Reflexive Embodied Empathy

Paper for 2005 Methods issue #4 The Humanistic Psychologist

‘Reflexive embodied empathy’: a phenomenology of participant-researcher intersubjectivity

By: Linda Finlay

Acknowledgements: My grateful thanks go to Scott Churchill for reminding me to return to Husserl’s work on intersubjectivity to better anchor my concept of ‘reflexive embodied empathy’. I am also indebted to Maree Burns who first drew my attention to the idea of embodied reflexivity.

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Abstract

In this paper I’m advocating a research process which involves engaging, reflexively, with the embodied intersubjective relationship we have with participants. I call this practice ‘reflexive embodied empathy’. First, I explicate the concept of empathy through exploring ideas from the philosophical phenomenological literature. I then apply this theory to practice and offer examples of reflexive analysis of embodied empathy taken from various hermeneutic phenomenological research projects. Three interpenetrating layers of reflexivity are described, each involving different but coexisting dimensions of embodied intersubjectivity. The first layer – connecting-of – demonstrates how we can tune into another’s bodily way of being through using our own embodied reactions. The second layer – acting-into – focuses on empathy as imaginative self-transposal and calls our attention to the way existences (beings) are intertwined in a dynamic of doubling and mirroring. The third layer – merging-with – involves a “reciprocal insertion and intertwining” of others in ourselves and of us in them (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.138), where self-understanding and other-understanding unite in mutual transformation. Through different examples of reflexive analysis from my research, I’ve tried to show how our

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