Seeking to mediate between the "classical" view of countertransference as a neurotic impediment to the treatment process and the more recent "totalist" perspective, which assumes that the therapist's emotional response necessarily reveals something about the patient, Tansey and Burke stake out a thoughtful middle ground.
They submit that the therapist's utilization of adequately processed countertransference reactions is in fact integral to treatment success, while arguing against the totalist assumption that the therapist's emotional to the patient must be revelatory in a direct and immediate way.
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With AI we are entering a new era in which technology can tabulate information, recognize patterns, answer questions, and write reports at a phenomenal speed, and do tasks that would require a massive amount of human time and effort. This has huge implications for our future and what kind of skills are still important for humans to acquire. Being the smartest person in the room has little value if artificial intelligence can pull up more accurate information than the entire room has, and assess that information in moments.
Years ago, sitting across from a couple in my therapy office, I would stop them before they said a word to each other.
I'd hold my hands up, palms facing my own chest, and slowly move them outward, lifting something invisible off myself and setting it down beside me.
"Before you listen to your partner," I'd say, "take your issues, your concerns, your opinions, your judgments, lift them out of yourself, and place them over here. Not gone. Just set aside. So they don't get in the way of you actually hearing the person in front of you."
When empathy operates without discernment, people can enable dysfunction, confuse rescuing with caring, or mistake emotional immediacy for moral wisdom; this is where Trungpa's notion of idiot compassion becomes useful, pointing to care that avoids truth, limits, or necessary tension.
When discernment operates without empathy, people can become efficient, severe, and strategically correct while quietly dehumanizing the very people they claim to help.
One reason is the growing tendency toward self-centredness. Modern life often encourages us to focus on our ambitions, opinions, comfort, achievements, and personal interests. Social media can reinforce this tendency by turning everyday life into a competition for attention, recognition, and validation.
In such an environment, empathy has become more important than ever.
Empathy allows us to step outside ourselves and understand what another person may be experiencing.
It does not require us to agree with everyone. Rather, it requires us to recognize that other people have emotions, struggles, fears, hopes, and stories that may be invisible to us.
Measuring medical outcomes based on doctor warmth and conveyed empathy.
Compassionate care as an effective medical treatment, it's not just bedside manner.
We can’t always guarantee empathetic doctors, but we can practice self-compassion ourselves.
In the last month, I’ve been absorbed in Meghan O'Rourke’s insightful book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness. It examines the often dark and misconstrued world of long-term health conditions, specifically intangible illnesses that manage to slip under the diagnostic radar for many years. But she addresses all medical conditions that typically take a huge toll on our psychological well-being.
When we open a book, we don’t expect much more than to be entertained or to learn something about the world. We pick up a novel because we want to escape, to fall in love, to be frightened, to laugh or simply to spend a few hours somewhere that isn’t our own reality.
What we don’t always expect is to grow with every story.
Every character, every heartbreak, every unfamiliar life slowly builds something inside of us that we may not even realize is there: empathy
We developed the first universal single-item therapeutic empathy measure and demonstrated validity. The RATE scale is brief, accessible, and applicable to clinical practice, education, and research. Further research should validate practitioner-, student-, and observer-reported versions, and assess predictive and cross-cultural validity. This robust tool can support patient-reported routine measurement of therapeutic empathy and contribute to improving patient and practitioner outcomes.
Join Monica Harris, John Wood, Jr. and Ilana Redstone as we discuss the need to develop emotional intelligence and perspective-taking skills and how deep listening strengthens democratic participation and community bonds. This theme also supports FAIR's commitment to respectful civil discourse, which is a foundational element of our Many Stories, One Nation curriculum: https://manystoriesonenation.com/
Empathy entails more than feeling sorry for someone; it entails putting yourself in that person’s place. While sympathy shows you care, it may imply a sense of superiority or a sort of noblesse oblige. Empathy implies that we gain a real sense of someone unlike ourselves. We grasp what another person experiences, in much the same way that readers identify with a fictional character. When the heroine suffers, we wince; when another person grieves, we vicariously experience his or her grief.
Empathy can be intellectual as well as emotional: if someone holds beliefs differing from our own, we understand what makes those beliefs convincing to that specific person. We realize: had I had that person’s experiences, I might well have drawn the same conclusions. Those who disagree with me may have reasons as good as mine, and may be as concerned with the suffering of others as I am. Even if that is not always the case, it is a good rule of thumb to hold onto, especially because we are too ready to credit ourselves with good motives and suspect the motives of others. And sometimes we blind ourselves and conceal our own vindictiveness by representing it as goodness. Today, empathy with the opinions of others is in especially short supply.
