Abstract
The purpose of this article is to report on a study that attempted to qualitatively evaluate the phenomenological approach to empathy training. A descriptive phenomenological psychological method was used to explicate the lived applied meaning of the training. The result disclosed a general structure of the phenomenon, composed of the following five constituents: (a) a serious context in which one is encountering the other who is emotionally distressed about something, (b) directing one’s lived presence to the other’s meaning-expression, (c) a shift in emotional context, (d) novelty of approach toward interpersonal understanding, and (e) disclosing an interpersonal relatedness. The results were briefly discussed in relation to the content and the procedures of the training.
The phenomenological approach to empathy training (Englander, in press; Englander & Robinson, 2009) has been theoretically and practically developed over the course of a decade. To date, the purpose of the training has been to help students approach the topic of empathy and interpersonal understanding, especially students of psychology, nursing science, and social work and leaders in various types of organizations (including multinational businesses). The training has its philosophical foundation in phenomenology, specifically in Dan Zahavi’s (e.g., 2001, 2012, 2011, 2010) and Shaun Gallagher’s (e.g., 2008, 2012) recent analyses of empathy and intersubjectivity. The practical goal of the training has been to assist students in turning their primary focus to the experiential world of the other and to set their own presuppositions aside. In other words, the phenomenological approach to empathy training has had as its purpose teaching students to adopt the phenomenological psychological attitude 1 for empathy to be disclosed. Hence, the phenomenological psychological approach, particularly as seen in the work of Amedeo Giorgi (2009), has permeated the practical aspects as well as the human scientific foundation of the training.
A systematic evaluation has recently been carried out to better understand the applied meaning of the phenomenological approach to empathy training from the perspective of the student. In other words, what was the student’s lived experience like, when applying the phenomenological approach (that was learned during the training) in an everyday situation outside of the classroom (e.g., in the workplace or at home)? Therefore, there was no interest in evaluating the training in terms of causal relations to a certain predetermined value, but instead, the lived applied meanings of the training were examined. The descriptive phenomenological psychological method as developed by Giorgi (2009) seemed a rational choice for this evaluative study, mainly because this particular method is designed to investigate lived meanings but also because it was congruent with the context of the training. Thus, applying such a methodology could aid in the discovery of the lived applied meaning of the training. The following article will (a) aim at giving a brief overview of empathy training from a phenomenological perspective; (b) describe the results of the qualitative, phenomenological evaluation of the applied lived meanings of training; and (c) discuss the phenomenological psychological findings in relation to some of the content of the training.
Brief Overview of the Phenomenological Approach to Empathy Training
Only a concise overview of phenomenological empathy training and its philosophical foundations will be presented here, because the main focus of this article is to report on the qualitative evaluation of the training. 2 Incorporating the philosophical aspects related to the training can sometimes appear abstract and thus depart from the lived experience; however, explicating the training within the philosophical realm has provided it with a fruitfulness in terms of its contrast to the mainstream psychology of empathy (based on simulation theory). The philosophical foundation of empathy training is rooted in the phenomenology of empathy as described by Edmund Husserl (e.g., 1989, 1999, 2006), Edith Stein (1989), and Max Scheler (2008), whereas the human scientific and the practical context of the training is based on Giorgi’s (1970, 1985, 2009) phenomenological psychology. The integrative account of Husserl, Stein, and Scheler follows Zahavi’s (2012, 2011, 2010, 2001) recent philosophical research on empathy. 3 Zahavi (2010) writes, “Empathy is a basic, irreducible, form of intentionality that is directed towards the experience of others”(p. 291). This does not mean that one can have unmediated access to the other’s first-person perspective—hence Husserl’s (1999) use of the term apperception, indicating a copresence with the other’s own experience. The development of an experiential training program—in effect, training students in how to recognize their own lived experience of engaging in empathizing with another—constitutes a practical application of the phenomenological tradition’s philosophical examination of empathy.
