Humanity Imagined: A Bioethical Reflection on Edith Stein's Phenomenology of Empathy

Abstract: Over the last 20 years, empirical research has claimed that higher levels of provider empathy can be attributed to better treatment outcomes and an improved patient-provider relationship. In recent years, however, some have begun to question the role that empathy plays in medical practice. More specifically, some scholars have contended that empathy has been overused and overapplied, thereby rendering it a meaningless and unhelpful concept.

In this paper, I contend that the current skepticism regarding empathy is due in part to an outsized emphasis on how to measure and assess empathy. Much of the skepticism regarding the usefulness of empathy is not about the practice of empathy per se, but rather the overuse of overconfidence in scales and measures which claim to assess how empathetic a particular clinician is. I propose that those interested in understanding empathy within medicine need to refocus their attention to the conceptual and philosophical roots of the practice of empathy, tout court. One particularly insightful conceptualization of empathy comes to us from Edith Stein, who proposes that empathy be understood as a process by which one imagines themselves in another's state of being or personhood. This imagination is possible, Stein argues, because both the empathizer and the empathee possess a key commonality: humanity.

With all this established, I argue that empathy remains a fruitful and useful concept in medicine. Furthermore, I argue that Stein's conception of empathy in her 1916 work "The Problem of Empathy" provides medicine with a useful phenomenological account of empathy.