The Moral Contours of Empathy

Morally contoured empathy is a form of reasonable partiality essential to the healthy care of dependents. It is critical as an epistemic aid in determining proper moral responsiveness; it is also, within certain richly normative roles and relationships, itself a crucial constitutive mode of moral connection. Yet the achievement of empathy is no easy feat. Patterns of incuriosity imperil connection, impeding empathic engagement; inappropriate empathic engagement, on the other hand, can result in self-effacement. Impartial moral principles and constraints offer at best meager protection against these perils, and hence serve poorly in securing morally contoured empathy. More nuanced and practical guidance should be sought in normatively substantive conceptions of our roles and relationships and their defining moral stakes. These, joined with more abstract moral tools, can facilitate rich, narratively textured interpretations of moralitys demands. While the content of our normative conceptions must be continually debated, engaging in this debate is vital to the achievement of proper empathy, and thus to effective, respectful, morally healthy care of dependents.This paper was originally presented at the conference on Reasonable Partiality at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, October 22–24, 2003. I wish to thank all those present for stimulating discussion. Special thanks go to Bert Musschenga, who organized the conference, and who has provided insightful feedback on this paper. Warm thanks as well to Brenda Almond and Bernie Rollin for lively exchanges on the issues addressed here and to Nancy Sherman for sharing with me an ongoing fascination with, and her own fantastic work on, empathy. Comments from an anonymous reviewer for the journal were challenging and helpful. Finally, I wish to express gratitude beyond normal bounds to Maggie Little both for her generosity, keen insight, and artful intervention at key points in this essays evolution and for her ground-breaking work on deontic pluralism that deeply influences the position I frame here.     

Modelling change in self-narratives and embodied experience: A multicase study and autoethnography

The article documents a multicase study of the researcher’s own clinical work with four clients who each presented with embodied expressions of distress. The researcher practised within a ‘narrative-dialogical’ framework and set out to build theories of therapeutic change. However, a parallel thesis emerged during the project: an autoethnographic account in which the researcher’s uses of supervision, personal therapy, dreams and life events capture data on the ways in which the therapist’s theories of change are modelled in the therapeutic space—with varying degrees of confidence and success. Sessions were audio-recorded and coded for qualitative markers indicating the emergence of novel self-narratives. A reflexive narrative running throughout the work highlights the superordinate role of reflexivity in theory development. Therapeutic change was typified by an evolving internalised map of self and world, with corresponding change in embodied experience. The article highlights techniques deployed by the therapist in highlighting and building upon moments of innovation with the therapeutic process. As an analysis of one therapist’s practice and the experiences of their clients, the study generates theories for ongoing exploration and study. The continuous evolution of change concepts reflects the theory-building work of clinicians in their everyday practice. The study highlights the use of self as research instrument and offers a candid and intimate example of how practitioner research might be structured and delivered.     

The Listening Partners Program: An Initiative Toward Feminist Community Psychology in Action

The Listening Partners intervention is described and analyzed as a synthesis of feminism and community psychology, within a developmental framework. Working from an empowerment perspective, this social action, peer group intervention supported a community of poor, rural, isolated, young, White mothers to gain a greater voice, claim the powers of their minds, and collaborate in developmental leadership—creating settings that promote their own development and that of their families, peers, and communities. High quality dialogue, individual and group narrative, and collaborative problem-solving were emphasized, in a feminist context affirming diversity, inclusiveness, strengths, social-contextual analyses, and social constructivist perspectives. The power of enacting a synergy of feminism and community psychology is highlighted.     

Where Does I Stand? Reflections on Home and Identity Ensnared in a Cultural Narrative

In this paper the author explores a cultural narrative that she suggests rests on the concepts of the Feminine and Masculine as such, employing both as though they contain an agreed set of universal givens. These givens are extrapolated from an androcentric perspective on female and male bodies, in particular their biological functions regarding reproduction. The metaphors of the baby-in-womb, mother’s preoccupation with child and heteronormative sexual relations are the primary cyphers for the narrative. She suggests that remaining unconscious of this narrative, such that it is taken as a universal given, can hamper a person’s relation to themselves, the world and others. The author names two concepts, Home and Identity: Home being an hospitable and accommodating space with Identity denoting the one who inhabits the space. In the narrative these two are unhelpfully categorized as belonging to the Feminine and the Masculine respectively. For ease of understanding the author uses a capital letter to designate an abstract idea, and lower case when referring to the concrete or particular. Clinical examples are given throughout the paper to illustrate how acknowledgement and awareness of this narrative might free the analyst or therapist to think more broadly around issues pertaining to space and identity.     

