From "Einfühlung" to empathy: exploring the relationship between aesthetic and interpersonal experience

Touching and being touched: where knowing and feeling meet

Philosophers maintain that touch confers a sense of reality or grounding to perceptual experience. In touching oneself, one is simultaneously both subject and object of touch, a template for experiencing oneself as subject and object of intentions, feelings, and motivations, or intersubjectivity. Here, I explore a form of self-touch carefully documented by Winnicott in observing how the infant engages the transitional object. I compare the processes of self-loss in transitional states, including absorption in art, empathic immersion, drug-induced ego dissolution, and depersonalization. I use examples drawn from Rodin, Dante, and the Beatles; research correlating neurophysiological findings with aspects of self-representation; predictive processing-based models; Hohwy's concepts of minimal and narrative self; Clark's notion of the extended mind; and phenomenological perspectives on touch, to postulate a role for self-touch in the pre-reflective sense of mine-ness, or grounding, in transitional states.

Reconstructing the concept of empathy: an analysis of Japanese doctors' narratives of their experiences with illness

The ability of doctors to empathise with patients is a crucial concern in establishing humanistic medicine. Therefore, the cultivation of this ability has been discussed extensively in medical education. One theory suggests that the experience of patienthood can increase empathy among doctors. This theory is supported by previous research that published doctors' illness narratives. However, the concept of empathy has been ambiguously defined in academic fields, including medicine; therefore, analysing how doctors experience 'empathy' in their interactions with patients is difficult. Our research question is how doctors who became patients describe the relationship between their illness experiences and the interactions with patients after their illness. To this end, this paper initially tracks the debates on 'empathy' in medicine and other disciplines, to develop a lens for analysing doctors' illness narratives. Next, we conduct a narrative analysis of illness stories from 18 Japanese medical doctors who became patients. Our analysis supports the traditional idea that an illness can enable a doctor to become more empathetic. However, this is overly simplistic; how doctors experience and subsequently process their illness is more complex. Moreover, this notion can disregard doctors' suffering in these circumstances, and fail to represent the often-lengthy process of mastering 'empathy' based on their experiences. Therefore, our analysis deconstructed the concept of 'empathy', showing that it can appear in various ways. Further research is required to elucidate how empathy is cultivated during the process of transformation of doctors' illnesses, focusing on their communities and practices.

Chemical species: the art and politics of living with(out) drugs after addiction

We live within and are made up of ever-changing chemical flows. Witnessing a "chemical turn" in the social sciences, this article asks what a chemical reading of drugs and bodies can offer an understanding of drug dependency and recovery. Where chemicals render bodies "molecular" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), they open them up to more intimate forms of connection that extend our understanding of drug-body relationships beyond limiting categories such as addiction. Rather than a chemical drug entering a biological body, there are chemical interactions that expand the boundaries of where one ends and the other begins. While chemicals have long been a preoccupation in neurological models of addiction, they are seldom taken up in sociological studies of these concerns. Drawing on a series of body-mapping workshops with people in drug recovery/treatment in London, UK, to track these chemical bodies, this article explores the art of living a chemically transformed life. This is an art that thinks with Isabelle Stengers' (in Stengers and Savransky, 2018) notion of the word to include "not paying attention" as a mode of "paying attention to what may lurk" in living with the ongoing effects of drugs in unequally entangled worlds.

Self-Oriented Empathy and Personality Organisation Level: Insights from a Psychiatric Sample

OBJECTIVE

Empathy functioning is among the criteria to delineate psychiatric diagnosis. However, the self-oriented empathy dimension is almost neglected in the existing literature. On the basis of previous fragmented contributions, we hypothesised that an individual's level of personality organisation is explained by this facet of empathy more than the other components of empathy, both transversally and independently from the specific psychiatric diagnosis.

METHOD

Fifty-nine psychiatric inpatients were evaluated with clinical interviews inspired by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5, completed the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised, and Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). A panel of experts established each patient's psychiatric diagnosis and the level of personality organisation according to DSM-5 and PDM-2. Thirty-two patients were considered functioning at a psychotic level, 27 at a borderline level, and none at a neurotic level. Multinomial models were compared with the corrected AIC to determine if self-oriented empathy, among all IRI subscales, was the best-fitting model for explaining the levels of personality organisation. A further analogue series of models was used to investigate the best IRI subscale to explain each patient's psychiatric diagnosis.

RESULTS

The first series of models revealed self-oriented empathy (IRI personal distress subscale) as the best empathic dimension to explain levels of personality organisation. The second series revealed that none of the four IRI subscales explained psychiatric diagnoses.

CONCLUSIONS

The consistency of our findings with evolutionary concepts pertaining to both traditional psychodynamic models and contemporary models of psychopathology, such as the p factor theory, was illustrated. Despite the many limitations of our consecutive sampling jeopardising the findings' generalisability, the insight of self-oriented empathy as the best predictor of the level of personality organisation, irrespective of psychiatric diagnosis, has several implications from both research and clinical/diagnostic perspectives.

Validation of the Romanian Version of the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) among Undergraduate Medical Students

Medical professionals require adequate abilities to identify others’ emotions and express personal emotions. We aimed to determine the validity and reliability of an empathy measuring tool in medical students for this study. We employed Spreng’s Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (TEQ) as a starting point for this validation. The process was performed in several steps, including an English-Romanian-English translation and a focus group meeting to establish each question’s degree of understandability and usability, with minor improvements of wording in each step. We checked internal and external consistency in a pilot group (n = 67). For construct and convergent validity, we used a sample of 649 students. The overall internal and external reliability performed well, with Cronbach’s alpha = 0.727 and respective ICC = 0.776. The principal component analysis resulted in 3 components: prosocial helping behavior, inappropriate sensitivity, dismissive attitude. Component 1 includes positively worded questions, and components 2 and 3 include negatively worded questions. Women had significantly higher scores than men in convergent validity, but we did not highlight any differences for other demographic factors. The Romanian version of the TEQ is a reliable and valid tool to measure empathy among undergraduate medical students that may be further used in subsequent research.

Dramatizing Living-in-the-World: Affective Generalization in Drama-in-Education Workshop

Drama-in-Education workshops (DiE) emphasize on balancing between teacher's delicate structuring and participants' spontaneous exploration and creation in dramatic activities and thus can be a powerful liminoid space to scaffold and facilitate young people's development. Still, more researches are needed to dig into and understand such a dynamic and complex process happening in the workshop. In this article, we presented the theoretical background of conceptualizing drama as a hybrid cultural-aesthetic form to identify its potential in educational guidance. The perspective of developmental cultural psychology was introduced to frame DiE practice as a catalytic process working on releasing and transforming participants' developmental forces. The hierarchical levels of semiotic mediation in cultural psychology can help to capture participants' affective and cognitive generalizations in semiotic forms and to perform a micro-genetic analysis of the flow of participants' subjective experiences. We also provided a step-by-step analysis of a DiE practice working with young Chinese immigrants to illuminate our theoretical proposal.