Susan Lanzoni. Empathy: A History; New Haven and London: Yale University Press; 408 pages; hardback $30.00; ISBN: 9780300222685

by Sarah Chaney

A couple of years ago, I attended a colloquium on empathy at the University of Oxford. The organisers of this event were rightly concerned by the vague and varied definitions of empathy in medical research and practice and sought to remedy this. While they had found a number of clinical trials that purported to measure empathy, the introductory lecture noted, every single one of these gave a slightly different definition of what it was they were actually measuring! As Susan Lanzoni’s comprehensive history of empathy shows, this conceptual confusion around empathy is not new. Even after an explosion of interest in the term through the 1950s and 1960s, in 1979 the American social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark declared himself dismayed by the lack of “clear definition and a comprehensive theoretical approach” to the subject (p. 248).

As Lanzoni shows in this genealogy, the confusion lies to some extent in the fact that the meaning of the term has “shifted so radically that its original meaning transformed into its opposite” (p. 8). Lanzoni makes this shift clear by outlining a huge range of examples of studies in which empathy does not mean what the modern reader might expect. To take just one example of many, when the psychologist Edward Bullough found in 1908 that his subjects described coloured lights as having a particular temperament or character he called this “empathy” (p. 52). Even in the twenty-first century, many forms of empathy exist: “from emotional resonance and contagion, to cognitive appraisal and perspective taking, and to an empathic concern with another that prompts helpful intervention” (p. 252). While the book takes a chronological approach to the subject, the diversity of different meanings at play in any one period are thus made clear throughout.

Lanzoni records the first use of the term “empathy” simultaneously in English in 1908 by the psychologists James Ward and Edward Titchener, used in both cases as a translation of the German Einfühlung. Jeffrey Aronson has dated this a little earlier, finding the English word empathy in The Philosophical Review of 1895. Quibbles about the exact date aside, however, Lanzoni rightly emphasises the importance of the origins of empathy in the aesthetic Einfühlung (empathy was later translated back into German psychology as “empathie”). Empathy thus emerged from the appreciation of art and was first conceptualised as an ability to project oneself into an artwork or object; early psychological definitions also incorporated this notion of empathy as an extension or projection of the self. By the post-war period, however, empathy increasingly became viewed as a way of understanding others, a notion that was particularly prominent in the field of social work. It was this latter idea of empathy that was popularised after the Second World War.

Of course, the distinction is not so clear or neat in practice. Indeed, Lanzoni cites the German psychologist and philosopher Theodor Lipps as having suggested that Einfühlung was a way to understand the emotions of others as early as 1903, while modern neuroscientific definitions often hark back to aesthetic empathy through the links made to visual images and movement (p. 265). For ease of narrative, however, Lanzoni divides the history of empathy into nine historical stages. She begins with empathy in the arts as a way of “feeling into objects” and closes with mirror neurons as an expression of empathy in the modern neurosciences. On the way, the book takes in the experimental laboratory, art and modern dance, the psychiatric hospital, social work, psychometrics, popular depictions of empathy and the politics of social psychology. While the early chapters, on the introduction of the word, include aesthetic and psychological research across Europe, the second half of the book tends to focus more closely on the United States. This is perhaps the opposite of what one might anticipate, as the post-war era moved towards a supposedly international culture. Further explanation of the reasons for the chosen focus would thus have been helpful to the reader, or the occasional reflection on how the North American field complemented or differed from research elsewhere.

The chapters vary in their presentation: some chart changes over a period in a particular area such as social work, others focus in more detail on a specific person or theory. A good example of the former approach is chapter six, on the post-war measuring of empathy, a comprehensive account of North American efforts to test for empathy in the wake of Rosalind Dymond’s student test at Cornell University in 1948. These tests are highlighted by Lanzoni as they marked a shift in understanding of empathy from a creative enterprise to an “accurate understanding of another’s thoughts” (p. 176). In contrast, chapter 8 on the 1960s relationship between social psychology, race and politics, focuses largely on the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. This seems to be a particular interest of Lanzoni’s (she has also written about Clark for the Washington Post) and she sensitively weaves Clark’s concerns about the centrality of capitalist greed in White American society, and prejudice as a social disease, into his psychological research on the topic of empathy. This culminated in the publication of Clark’s Dark Ghetto in 1965, an ethology of Harlem explicitly aiming to “inform, to engender feeling, and to galvanize social action” (p. 240).

At times, the sheer amount of content means that Lanzoni veers into a rather descriptive style. Some chapters are heavy on chronological lists of contributions with less focus on how these fit into a broader picture. Chapter 3, on empathy in art and modern dance, for example, might have been edited down and combined with the previous chapter to indicate the links between experimental psychology and aesthetics in a more directed way. And while the material on Clark is undoubtedly interesting, a greater degree of contextualisation into the contemporary civil rights movement (which is merely nodded at in passing) would have been useful. There are also some significant absences. For instance, while occasional debates around the distinction between empathy, sympathy and compassion briefly surface (such as Edward Titchener’s claim that sympathy referred to fellow feeling, whereas empathy reflected an imagined but unfamiliar feeling [p. 66] ), the reader is left wondering why more attention was not paid to the interplay and conflict between these ideas.

Overall, however, Lanzoni’s book ably charts the complex changes in meaning that empathy has undergone over the last century, and convincingly argues that much of this confusion remains today. This is important, given how often empathy is invoked in a wide range of arenas in the modern world – from politics to education to health and medicine. As Lanzoni recognises, empathy is frequently emphasised as a vital human capacity, something that has the power to shape society for the better. Does it matter that we remain unable to convincingly explain what exactly it is or how it functions? Perhaps not, Lanzoni concludes, so long as we are aware of this complexity. Across all its definitions, empathy is characterised as a “technology of self”. This means that understanding its complex history can serve to increase our ability to make connections.

Sarah Chaney is a Research Fellow at Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Living With Feeling’ project. Her current research focuses on the history of compassion in healthcare, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and includes an exhibition to open at the Royal College of Nursing Library and Heritage Centre in December 2019. Her previous research has been in the history of psychiatry, in particular the topic of self-inflicted injury. Her monograph, Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harmis published in paperback in July 2019 (first published 2017).