Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

by Paul Bloom

Smith begins by talking about a virtue of empathy. If you’re anxious, it pays to be empathic with a calm friend because this will make you calm and help you make sense of your situation: “The mind, therefore, is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness. The breast is, in some measure, calmed and composed the moment we come into his presence. We are immediately put in mind of the light in which he will view our situation, and we begin to view it ourselves in the same light; for the effect of sympathy is instantaneous.” Smith inverts the sort of empathic distress scenario that we’ve worried about in the therapeutic context, where a calm person (the therapist) meets an upset person (the client), and through empathy the calm person becomes upset. Here, the calm person meets the upset person and the upset person becomes calm. This is a better model for what should go on in therapy—the trick, then, is not for the therapist to have empathy; it’s for the patient to have it. It gets more complicated

quem precisa sentir empatia é quem está sofrendo