Empathy

In the essays in The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison explores the questions of what empathy is, how it can be best expressed, and when is it appropriate to do so. The first essay in the book establishes empathy as an active choice on the part of the empathizer that needs to be voiced in order to be most effectively expressed. Leslie counters the idea that empathy is an emotion that rises unbidden. Instead of associating it with feeling only, she associates it with action, suggesting that the person who is called to empathize must do so consciously. In the author’s words: “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse” (23). With this quote, Leslie is...