Eating disorders in the course of life: A qualitative approach to vital change

Eating disorders (EDs) have become one of the biggest mental-health problems in the last decades, especially among youth and women. The present study aims to analyse the suitability of Prochaska and DiClemente’s Transtheoretical Model of Change when applied to the living experiences of people diagnosed with ED and their carers. For this purpose, we applied a narrative biographic approach to the ways in which people face their problems and vital development in the ED domain. Through the narrative analysis of these autobiographies, we aimed to study the patients’ own notions of ‘change’, ‘problem’ and ‘vital trajectory’. We focused on five autobiographic interviews of persons diagnosed as ED (four women and a man). The analysis yields three discourses which organize and give sense to our participants’ vital transitions: a discourse of functional adaptation to events and experiences; one that pays attention to random events and people entering your life; and one that has the personal initiative and agency of an individual agent at its core. It also illuminates particular ways of understanding determination, contemplation and pre-contemplation. These ways of understanding change are shown to extend the possible ways of thinking about people’s lives and ED patients’ perspectives.     

A longitudinal test of social cognitive career theory's academic persistence model among Latino/a and White men and women engineering students

This study tested Social Cognitive Career Theory's (SCCT) academic persistent model among engineering students from a longitudinal perspective and examined whether relations among the variables in the model differed between Whites and Latinos/as and between men and women engineering majors. Three hundred fifty engineering student participants (172 Latino/as; 155 Whites; 23 mixed race) who were attending a Hispanic-serving institution in the Southwest completed measures of math/science ACT, college GPA, engineering self-efficacy, engineering goals, and persistence. The academic persistence model within the engineering domain provided an excellent fit to the data. Significant group differences between women and men were found; however, there were no group differences across ethnicity. Implication for further research and interventions based on SCCT's academic persistence model are discussed in relation to academic persistence in engineering for women and Latinos/as.     

Mid-career reframing: the learning and development processes through which individuals seek to effect major career changes

This article focuses upon the processes whereby individuals reframe their career goals and career direction mid-way through their working lives. Three cases, drawn from Denmark, Germany and Italy, are used to exemplify these processes. The cases are part of a larger study which included the development of a model that could accommodate the different ways in which learning could support labour market transitions across the life-course, where these transitions may involve shifts away from initial occupational identities. The model was used to inform the case analysis whereby career reframing processes could be viewed from three perspectives: reframing as a process of identity development, as a form of relational, emotional, practical and cognitive development and taking place within particular opportunity structures.     

Posttraumatic Growth in Trauma Recollections of 9/11 Survivors: A Narrative Approach

The relationship between posttraumatic growth (PTG) and adaptation is unclear. This study is the first to examine PTG in trauma narratives of survivors of the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks. Participants recalled their experiences 7 and 18 months post 9/11, and content analysis was conducted to detect PTG. Posttraumatic stress was also measured. PTG was commonly reported. Relating to others and positivity were frequent in the PTSD and non-PTSD group, although less frequent over time in the PTSD. Greater appreciation for life was reported by the non-PTSD group but relatively absent in the PTSD group. Women but not men reported relating to others across time. It appears that there are distinct profiles of growth implicated in distress and adaptation.     

Divergent and Convergent Validation of the Complicated Grief Prototype Narrative

Although there is a prototype narrative for complicated grief (CG), there are neither divergent nor convergent validity studies of its clinical value. We evaluated the CG prototype narrative using a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Clinical Interview for Complicated Grief Diagnosis. We first conducted a convergent validation analysis followed by a divergent validation analysis. Results showed that participants with CG identified significantly more with the complicated grief prototype narrative than participants without CG.