From a phenomenological psychological perspective, empathizing is an intentional act in which one’s primary presence is directed to the other person’s meaning-expression, making possible an apperception of and copresence with the other’s lived experience. Note that expression is not the same as behavior in the reductionistic sense, as used by the behaviorist (Zahavi, 2007). Instead, expression is meant as an “expressive unity” in the sense originally described by Scheler (Zahavi, 2010, p. 292). For example, during the training, a student who was present to another student’s frustration over something (or some other experience) was encouraged to trust the presence to this “expressive unity” instead of reducing it to behavioral observations, theoretical-based interpretation, and so on. When asked to reflect on the own directedness toward the other student’s expression, he or she was helped in seeing the sometime-subtle psychological meanings that were being expressed by the other, such as struggles, tension, emotions, and so on. Hence the training had a descriptive focus (by encouraging the students not engage in theories, hypotheses, and existential assumptions about the other’s expression) and it had a primary focus on the other person’s experience.
Considering the use of the psychological reduction, it is the psychological meaning that one is present to in the other’s expression. By means of an experiential and theoretical introduction to the phenomenological psychological perspective, students were trained to adopt a phenomenological attitude, with a focus on the psychological reduction, in order to be open to another person’s experience of something, directing their primary attention to the meaning in the other’s expression. This phenomenologically turning toward the other made it possible for empathizing to spontaneously occur and a greater sense of lived intersubjectivity to be disclosed.
Teaching Strategies and Steps of the Training
Classic Rogerian (e.g., 1989, p. 211) teaching strategies such as recording and transcribing communicative sessions have proven to be legitimate classroom teaching strategies as part of the phenomenological approach to empathy training. Despite the fact that Rogerian teaching strategies are utilized, it must be noted that Rogers’s (e.g., 1989) own theoretical understanding of empathy as part of his extensive work on the subject matter is not highlighted during the training. As Spiegelberg (1972) has shown, Rogers cannot be considered a phenomenologist in a continental and Husserlian sense. Nevertheless, this is not to say that Rogers’s understanding of empathy is completely incongruent with the phenomenological, but instead the front-loading (to use Shaun Gallagher’s term) 4 of the continental phenomenological perspective and Giorgi’s phenomenological psychology has been the foundation of the theoretical and the methodological content. Hence, a psychological perspective informed by phenomenological philosophy was adopted in the educational context to make visible the process of empathizing and its relationship to interpersonal understanding.
The phenomenological approach to empathy training consists of three consecutive methodical steps, suggesting an educational (or pedagogical) method. The steps have evolved from the first 6 years in developing the training in which discoveries were made about what worked practically and what did not. All steps encourage the use of a phenomenological attitude to keep a primary focus on the other. The first step focuses on the student’s learning about a phenomenological attitude and the phenomenology of empathy on an intellectual level, using the traditional lecture format. During the second step, recorded and transcribed dialogues are brought to the classroom situation in which the students have recorded a 3- to 5-minute dialogue during which they tried to empathize with somebody else (usually another student) who presented them with their personal, trivial everyday problem. The second step consists of three such training sessions. A trivial everyday problem (e.g., always being late for the subway, being frustrated by standing in line for something, etc.) seems to work well in the teaching situation, because it minimizes the extensive discussions often brought to the classroom about problems appearing in a professional context, hence keeping the focus on the phenomenology of the interaction. If the steps of the training are repeated, serious problems with clients are appropriate, to integrate the phenomenological perspective with the related problems presented to the professional.
The first goal of the second step is to confront the student with his or her previous understanding of empathy, by disclosing communication habits that point toward a focus on the students themselves. Such a confrontation is conducted in a respectful manner, empathizing with the student involved in the initial steps of a complex learning process. It is also important that the groups are small (i.e., four to six students in each group) during the three training sessions in Step 2 and that there is enough time to properly explore psychological meanings (i.e., 2-3 hours for each group meeting). During the initial session, the facilitator can point out habits such as the student being overly focused on giving explanations of and solutions to the other person’s everyday problem, whereas in the following two sessions, more subtle aspects of continuing to have a primary focus on one’s self can be highlighted. 5 The second step is also marked by the student’s struggle to find ways to adopt, embody, and enact a phenomenological attitude. The facilitator thus needs to provide alternative ways of empathizing with the other. Students are thus shown (by the facilitator) alternatives of how to verbally describe the meaning to which they are present. The third step is an active attempt to integrate the first step (i.e., the intellectual understanding) with the second (i.e., the embodied understanding) using a traditional format of a seminar and additionally to require students to write a paper (in academic settings). The integrative goal of the third step can also be achieved by less formal formats, such as reflections and discussions of the three training sessions, perhaps more appropriate for nonacademic settings (e.g., in professional organizations and multinational businesses) in which the empathy training has also been used.
