Empathy≠sharing: Perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology

Abstract

We argue that important insights regarding the topic of sharing can be gathered from phenomenology and developmental psychology; insights that in part challenge widespread ideas about what sharing is and where it can be found. To be more specific, we first exemplify how the notion of sharing is being employed in recent discussions of empathy, and then argue that this use of the notion tends to be seriously confused. It typically conflates similarity and sharing and, more generally speaking, fails to recognize that sharing proper involves reciprocity. As part of this critical analysis, we draw on sophisticated analyses of the distinction between empathy and emotional sharing that can be found in early phenomenology. Next, we turn to developmental psychology. Sharing is not simply one thing, but a complex and many-layered phenomenon. By tracing its early developmental trajectory from infancy and beyond, we show how careful psychological observations can help us develop a more sophisticated understanding of sharing than the one currently employed in many discussions in the realm of neuroscience. In our conclusion, we return to the issue of empathy and argue that although empathy does not involve or entail sharing, empathy understood as a basic sensitivity to and understanding of others (rather than as a special prosocial concern for others) might be a precondition for sharing.

Collective intentionality and socially extended minds

“…After all, it would be unrealistic to assume that two people have to think the same thoughts as they perform a task jointly, if their minds are to count as shared in joint action. Another way to put this point is to say that multiple minds can function as a unity when your experience of a thing or situation becomes part of my experience-though shared-ness does not need to amount to fusion (Zahavi & Rochat, 2015). Perfectly aligned minds might then be shared, but not in the sense in which the extension of my mind into ours, and vice versa, generates identical thoughts or enables identical actions.…”

On Self and Other

“…It entails our perceptions of the mental life of others in their expressive behaviors and utterances (Zahavi 2015, 8;2017b, 39). According to Zahavi and Rochat (2015), "empathy is the experience of the embodied mind of the other, an experience which rather than eliminating the difference between self-experience and other-experience takes the asymmetry to be a necessary and persisting existential fact." Empathy allows me to experience other experiencing subjects (544).…”

Generational And Sex Differences In Relation To Empathy Among Pre-Graduate Teachers

“…The origin of the word empathy dates back to the 1880s, when a German psychologist Theodore Lipps coined the term 'Einfühlung' to describe the emotional comprehension of another's feelings (Zahavi & Rochat, 2015). The English term was then adapted by Edward B. Titchener (1909).…”