"Reflexive Embodied Empathy": A Phenomenology of Participant-Researcher Intersubjectivity

In this article, I advocate a research process that involves engaging, reflexively, with the embodied intersubjective relationship researchers have with participants. I call this practice reflexive embodied empathy. First, I explicate the concept of empathy through exploring ideas from the philosophical phenomenological literature. I then apply this theory to practice and offer examples of reflexive analysis of embodied empathy taken from various hermeneutic phenomenological research projects. Three interpenetrating layers of reflexivity are described, each involving different but coexisting dimensions of embodied intersubjectivity. The 1st layer-connecting-of-demonstrates how people can tune into another's bodily way of being through using their own embodied reactions. The 2nd layer-acting-into-focuses on empathy as imaginative self-transposal and calls attention to the way existences (beings) are intertwined in a dynamic of doubling and mirroring. The 3rd layer-merging-with-involves a "reciprocal insertion and intertwining" of others in oneself and of one in them (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968, p. 138), where self-understanding and other-understanding unite in mutual transformation. Through different examples of reflexive analysis from my research, I have tried to show how intersubjective corporeal commonality enables the possibility of empathy and how, in turn, empathy enables understanding of the Other and self-understanding. I discuss how the coexisting layers of empathy and the resultant understandings can be enabled through hermeneutic reflection and collaborative research methods.