Philosophical Foundations in Relation to the Training
During the training, the main task of the facilitator is to encourage students to attend to the other’s experience of something, an intervention that can find support in Zahavi’s (2010) integrative analysis of Max Scheler’s, Edmund Husserl’s, and Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy. Zahavi (2010) observes that from a phenomenological perspective, if one intends to understand the other, one must have a primary focus on the other. As Zahavi (2010) writes, “The focus is on the other, and not on yourself, not on how it would be like for you to be in the shoes of the other. That is, the distance between self and other is preserved and upheld” (p. 291). In contrast, mainstream psychological approaches to empathy imply that one has a primary focus on oneself, “imagining oneself in the other’s place,” and that empathizing is a kind of “simulation” within oneself of the other’s experience (e.g., Gallese 2003; Goldman, 2006; Stueber, 2006). The dominant understanding of empathizing as a primary focus on oneself largely derives from Theodor Lipps’s original account of empathy as projection (Zahavi, 2010). The influence of Lipps’s perspective can be seen throughout the history of psychology, especially in contemporary simulation theory (Zahavi, 2010). For phenomenologists, such theories are not adequate as comprehensive accounts of empathy and interpersonal understanding (e.g., Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012).
The attempt to ground the training in the primary focus of the other might seem radical at first because it could imply that there is an attempt at bypassing the foundation of the lifeworld. This is a misunderstanding, because there are possibilities of many levels of empathy (e.g., Zahavi, 2010) in relation to the training and only one level is described here. To go into the discussion of the different levels of empathy in relation to the training is beyond the scope of this article and has been left as a consideration for future work. Nevertheless, the focus on the other has proven valuable in terms of the pedagogical method, because it breaks the embodied habits left from traditional definitions of empathy as something that occurs only within one’s own mind (e.g., simulations, projections, etc.). In addition, the absence of a primary focus on oneself does not mean that for phenomenology, the experiencer is void of self-experience in his or her apperception of the other (Zahavi, 2012). In other words, there is an essential difference in claiming that one’s emotional response is a prerequisite for understanding the other versus having the experience of the other’s unity of expression (Zahavi, 2010). In fact, to seek an understanding of the other from one’s emotional response puts one at the psychological risk of entering into emotional sharing, which is a specific quality of experience in which it becomes difficult to clearly see whose experience you are dealing with (Zahavi, 2001). From a phenomenological perspective, empathizing is qualitatively different from other forms of intentionality 6 that are characterized by a primary focus on oneself, such as projection, simulation, imitation, theorizing, and so on. In addition, empathy is also distinctly (in a qualitative sense) different from other intentional acts of consciousness, such as sympathy, emotional cogitation, emotional sharing, and so on (Zahavi, 2001). Hence, empathy is a unique intentional relation in which the primary focus is to understand the other as other.
Teaching empathy as a unique type of intentionality, one characterized by the primacy of the other, assists students in recognizing the many problematic implications of empathy as conceptualized in mainstream and popular perspectives of empathy. Mainstream psychological approaches to empathy seem to characterize interpersonal understanding as a process in which simulation gets one closer to the other’s experience, resulting in a possibility of confusing one’s own experience with that of the other. The phenomenology of empathy suggests the opposite (Meneses & Larkin, 2012, p. 176). The phenomenological perspective can thus provide a sense of clarity in terms of empathy as a distinct type of intentionality directed primarily toward the other in a context of interpersonal understanding. In contrast, having a primary focus on oneself (i.e., simulating) when trying to understand the other arguably results only in a potentially better understanding of how one would experience a hypothetical situation (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, p. 197). In other words, it yields self-knowledge at best, instead of authentic knowledge of another. Note that this shift in focus to the other does not imply a sense of determinism, that is, it does not mean that empathy could not occur spontaneously without the primary focus of the other. In other words, the notion of the primacy of the other is suggested as a reasonable place to start when one is deliberately initiating the intentional act of empathy.
