Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
letting-go of self, and childlike in nature (p. 50). The reference to
childlike is important to this discussion. The nurse’s empathy for
the patient must be naïve in nature so that the patient is viewed as
a unique being and his/her experience of illness is also viewed as
unique to them. Moreover, this view would suggest that
identification fits with the description of the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt)
proposed by Husserl (1970), where individuals experience prereflexively,
without resorting to interpretations.
Edith Stein’s conceptualisation of empathy
The view of empathy proposed by the German philosopher Edith
Stein (1917/1970) is helpful in understanding the nurses’ narratives
described in this study. Her work is one that combines the
philosophical, psychological, aesthetic and the interpersonal (Davis,
2003), and is described in a three-level model of empathy where a
field of tension between views on closeness and distancing in
relationships is evident, and sympathy is considered part of
empathy (Maatta, 2006).
Moreover, Stein’s view of empathy appears ‘active’ in contrast to
that of another phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995),
in that Stein suggests that I go out of myself and encounter the
other, through “the emergence of the experience” (Stein
1917/1970, p.11), whereas Levinas suggests that the other initiates
the relationship (Moran, 2000). Stein’s conceptualisation of
empathy is, therefore, useful in explaining the active nature of
nurses’ pursuit of identification with patients described is this study.
Level one of empathy
Davis (2003), drawing on Stein’s view of empathy, describes level 1
as a cognitive process whereby there is an attempt to enter into
another’s feelings and to put ourselves in their place. This first level
of empathy requires the ability to use imagination and reflects the
art of empathy (Davis, 2003). By reading the facial expressions or
other signals, we attempt to obtain an idea of the person’s
emotional and mental state. This represents a determined
aspiration to enter into the feelings of another and an attempt to
position ourselves in another’s place (Davis, 1990). Stein
(1917/1970), describes this as, “When it �empathy� arises before
me all at once, it faces me as an object (such as the sadness I “read
in another’s face”), but when I enquire into its implied tendencies
(try to bring another’s mood to clear givenness to myself), the
content, having pulled me into it, is no longer really an
object”(p.10). Davis (2003) uses the term self-transposal, one
proposed by Speigelberg (1982), to describe this first level. This
description is also similar to that of caring by Noddings (1984) who
argues that “all caring involves engrossment” (p.17) which results
- 289 -