In-house #10: Caring for the uncaring

During the Diagnostic Assessment Intake and through half of the next session, I played with being disgusted with my client. He was smiley and had a “water off a duck’s back” air. His wife, suffering in his neglect, had “talked to another man.” He then coincidentally found an affair to have. But there was a bright side: Cheating made him happier to be at home.

What evaporated my negative attitude about him was his statement, well into the session: “I have no empathy.” This was not meant as a sociopathic affront but was said with plain ingenuousness. He was simply describing a deficit, which of course didn’t bother him because essentially, he couldn’t feel: It’s loss of touch with one’s emotional core, owing to early pain, that makes a lack of feeling for others.

I am not the type of man who, if a woman, would fall in love with a serial killer in prison, write him letters, marry him and help him escape. But I have noticed that a certain perverse affection, an easygoing camaraderie occupies me when I’m working with Antisocial personalities or shallow hoods without a conscience. My depth work – therapy and introspection – reveals that this is both a vestige of the inner child’s id and his basking in complete power, power in its own right extracted from a sense of bond (just as a young child might experience father). Within a gossamer sense of power differential, I feel the lightness of the absence of moral burden, and this brings me home to, perversely enough, a deeper or more original self.

So imagine how I would have felt even more goodness to learn that this client did have a small capacity for empathy, and that his buried heart might be brought back into his world. That is what I learned: Among all possible targets of empathic caring, the only one he owned was abused children. He had not been one, he believed, and didn’t know where the resonant feeling came from.

So therapy with the self-absorbed cheater would look to growing empathy. If not that, then what? Encourage him to foist himself on a new woman? I will help him see his childhood better, feel the pain of being invisible to his parents. You feel your own pain, with someone’s help, you’ll feel others’. 

https://www.hffmcsd.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=281&dataid=1198&FileName=for%20esme--with%20love%20and%20squalor.pdf

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Link: J. D. Salinger’s short story, For “Esmé – With Love and Squalor”