To apply the insights of phenomenological philosophy to the praxis of empathy training, a modification of the philosophical approach was necessary in order to facilitate students’ attempts to understand others in an interpersonal, psychological context. In phenomenological philosophical terms, the epoché, the reduction, and eidetic variation would be used; however, instead of effecting the transcendental phenomenological reduction, the psychological reduction was used. In practical terms, this means that the facticity of the content of the other’s expressions was bracketed, but the facticity of their identities as distinct individuals was not. Instead of implementing the transcendental reduction (appropriate in transcendental philosophical inquiry), students were taught to implement the phenomenological psychological reduction. The situation is analogous to the way the psychological reduction is used in Giorgi’s (2009) phenomenological psychological research method. In contrast to Giorgi’s research context (where the focus is on making an inquiry into a specific phenomenon), during the empathy training, students were encouraged to have a primary focus on the individual person’s experience of something (i.e., to be present to their meaning-expression). In turn, many different phenomena might appear during the interaction with the other, and by being present to the expression of the other and describing the meanings that were expressed, empathy could be revealed.
Students noticed that by bracketing their own existential assumptions, theories, prejudices, hypotheses, emotional involvement, practical solutions, explanations, inferences, and so on, they were able to have a primary focus on the experiential world of the other. Note that bracketing was not conducted in a step-by-step approach, in which the student identified everything that was supposed to be bracketed and then attended to the other person, because this would mean a primary focus on oneself. Instead, attending directly to the other’s expression and following the expression rather than seeing the expression through a theory or through your own emotions etcetera are being taught during the training. In other words, students practice staying within the realm of perception, which is, following Gallagher and Zahavi (2012), 7 what makes empathy plausible in the first place. Now, this is not to say that adopting (using the psychological reduction) is the same as not bringing any of your experiences “to the table,” which is highlighted by Husserl in what he calls pairing, which is not the same as simulating, projecting, or inferring (Zahavi, 2012). Pairing is a passive synthesis, meaning that “patterns of understanding are gradually established through a process of sedimentation and they thereby come to influence subsequent experiences . . .” (Zahavi, 2012, p. 235).
The students’ primary focus would then be on the other, although it was a primary focus on the other’s meaning-expression from within a phenomenological attitude. Thus a descriptive phenomenological psychology was established to be present to the other’s meaning-expression, which consequently could open up for empathy to occur and an experiential disclosure of intersubjectivity. In other words, by adopting a phenomenological attitude, one could be present to the meaningful expression of the other and by doing so disclose the possibility of an appresentation and a copresencing of the other’s lived experience (i.e., empathy). Once again, this is not to say that we could ever have unmediated access to the other’s first-person perspective in the same way as the other’s experience is present for him or her. The fact that we can never have direct access to the other’s first-person perspective does not automatically mean that we do not have any access at all (Zahavi, 2010). If we had no experiential access to the experience of the other, we would have little alternative than to turn to the mainstream conceptualization of empathy as demonstrating a primary focus on ourselves and the concomitant framing of interpersonal understanding as modes of simulation, projection, or inference. In contrast, the phenomenological perspective acknowledges that we actually do have access to the other’s lived meanings through their expressions and are able to grasp something about the intentionality of the other in a way that is not simply mimetic or imaginary.
In using a phenomenological approach to empathy training, we are actually making an attempt to teach students to reach a clear sense and a better grasp of what it means to understand the other. The phenomenological approach challenges the common sense, mainstream, and popular accounts of empathy by turning away from one’s own self to adopt a primary focus on the other instead. Empathy is about directing one’s intentionality toward the other’s intentionality. In other words, empathy is a unique intentional act that cannot be confused with intentional acts such as simulation. As Gallagher (2008) illustrates using a vivid example, I see a woman in front of me enthusiastically and gleefully reaching to pick up a snake; at the same time I am experiencing revulsion and disgust about that very possibility. Her action, which I fully sense and understand from her enthusiastic and gleeful expression to be something that she likes to do, triggers in me precisely the opposite feelings. In this case, neither my neural states, nor my motor actions (I may be retreating with gestures of disgust just as she is advancing toward the snake with gestures of enthusiasm), nor my feelings/cognitions match hers. Yet I understand her actions and emotions (which are completely different from mine), indeed that is what is motivating my own actions and emotions, and, moreover, I do this without even meeting the minimal necessary condition for simulation, that is, matching my state to hers. I suggest that no simulation in any form is involved in this kind of case, and I suggest that this kind of case is not rare. So that’s the trouble for the universal claim made for simulation. (pp. 131-132)
Hence, in preparing our students for their future professional context in which interpersonal understanding are valued, the phenomenological psychological approach to empathy highlights the primacy of the other.
