From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical PracticePhysicians recognize the importance of patients' emotions in healing yet believe their own emotional responses represent lapses in objectivity. Patients complain that physicians are too detached. Halpern argues that by empathizing with patients, rather than detaching, physicians can best help them. Yet there is no consistent view of what, precisely, clinical empathy involves. This book challenges the traditional assumption that empathy is either purely intellectual or an expression of sympathy. Sympathy, according to many physicians, involves over-identifying with patients, threatening objectivity and respect for patient autonomy. How can doctors use empathy in diagnosing and treating patients rithout jeopardizing objectivity or projecting their values onto patients? Jodi Halpern, a psychiatrist, medical ethicist and philosopher, develops a groundbreaking account of emotional reasoning as the core of clinical empathy. She argues that empathy cannot be based on detached reasoning because it involves emotional skills, including associating with another person's images and spontaneously following another's mood shifts. Yet she argues that these emotional links need not lead to over-identifying with patients or other lapses in rationality but rather can inform medical judgement in ways that detached reasoning cannot. For reflective physicians and discerning patients, this book provides a road map for cultivating empathy in medical practice. For a more general audience, it addresses a basic human question: how can one person's emotions lead to an understanding of how another person is feeling? |
Contents
One Failures of Emotional Communication in Medical Practice | 1 |
Two Managing Emotions as a Professional Ideal | 15 |
Three Emotional Reasoning | 39 |
Four The Concept of Clinical Empathy | 67 |
From Noninterference to Empathy | 101 |
Six Cultivating Empathy in Medical Practice | 129 |
| 149 | |
| 163 | |
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Common terms and phrases
affective anger another's argues aspects associations attunement awareness belief cancer capacity chapter cians clinical empathy cognitive cognitive therapy cognitivists complex concept concretized countertransference curiosity Descartes describes detached insight detached reason develop distinct doctors Einfühlung emotional communication emotional irrationality emotional reasoning emotionally emotions influence empa empathic understanding empathy involves emphasizes errors example experience experiential fear Freud future goals grieving gut feelings healing Heidegger hopeless human idea ideal imagining intense interactions interpersonal irrational emotional judgment Kant Kant's Kantian knowledge Lipps medical ethics medical practice medicine mental mind model of empathy moods motives object one's Osler Oxford English Dictionary pain pathy patient autonomy patient-physician person perspective Philip Blaiberg philosophers physi physicians physicians need projective identification psychological rational realistic reality recognize resonance responses Richard Wollheim role self-efficacy sense situation social spontaneous suffering sympathy therapeutic thinking tients tion tional treatment understanding Winnicott Wollheim