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Empathy: a new way of understanding the complexity of human beings using cognitive and psychological input
There is renewed interest in empathy as a result of the questions it raises at the point where a variety of disciplines converge. Defined as the ability to understand another person's condition from their perspective, it has become one of the paradigms in the debate on the place of the mind in relation to the body, at the point where philosophy and neuroscience overlap. Empathy raises questions about what is increasingly emerging as the most humane aspects of mankind: a person's ability to see beyond differences to find what is similar and extract it from situations, to give substance and meaning to intersubjectivity as a condition and means of surpassing the self.
Empathy embodies the very ambiguity behind the concept of the mind.
What is meant? Is it the mind described in cognitive psychology ("theory of mind", a cognitive movement that allows us to attribute mental states to others) or that used in psychoanalysis (which is characterized by the importance given to affect)? What is communicated between the empathetic subject and the object of this empathy? And how? The discovery of mirror neurons has open up a new research pathway in the search for an explanation for the "transmission gap" between self and others.
What this sort of "spilling over" from one discipline to another teaches us is that it is possible to take a strictly scientific approach to the understanding of relationship devices and progress in the fundamental sciences can only be translated into concrete therapeutic advances if therapists opens up to the subjectivity of their patients not just as a means of assessing their suffering, but also to be able, in so far as this is possible, to situate themselves in the representations the latter have of their disease.