From here, it seems important to critically evaluate whether and in what sense the empathy training has some practical implications outside the training situation. For example, in what way does the phenomenological approach to empathy training “come alive”—that is, does it present some applicability in the world outside of the classroom? In other words, were there situations (at work or in everyday life) in which the students had applied what they had learned in the classroom and what was the meaning of such an experience? Thus, the purpose of this evaluative study was to explicate and describe the lived applied psychological meaning of the phenomenological approach to empathy training.
Method
Because the study aimed to explore a human phenomenon as it was lived in everyday life, the descriptive phenomenological psychological method (Giorgi, 2009) seemed like a logical and appropriate methodological choice. The study was guided by the following questions: Could the students describe a situation (outside of the classroom) in which they experienced the applicability of the training? Could a phenomenological analysis of such an everyday description explicate the lived applied psychological meaning of the empathy training?
Data Collection
The study took place at the end of spring and fall semesters in 2011 at Malmö University (in Malmö, Sweden) after two undergraduate courses had been completed in which the empathy training had been the main focus. Most of the participants (i.e., students) who had gone through the training also worked full-time (especially in the fields of social work or health care), meaning that these students had had the possibility of experiencing the phenomenon in the work place. Standard ethical procedures for evaluative research at Malmö University were implemented according to the routines of the university. The researchers also carefully considered some additional details in regard to ethical cautions. For example, during the data collection, students could hand in the material and the consent form completely blank without the researcher knowing that they were blank. Also all course grades were submitted to the registrar’s office before the researcher reviewed any of the descriptions.
The procedures followed the guidelines of data collection in descriptive phenomenological psychological research. The selection of descriptions was based on the criterion outlined by Giorgi (2009); namely, they were descriptions of a specific situation in which the participant had the experience of the phenomenon being researched. Written descriptions were collected about situations in which the participants found themselves applying what they had learned during training in the world outside the classroom. The participants were asked to describe an everyday situation in which they had applied what they had learned during the empathy training. Although only three participants are necessary in Giorgi’s (2009) method, the researcher selected three from each of the two semesters (spring and fall 2011) to provide for longitudinal results.
More specifically, a total of 17 descriptions were collected from a total of 25 students (including both semesters). The data collection took place during the course evaluation and 17 were present during this scheduled time. All 17 agreed to participate. The age range was 19 to 68 years, with a majority in their 20s and 30s (68%). All descriptions contained some aspects of the phenomenon, although the descriptive quality and depth (and the ability to select and describe only one situation) of the response determined the selection criteria of the six descriptions selected and later analyzed. The remaining descriptions that were not selected came from participants who gave an overly sketchy account of their experience of a situation, described several situations or nonspecific situations, or described what they had learned conceptually during the training (which could also be interpreted as describing a different phenomenon or as a misunderstanding of the task).
