Empathy and Sympathy

In class yesterday our professor talked about Diltheim's definitions of empathy and sympathy. Empathy is the experience of feeling the same thing as another person, of entering so entirely into their experience that it feels like your experience. This can lead to a feeling of oneness, of fusion. A fusion experience is what people are often seeking in love or sex. Fusion moments feel wonderful: we feel loved, understand, ONE with others.

I had several friends who burst into tears when I told them my dog had died. Some had loved my dog too, and grieved like I did at her loss. But some cried because they were reminded of how they felt when they had lost a beloved pet. They weren't grieving MY loss but their own loss remembered.

When that happens, it's not exactly a fusion of selves, but rather a moment of parallel emotions that can fool us into thinking we are sharing something when we really aren't. If I cry when you tell me your dog has died, but I'm thinking about Jenny while you are thinking about Buttons, we're not actually in rapport. I'm not actually thinking about you, I'm thinking about me.

Sympathy, on the other hand, is a conscious and rational attempt to understand the other person in their own terms. It requires that one question and listen and think about the other person, and probably also requires some back-and-forth where the listener paraphrases what they think the other person said, and then allows the person to correct that impression until the listener "gets" it.

As you can see, sympathy takes a lot more work. It requires recognition that the other person is Other, not the same as me, a unique individual that I have to make an effort to understand. Realizing this can help us avoid assuming that we know something about the other that we actually don't.

I used to think empathy was "better" than sympathy, that it meant the other person really understood me, understood me so entirely that they felt what I felt. But after this discussion I'm veering the other way. And not just because of that discussion. I've spent the last three years with a group of people with whom I often had wonderful fusion moments where we would laugh helplessly together or cry together or just feel "oh yeah, YOU get me." I loved all those moments. But in another day we will be going our separate ways. While we will meet again, it will not be the same; we will no longer be a class studying and talking about the same things and experiencing the same issues. And I find that suddenly, I want to KNOW my classmates much better than I do. I "get" them emotionally in so many ways, but now that's not enough. I want DETAILS. What color do you like to paint your living room? What color hair do your children have? What was the weirdest job you ever had? I want to sit down with every one of them and ask them to tell me about the things we don't share. I've empathized with them for 3 years; now, I'd like to sympathize. I want to understand them in their differences too.

It's not just I want to do this; I've recently learned that I have to do this to keep a relationship alive. For the past 10 years or so a good friend and I have seemed to be on parallel tracks and could empathize readily with each other. But in the last year that relationship has been shifting more towards sympathy, because our issues are no longer the same. It's been a bit tricky because it had been so easy to empathize all those years, but now we have to work at our relationship. For a while both of us were frustrated because suddenly my friend didn't seem to be getting me like before, and vice versa. Empathy wasn't enough.

My professor has a wonderful love relationship with plenty of fusion moments, yet she says that while the memory and the hope of such moments often get her and her partner through a tough patch, that's not what keeps them together. What keeps them together is their appreciation of and intrigue with the other person's differences. What keeps them together is their willingness to try to understand the aspects of their lover's personality that they don't share and cannot empathize with.

Empathy allows us to feel compassion for others because of our similarities. But sympathy enlarges our ability to tolerate and even respect differences. We need both, and right now, I'm thinking we need a bit more sympathy going around.