Radical empathy is the number one trend. The world is a more dangerous, broken place than it was a year ago. The challenge to empathy is that the dangers and breakdowns in the world have expanded dramatically over the long past year such. Standard empathy is no longer sufficient. Radical empathy is required.
Empathy is an authentic way of being with the other individual after all the inauthentic ways of being have been overcome or at least set aside and quarantined. A reversal takes place, and the empathic way of being is the foundation for the psychological mechanisms. Projection, projective identification, and transient identification are valid and important, but not fundamental. What is fundamental is empathic relatedness, being present with the other person.
James’ incomparable empathy with Maisie and his penetrating and astute comprehension of human relations writ large applies empathy in the extended sense to who people are as possibilities, walking in the other’s shoes (after, of course, first taking off one’s own to avoid projection), translating communications between adults and children (and adults and adults) as well as affect-matching and mis-matching (empathy in the narrow sense).
At first, empathy and rhetoric seem to be at cross purposes – yet the speaker without empathy is not likely to be effective or persuasive, no matter how much we may disagree
Empathy Lessons 