Data Analysis
Data analysis followed the four steps in the descriptive phenomenological psychological method as developed by Giorgi (2009). This qualitative research method follows both scientific and phenomenological criteria (Giorgi, 1997, 2006, 2009, 2010). Hence, it is essential that the researcher, in a systematic and rigorous way, conduct all methodical steps during the data analysis by adopting a phenomenological attitude (i.e., by utilizing the phenomenological psychological reduction; Giorgi, 1997, 2009). During the first step, the researcher reads the entire description to get a sense of the whole experience in the situation as described by the participant. In the second step, the researcher breaks the descriptions into meaning units, serving as manageable units for the analysis. This is followed by a third step, in which the researcher goes through all meaning units and describes the psychological meanings as expressed by the participants. This particular step also includes the use of eidetic, imaginative variations to provide for general, psychological descriptions of meanings. The fourth and final step is marked by the use of eidetic, imaginative variations in order to discover, explicate, and describe the invariant, psychological meaning-structure of the phenomenon. As Giorgi (2009) writes, Each concrete description is chock full of specific, varied meanings, and the question arises as how to communicate in the best possible way what is the common meaning of the phenomenon being researched given all of the variations in the raw data. (p. 100)
Results
General Structure
The results showed an invariable structure of the lived applied psychological meaning of the phenomenological approach to empathy training. Five constituents constituted a psychological structure of the phenomenon as explicated and discovered from the data analysis. The general psychological structure is described here as follows: The lived applied psychological meaning of the phenomenological approach to empathy training is experienced in situations characterized by a serious (i.e., nontrivial) context in which the other is emotionally distressed about something. In the lived application of the training, the encounter with the other became genuine and was experienced as if the directedness toward the other’s experience became visible for the other. Such an encounter was experienced as having an effect on the other in which the other shifted from a more distressed mood to a more harmonious sense of mood, which eased up the communicative experience. The newly learned (i.e., the phenomenological) approach to empathizing was experienced as a novel way to interact that aided in the transformation of the initial serious context in which the other is distressed about something into a more harmonious emotional context, in which the seriousness was preserved but the distress faded. The other revealed personal information during the encounter and expressed a sense of gratitude for the interaction, which was experienced by the participants as making future positive encounters plausible, and an interpersonal relation was disclosed.
Constituents
A Serious Context in Which the Other Is Emotionally Distressed About Something
Participants who experienced the lived applied meaning of the phenomenological approach to empathy training did so in a serious context in a work or everyday situation in which the other person was emotionally distressed about something. By serious was meant here that the context was nontrivial. A serious context was a context in which the other was vulnerable, for example, being a patient with a medical condition, an employee with a work-related problem, a client with a psychological problem, a student with an experience of having been graded unfairly by a teacher, anyone being stressed by everyday life in a big city, and so on. Most of the participants were describing a work-related situation (e.g., nursing or social work) in which they interacted with a patient or a client.
Another important aspect of this particular constituent was the fact that the other person was emotionally distressed by something. Whether this aspect constituted the seriousness of the context was not clear in terms of the data collected. Nevertheless, both of these aspects (i.e., serious context and the other being emotionally distressed by something) seemed necessary for the phenomenon to be experienced by the participants. In addition, to be emotionally distressed by something did not always imply an explicit emotional state or response such as anger, joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and so on; implicit emotional expressions were also present in the data, which indicated that a subtle mix of emotions could be expressed, for instance, in the experience that something meant a great deal to the other. For example, if one was in the serious context of being a patient with a medical condition, the emotional distress was obviously connected to the value of being healthy. In other words, being emotionally distressed about something also constitutes more than just an emotional expression, meaning that being distressed about something was also an expression for not experiencing a sense of congruency with the world. 8
Directing the Presence to the Other’s Meaning-Expression
The participants experienced that they had shifted their attitude, and this shift was experienced as similar to the shift that they had learned during the empathy training. They expressed this as a sense of openness toward the other in which they were able to direct their presence to the meaning in the other’s expression. In other words, the participants described an ability to follow the other’s meaning-expression by having a primary focus on the other. One participant captured this eloquently, by making an analogy of being captured in the story of an interesting book in which the external world around them faded into the background. Other participants described that they started to focus in on what the patient or client was actually telling them about their problem instead of being occupied with coming up with a feasible explanation about their condition and/or situation. There were many variations in terms of describing this constituent; however, all participants experienced a shift in attitude that had its primary focus on the other’s meaning-expression.
Shift in Mood and Emotional Context
During the serious context in which the participants were present to the other’s meaning-expression, the participants experienced the encounter as having an effect on the other in which the other’s emotional expression transformed from a distressed mood to a more harmonious one, especially in relation to the expression in their tone of voice. The participants experienced that the transformation in mood also transformed the whole emotional context of the encounter into a positive one. In turn, this process was experienced by the participants in that it transformed the communicative context into becoming more relaxed in comparison to the beginning of the interaction. For example, all the participants noticed that the person (they empathized with in a work situation or everyday situation) started to unwind and change his or her tone of voice (so it became calm). In other words, the phenomenological approach to empathy (as learned during the empathy training) was experienced (i.e., outside the classroom) in that it transformed the encounter with the other and was experienced as causing a shift in mood and emotional context that consequently transformed the communicative situation. Hence, there was a shift in the emotional context: however, it is essential to point out that the shift did not diminish nor change the seriousness of the context.
