How the Brain Loses Heart

Empathy rides up front in the brain, near its evolutionary apex. Empathy is the driving force that binds us to others. It is both an emotional response to how another feels and a cognitive recognition of that other's mind, separate but also similar. Difficult to measure, empathy clearly varies between individuals and can also bend with experience.Empathy is one of the defining characteristics of humanity. So what happens when it goes missing?Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch called the 1970s the "Me" decade when baby boomers pursued a culture of narcissism.  A key element of the narcissist is a noticeable lack of empathy, certainly of the emotional, I-feel-your-pain component. The glaringly acquisitional, entitled, self-important qualities of narcissism captured the tenor of that time. But low empathy ratings have always existed. Narcissists are still with us, some flagrantly in the public eye (where they love to be).Persons on the autism spectrum also suffer from a lack of empathy, perhaps a complete lack of its cognitive aspect. Being unable to "read" others, autists have diminished access to the emotional side of empathy. They may be fundamentally kind and socially responsible but they must learn about empathy as a kind of alien mental language. Autists share the human need for intimacy yet find it difficult to achieve intimate access with others. Acquiring an empathic linguistic repertory can allow friendships and relationships to form. But it takes work..

"Empathy is fraught with biosocial qualifications. We love our neighbors but distrust, fear and even loathe strangers."

.Psychopaths have a profound absence of emotional empathy but a keen sense, even frighteningly accurate awareness of what others may be thinking. They use that cognitive sensibility to foster relationships that can only be based on fulfilling the psychopath's own needs. A psychopath relates to others by control, manipulation, usurpation, appropriation — for the psychopath the other is only a means to their very own ends.In my forthcoming book, Leading the Lambs, I explore psychopathy in considerable depth. In psychiatry one finds very few salient signposts: a childhood history of arson, torturing animals and oppositional conduct. The attitudes and behavior of adult psychopaths can be identified. But their sense of self, their intrapsychic structure remains obtuse and wholly sphynx-like. After 120 years of psychoanalytic theorizing, no therapist is yet capable of treating them. They resist revealing themselves, are probably incapable of allowing that safe to be cracked. Psychopaths only relate by using people. When violence enters the picture — and rarely does so — no holds are barred.Empathy is fraught with biosocial qualifications. We love our neighbors but distrust, fear and even loathe strangers. Certain fetishistic and addictive behaviors tend to limit or distort empathy when it conflicts with the need for a fix or the desire to have sex with a child.  Managing empathy requires, from everyone, a moment-by-moment tactical regard of the social field before us. The forebrain collaborates with brain centers tuned to the flow of experience. These centers respond to danger as well as safety, to pleasure and pain, hunger and satiety, lust and lassitude. Empathy is our finest tuned instrument so that empathic deficiency becomes a calamity.  In my book, Leading the Lambs, that calamity is visited and explored with a concern to understand how empathic disasters can evolve and how we might protect each other from suffering its impact.  But even greater disasters can occur. Perhaps the most egregious, or farthest reaching, form of empathic failure is the hubris syndrome. Persons who rise to power and prestige sometimes undergo a narcissistic explosion, which can promulgate universal charisma and sometimes a dark empathic hole. Corporations and whole nations may fall in line, everyone's empathic awareness devoted to the leader. Subjects sign up for genocidal war, enlist to serve in death camps, stand mutely by while promoting the grotesque whims of their hubristic leader.Empathy can also pursue an opposite direction, can unify people toward commitments to peace and humane endeavor, toward unifying for the common good, for the protection of wildlife and wilderness, for promoting health and spiritual ideals. Though we tend to focus on mistakes, on murder and mayhem, we can also travel in that other direction. Empathy is that powerful and that fragile. It is what constitutes humanity. It is our gift to safeguard and also to advance. Progress has been the defining characteristic of human history.As always empathy stands at the vanguard. But it needs tending, even protection. Like language, the capacity for empathy is inborn but its development and expression depend on our manifold social context.