WHY CARE?

“An empathic way of being...means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it...moving about in it”

(Rogers, C. R. A Way of Being, 1980)

 

I construct encounters that revolve around the empathy theory, encouraging participants to empathise, question why they empathise and see if they do empathise in a given situation. So empathy is clearly important to my practice but what effects do empathic responses have upon the recipient, and why do we need them?

 

In his essays, Carl Rogers talked about empathy dissolving alienation. He stressed the importance of a finely tuned understanding being essential to giving a recipient an identity.
R. D Laing compounded this in The Divided Self saying a “sense of identity requires the existence of another by whom one is known”.

 

Each encounter, from 9” to What Are Other People Like..., is concerned with that flux between the individual and the group. It highlights the required feedback loop and the need for collective confirmation in establishing and re-affirming an individual's identity and behaviour. Rogers' work is obviously nearly sixty years old but the need for this type of connection and communication is still hugely pertinent today in countering the affects of neoliberalism.

 

“the idea of the autonomous, self-seeking individual as the foundational ‘atom’ of the human world – is wrongly conceived. For human beings are essentially social beings – and individual freedom and choice, where they emerge and exist, are the outcome of delicate and precarious social arrangements”

(Hall, S., Massey, D. and Rustin, M. After Neoliberalism: The Kilburn Manifesto, 2015)