Novelty of Approach Toward Interpersonal Understanding
The participants experienced the phenomenological approach, during the encounter with the other, as a novel approach in that it opened up for a new emotional context in which interpersonal understanding took place. By shifting to a phenomenological attitude in which they had a primary focus on the other, the participants found themselves more disposable for an experience of interpersonal understanding. By following the other’s meaningful expression, the primary focus became the other’s intentionality (instead of one’s own experience). For instance, some of the participants even received direct feedback from their clients/patients stating that they were not like others (that they had usually encountered in the social and health care services) who had, for instance, tried to find an explanation of their problem or lectured to them on the effects of bad habits (e.g., smoking). Although there were many variations in terms of situations and individual experience, the phenomenological approach to empathy was experienced by all the participants as a novel way of trying to understand the other as other.
Disclosing an Interpersonal Relation
During the encounter in which the novel approach to interpersonal understanding was being used, the participants experienced that a fuller sense of interpersonal relationship was disclosed. The other dared to share personal information during the encounter and expressed thankfulness for the interaction. The participants experienced this newly found relation with the other as an interpersonal relation accompanied by an anticipatory sense that future positive encounters with the other could occur. For example, one of the participants described the experience as if laying a foundation for the next meeting with this person, whereas another participant described the encounter as having created a closeness to the other that was not there in the beginning of the encounter. The overall experience as expressed by all participants was that the phenomenological approach to interpersonal understanding paved the way for an interpersonal relationship.
Discussion
Students’ ability to apply what they have learned is a central goal in education. The results of this study do not indicate that the training actually caused the students’ overall ability to apply what they have learned during class in practical situations outside of the classroom. Instead, the results show the general, psychological structure of the lived applied meaning of the training, which points to an experience in which the possibility opened up in a practical setting in which the phenomenological approach became useful. To then take a look at what is being taught and facilitated during the training and how this relates to the results seems qualitatively essential. Thus, the purpose of the following discussion is to engage in a dialogue between the results of this study and what is being taught and facilitated during the phenomenological approach to empathy training. A more extensive and exhaustive discussion is a work in itself; thus the focus here is specifically on a dialogue between the main content of the training in relation to the results.
The first constituent indicates that a serious context and the emotional distress of the other open up for the experience of applying the phenomenological approach. During the training, students are asked to record conversations in which they are trying to understand the other’s everyday problems, which are usually trivial problems, however, most of the time there are feelings present, such as frustration or distress. Hence the training consists of understanding persons experiencing a problem that is “naturally” accompanied by negative feelings, meaning that the training is somehow a “light” version in comparison to the practical situation in which the phenomenological approach is being applied. The interesting aspect is that the training comes to life not in a situation in which a person has a trivial problem but instead in a serious context. Hence, we are training within the realms of the trivial but the lived applied meaning presents itself in a serious context. Now, the classroom is a serious context, so it becomes unclear what type of embodied knowledge the student is able to generalize. Nevertheless, the results suggest that we do not necessarily have to train students in real situations with clients or patients in order for them to learn the basics of interpersonal understanding.
One specific aspect of empathy that is encouraged during all phases of the training is that the primary focus should always be on the other. This is in line with the contemporary, phenomenological philosophical research on empathy as conducted by, for instance, Zahavi (2001, 2010, 2011, 2012). That such an aspect is lived and applied in a practical setting, as can be seen in the second constituent, is very positive because this is what makes the training phenomenological and unique in comparison to other approaches to empathy. During the first training session, the students are confronted with their typical focus on themselves as opposed to having a focus on the other. For example, during the first session during which the participants are attempting to empathize with the other, the participants tend to ask too many questions of the other, or try to come up with a solution to the other’s problem, or provide an explanation or interpretation of the problem for the other, and so on. The teacher or facilitator can easily point toward such a primary focus on oneself and also show that the direct results of such a primary focus on one’s self results in a loss of a primary focus on the other. The lived experience of applying the phenomenological approach is just what the second constituent indicates, which is to remain open and shift to having a primary focus on the other’s meaning-expression.
