What Is Empathy?

Empathy is difficult to define as it means different things to different people. The chapter outlines the importance of empathy in clinical practice before examining some limitations of empathy. The development of the notion from the beginning of the twentieth century provides us with an understanding of how empathy is seen in medical practice. Medical empathy is still held to be largely a cognitive concept, manifest in practice as detached concern. Emotional aspects of empathy are still regarded with suspicion by some doctors. The chapter argues for a relational concept of empathy which embraces emotions. A discussion follows about the current deficit in empathy in clinical practice.