exactly what we mean by affective resonance. And if the response to affective resonance includes soul searching and the decision to help the other by providing modulation for that affect, then Wispe is describing what Basch called "mature empathy," and the actions taken next by a caring person may be understood as skills rather than a subset of sympathy. Only if you restrict the definition of sympathy to interaffectivity involving negative affect can you make it something different from normal empathy.

In the definitional system I have adopted from Tomkins, sympathy differs from empathy as I mentioned in a previous post---sympathy implies an affective reaction (usually distress) to our cognitive interpretation of the plight of another person or group. It differs from identification in that we have sympathy for that part of another's plight which we understand, while we identify with the plight of the sufferer in order to figure out what affect or pain that sufferer is experiencing. We are stuck with a limited lexicon; there are so few words in our field, and each era defines them differently. I represent affect theory, within which the words empathy and sympathy are defined very differently from the system used by Wispe and now by you. We may feel quite the same about a therapeutic event, but we use different words to explain every aspect of it. This thread is a perfect example of the problem we face in introducing affect and script theory to a profession that has grown up with perfectly reasonable definitions of every important concept. We use words differently and go different places with our definitions.

I think that if you backed off from your wish to promote sympathy as a maligned term (we agree) and just looked at the affective interactions involved in each of the transactions you describe, you would change most of the terms you use. I don't think that empathy involves vicarious experience; if my affect has been triggered by the affect of another person, I am feeling real affect.

Perhaps the 4-letter words here are "love" and "care." I can care about or love someone in moments when I do not have a shred of sympathy (as I have defined it above.) I have no less love for the abuser than for the abused even though each triggers different affects in me. People in our field find it easier to use words like empathy, sympathy, and such when the real force involves love. Too embarrassing.

I salute and share your altruism, believe wholeheartedly that every practitioner of the healing arts should care deeply about the people served by those arts, and hold as central the idea that neither mother nor therapist can calm a child or adult to any degree more than those caregivers are calm within themselves. We are quite close to each other in therapeutic attitudes. But I do take exception to your language, which does not take into account the affects experienced by each protagonist, the scripted reactions of all concerned, and the processes through which all of this is metabolized.

• How Does Affect Theory Explain the Care in a Caring Person? by Jim Duffy, 3/22/97