There is no attempt during the training to indicate that the phenomenological approach contributes to changing the actual situation of the other, meaning that the purpose of the training is limited to interpersonal understanding. Whether empathy and interpersonal understanding contribute to changing the situation for the other or changing the other is part of another debate that has been prevalent, especially in the field of clinical psychology (e.g., Coplan & Goldie, 2011). Hence, the purpose of leaving out the aspects of change is deliberate, because such a discussion would have taken away the main focus, which is to train to have a primary focus on the other if one is to understand the other. Nevertheless, the lived applied meaning includes a constituent that directly points to an experience of change or, perhaps better, a transformation of the emotional context. What is interesting about this finding is that such transformations are present during the training but never discussed or encouraged to be discussed. Perhaps such transformations could be discussed in later phases of the training, that is, after the students have gone through the required first three sessions. Bringing in the concept (or phenomenon) of change initially could have negative consequences for the main task of having a primary focus on the other and understanding the other.
The experience that the phenomenological approach is something novel for the student is by no means a surprise because this is usually the common reaction after the first training session. In a way, the approach is far from being new to them, because if you never had a primary focus on the other, understanding anyone in the lifeworld would be impossible. As an illustration, just take the everyday situation of crossing a street with no traffic lights. Having a primary focus on your own experience would make such a situation very difficult, if not impossible. However, the phenomenological approach is novel for students simply because the literature on empathy and interpersonal understanding is dominated by processes focusing on one’s own experience, for example, simulating, projecting, or theorizing. The problem can easily be traced to the philosophical fact that one cannot perceive the primary experience of the other as well as the commonsense notion that one cannot understand something if one has not had a similar experience oneself. In addition, there are also norms in contemporary Western society that you are supposed to “deliver” something if you are getting paid for something (e.g., an explanation and a solution to a problem) or that people typically tend to be rather self-absorbed. In other words, just because one’s self is the primary starting point when one tries to understand, it does not automatically mean that one’s primary focus should be on one’s own self when trying to understand the other. As the “phenomenological proposal” suggests, “direct social perception” is possible (Zahavi, 2011, p. 541), and considering the background of most students, it is no wonder that such an approach is experienced as novel.
There is no part of the training that has a didactic focus on interpersonal relations, although such an issue becomes obvious in the presence of empathy. The phenomenological psychological account of interpersonal relations has recently been described in the research of Halling (2008). Whether Halling is investigating phenomenon such as “forgiveness” or “seeing the other as if for the first time,” empathy from a phenomenological perspective seems to be implicitly present as constituting the process. Following Halling, there seems to be a demand for a sense of openness toward the other in order for a meaningful interpersonal relationship to be constituted and disclosed. Now, all the participants in the present study experienced that interpersonal relatedness began to disclose itself when they started to use the phenomenological approach in a situation outside of the training context. In this way, the relation between empathy and intersubjectivity is similar to empathy and interpersonal relations. Or perhaps better, one could say that empathy can disclose interpersonal relatedness, which would be congruent with Zahavi’s (2001) notion that empathy “is taken to disclose rather than to establish intersubjectivity” (p. 154).
This study was limited to the participants’ (i.e., students’) experience of the applied psychological meaning of the training, and thus we have no account of the first-person perspective of the other (i.e., the person that the students tried to understand). Thus there are no data describing the first-person experience of the other. As Zahavi (2010) notes, Second- (and third-) person access to psychological states do differ from first-person access. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of restricting and equating experiential access with first-person access. It is possible to experience minds in more than one way. (p. 295)
Following the phenomenological perspective on empathy, there is evidence that interpersonal understanding occurs, because the meaning-expression of the other as present to the participant and to the researcher presents such a possibility. Nevertheless, an extensive study investigating the other person’s experience of being understood, while a student is adopting the phenomenological psychological approach to empathy in a situation, is a plausible research project to take into future consideration.
In conclusion, conducting a descriptive phenomenological psychological investigation on the phenomenological approach to empathy training has revealed a structure on the lived applied meaning of the training. The results are important because they provide us with the lived meaning of the training when it “comes alive” (i.e., when the approach is applied) in a practical situation outside the educational context. What we can see is that the core aspects of the training come through in a practical situation as well as other positive aspects that are not encouraged during the training. The experience of the lived applied meaning of the training is a complex phenomenon in its own right that needs to be critically examined as part of refining the training itself.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.