...and misunderstood as understanding itself...

• Empathy-often missunderstood... by Jessica, 5/26/98
  
  

Wow, Jessica, you sure know how to make a contributor feel welcomed and appreciated! Thanks for your postive reaction and complimentary remarks. I'm glad to be reassured that you can confirm my interpretation that CMT does acknowledge the potential value of incorrectly understanding a person and, especially, it's frequent inevitability.

You've captured the essence of my propositions in your appreication that such inevitable misunderstandings are not evidence that a therapist has lost her empathic presence nor that she necessarily would understand any better if only she were more empathic. It certainly seems to be so that much struggle with misunderstanding, far from being an indication of empathic failure, is actually requisite for having those rare moments of empathic understanding.

Giving up the struggle is when empathic failure MAY set in, but, even then, what looks like "giving-up" may only be an unconscious continuation of the struggle for understanding. There's a lot of good to be said about struggling.

Mortimer Adler is a philosopher who writes for everyone and who believes that "philosophy is everybody's business." Mortimer thus writes with amazing clarity and simplicity about profound and complex ideas. In his wonderfully practical book HOW TO SPEAK/HOW TO LISTEN (1983), he explains that almost everybody vastly underestimates how difficult it is to speak clearly and directly so that one's intentions can be correctly communicated. And similarly Adler explains that almost everbody vastly underestimates, too, how extremely difficult it is to correctly and accurately understand what others are saying.

And Adler is talking about everyday conversations about everday topics.

A statement so emphatic, about communication difficulty, made by a man like Adler, a man who has dedicated his life (he is now 90 years old and still teaching) to communicating clearly important basic ideas of universal interest to persons who are eager to learn from him, made a lasting impression on me. I now try to never take for granted good communication. I expect it will not be easy. I expect that if it is good communication--in which participants really understand each other--it will entail struggle, even in everyday matters.

Imagine how much more difficult is the task of a therapist and patient who are trying to understand unconscious matters not well understood by either participant for long periods of time!!

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