Que triste pensar que nos estamos acostumbrando a que un algoritmo nos escuche solo porque la gente ya no tiene tiempo ni paciencia para soportar nuestras crisis existenciales.
WHERE AI MEETS EMPATHY(TM) Coaching the Human Side of Innovation
AI is no longer theoretical; it's operational. It drafts your critical documents, optimizes supply chains, schedules high-level meetings, and processes data at unimaginable speed-yet, for all its power, it leaves the organization's internal world untouched. Leaders are equipped with sophisticated tools, but increasingly struggle with the fundamental human demands of clarity, compassion, and courage. This is the central paradox of our time: the very efficiency that drives success simultaneously creates a widening empathy gap in the workforce.
The greatest risk today is not technological failure, but losing our essential humanity in the pursuit of automation.
Dr. Towanna Burrous, founder of the Institute for Coaching Innovation, delivers the definitive blueprint for intentional leadership in this new era. This book is a strategic imperative, redefining coaching not merely as a beneficial soft skill, but as the non-negotiable human infrastructure required to guide your people through profound organizational change.
More power, less empathy Powerful people are more likely to be self-centred in general, not just in romantic relationships. Research has shown that high-power individuals are less empathetic and compassionate, with some displaying less distress at the suffering of others.
In one of Galinsky’s studies, he showed that high-power individuals literally struggle to see the world from other people’s perspectives. He and his colleagues asked people to draw the letter E on their foreheads.
In conversation-based psychotherapy, therapists use verbal techniques to help clients express thoughts and feelings, and change behavior. In particular, how well therapists convey empathy is an essential quality index of psychotherapy sessions and is associated with psychotherapy outcome. In this paper, we analyze the prosody of therapist speech and attempt to associate the therapist’s speaking style with subjectively perceived empathy. An automatic speech and text processing system is developed to segment long recordings of psychotherapy sessions into pause-delimited utterances with text transcriptions.
Cognitive empathy, understood as the ability to adopt another person's perspective, is a key socioemotional competence in health professions education and has been associated with psychological adjustment and lower levels of psychological distress. However, evidence on how cognitive empathy and psychological distress vary across disciplines and stages of training remains limited, particularly in large multidisciplinary samples.
The present study aimed to (1) analyze differences in cognitive empathy and psychological distress across Health Sciences degree programs and stages of training and (2) examine the relationship between cognitive empathy and psychological distress while controlling for relevant sociodemographic and academic variables.
Empathy is a crucial leadership skill, driving organizational success and employee engagement. Leaders can cultivate empathy by actively listening, demonstrating vulnerability and focusing on individual needs. Nurturing intergenerational teams and encouraging in-person interactions can further enhance empathy. Organizations should actively reward empathetic behaviors. Empathy is a learned trait that, when systematically encouraged, cannot be replicated by technology, making it indispensable for future leadership.
Several conservative public figures say misplaced empathy for hardened criminals and Islamist migrants has pushed Western society to the brink of collapse.
Vice President J.D. Vance, trillionaire Elon Musk, social researcher Gad Saad, Baptist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and Catholic media evangelist Bishop Robert Barron have argued that Americans have been kind to a fault with such people.
Most of them have close ties to the Trump administration, which has restricted illegal immigration, made deep cuts to social spending and deployed National Guard troops to police major cities. And all have used terms such as “toxic empathy,” “suicidal empathy” and “the sin of empathy” to justify such policies.
What made Robert Jenrick complain about “suicidal empathy” in a Telegraph article about benefit reform? The phrase barely existed until the end of last year, when it started to attract flutters of interest on Google search.
Then, in May, a Canadian professor of marketing called Gad Saad published a book called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind. Elon Musk wrote an admiring blurb, and the concept was fired straight into the far right lexicon.
“Suicidal empathy” has become a popular diagnosis of progressive excess: the idea that compassion can become so indiscriminate that it undermines the very people, institutions, and cultures it hopes to protect. In this episode, integral psychologist Dr. Keith Witt and Corey deVos take that critique seriously without accepting the Manichaean worldview often wrapped around it.
A single question can reliably measure how much empathy a patient experiences from their healthcare professional, according to a new University of Leicester study.
