Grown from the feculent weed lot of YouTube psychologizing* is the concept of the “super-empath.” I’m pleased to say that I’ve read no more than a few lines of the maudlin protestations about these bleedy heart-readers. But that was enough. Yes, I get in a mood. But I don’t storm the Capitol with it or ruin client relations with it.
An Internet description of the super-empath: “It is someone who is capable of feeling someone else’s feelings in their own body.”
My farcical contribution to the YouTube commentary:
“I can tell that you feel a recondite fusion of hurt and coldness of distance in your adult persona, but beneath it, your infant’s desperate need for symbiotic warmth, to disappear in the all-good mother, and rage at its deprivation. You are angry, but your anger is frustration and your frustration is sadness. ‘I need my mommy!’ you cry silently, ‘but she is poison and I am starving! My feeling is the ocean: sharks and treasures and sunny whitecaps that die in the deep.’”
“How in God’s name did you know all that?!”
“I am a . . . super-empath!!”
The concept of the super-empath is bull hockey. Individuals who label themselves this are feeling themselves, not the other person, magnified by their own injury and their intolerance of the stimuli of the world. They are, paradoxically, solipsists, and their world is mirrors. Yes, and they believe they care about you.
I can’t fix the world, but getting rid of shit psychology would be a worthy start. Look a teensy-weensy bit closer. A decently healthy person will feel a resonance with another person’s pain. This is not special, or shouldn’t be. Then there are those children who – as Alice Miller described in The Drama – become hyper-sensitive to their parents’ moods in order to survive. Reading rage in tight neck muscles and smelling fear are not empathy. And there is the process of “splitting off and projecting,” where one’s own repressed (split-off) abandonment pain, devastation or humiliation is projected into the world. Our deeply buried critical wound may cause us to see a sad person as devastated, an injured person as soul-dying, an oppressed but determinedly independent or alienated person as needing our hugs and symbiotic bond. Unhealed people, as Janov noted, cannot really see beyond their unmet needs, are “dumb” to the extent that their own starved needs unconsciously importune. Their sight is of themselves; their feelings are their own, not the receiver of super-empathy’s.
Another clue is illustrated in my YouTube scenario. People’s psyches are, as I’ve described in my earliest posts, a “molecular mess.” They are hues within hues, present chemistry blended with infancy, the chemicals of buried time and a more preciously felt life. There is no way that another person could grasp the abstruseness of any person’s single moment.
In therapy, these porous, wobbly-antennaed clients sometimes cite, in passing, their talent at emotionally sensing other people’s pain. It’s one little strand in their résumé, and they move on. These clients have been starved of love their whole lives, and with no core self or self-esteem have come to focus on the other. But the irony is that the emptiest – though they may seem the extreme of altruistic interest – are the neediest. They are there for you, for themselves.
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* See https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-rough-diatribe-on-yousick.html.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.