Empathy is not simply about making patients feel better about their care. Evidence suggests that empathic healthcare can improve patient outcomes and safety and reduce healthcare costs, while failures to listen to patients can contribute to patient-safety incidents.
But to improve empathy, healthcare organisations need to measure it properly. Without reliable measurement, it is difficult to identify where care is falling short or establish whether attempts to improve it actually work.
The Art of Empathy: Reimagining Healthcare Symposium is part of the Empathy Imperative that brings together educators, students, researchers, healthcare practitioners, people with lived experience, and creative practitioners to explore how empathy shapes – and transforms – healthcare. Through research presentations, shared lived experience, interactive discussions, and creative expression, the symposium provides an opportunity to explore how empathy can be taught, researched, embodied, and practised, with the aim of humanising healthcare.
Reactivating Healthcare Empathy via Transdisciplinary Research, Patient Perspectives, and Immersive Learning
The Healthcare EmpathyRx Lab conducts transdisciplinary research to develop healthcare education interventions that sustain empathy, cultural awareness, and health-related literacy challenges within health professions and across the health education and professional development journey.
We blend insights from neuroeducation, the art and science of nursing and medical education with innovative technologies to enhance healthcare practice. With the support of SDSU’s VITaL Research Center and the expertise of our industry advisors, we aim to nurture a more compassionate and competent healthcare future for all. Our advisors bring invaluable expertise and real-world perspectives, ensuring our interventions are both innovative and practical, meeting the evolving needs of the healthcare industry.
Empathic Leadership and Culture Change The New Drivers of Patient Experience Excellence Healthcare organizations are under growing pressure from workforce burnout, staffing shortages, rising patient expectations, technology overload, and increasing complexity across care delivery. In this timely panel discussion, leaders from across Mass General Brigham will explore why empathic leadership and culture transformation have become critical drivers of both workforce well-being and patient experience.
Moderated by empathy researcher Helen Riess, this panel brings together senior clinical, quality, patient experience, and operational leaders from Mass General Brigham to share practical lessons and measurable strategies for leading through today’s healthcare challenges. Attendees will leave with actionable insights to strengthen leadership communication, supporting clinical teams, and creating more sustainable cultures that improve both the workforce and patient experience.
Strengthen organizational resilience, trust, retention, and patient outcomes through empathic leadership
Address burnout, communication breakdowns, workforce fatigue, and technology burden across care environments
Implement culture change strategies drawn from real-world frontline experience and operational leadership
Connect patient experience, quality, safety, and workforce well-being as part of a unified organizational strategy
Build accountable, compassionate, and engaged cultures during periods of ongoing stress and transformation
Nowhere is this clearer than in Saad’s signature contribution to far-right discourse: “suicidal empathy,” his theory that Western civilization is engineering its own collapse by being too compassionate. It’s a concept with no basis in psychological research, evolutionary or otherwise. Saad has never conducted a study on it, and it appears nowhere in peer-reviewed literature.
That hasn’t stopped it from becoming the latest trend in far-right discourse. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) invoked it to describe a mother on trial for killing her children. Representative Randy Fine (R-Fla.) cited it to argue Americans must “deal with the barbarians inside the gates.” Elon Musk, one of Saad’s earliest and loudest boosters, put his own endorsement on the cover of Saad’s book. What started as a marketing professor’s pet theory is now providing an excuse for far-right influencers and politicians to justify anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hostility.
In the rush to adapt to artificial intelligence, higher education may overlook something critical in the process: the human capacities that technology cannot replace. In my experience as a designer, educator and academic leader, meaningful innovation does not begin with technology; it begins with empathy.
This is not always how universities approach innovation education. We often emphasise technical expertise, analytical rigour and productivity. Those qualities matter deeply. But innovation that improves human lives requires something more difficult – and profound: the ability to understand people whose experiences differ from our own. That ability deserves far greater attention in higher education.
Empathy allows us to ask better and deeper questions, recognise unmet needs and undiscovered aspirations, and create solutions that genuinely improve human experiences and quality of life.
La educación superior se está enfocando tanto en la inteligencia artificial y en la parte técnica que está dejando de lado habilidades humanas clave como la empatía y la capacidad de escuchar. La tecnología ayuda a optimizar procesos, pero la verdadera innovación nace de entender las necesidades reales de las personas. Por eso, las universidades deben enseñar a los estudiantes a colaborar entre diferentes áreas y ponerse en el lugar del otro.
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