Empath

 

Are you a narcissist or an empath? To play this social media quiz question you click three colours and hope you don’t come up trump. How this divides statistically is hard to gauge. Are there more empaths per capita in the city or the regional and rural areas? Which political party has the most narcissists? Hard to gauge while the determining judge is artificial intelligence, one that is trained up to colour matching but not emotional range. It is hard to take the word ‘empath’ seriously. It originates in science fiction, a person with the paranormal ability to perceive the mental or emotional state of an individual. This has to be an improvement on seeing through said individual using X-ray vision, though it’s a question what it says about the emotional range of science fiction itself. Somehow in very recent times ‘empath’ has spread into common currency, meaning someone who identifies with another’s feelings and experience. However, ‘empath’ sounds like a type, raising the potential dilemma of infinite variables. There could be the active empath, by contrast with the passive empath. Can someone be a part-time empath? I imagine it happens all the time. Maybe one could work towards a doctorate. Or become the world’s leading empath. Though how would you know? Some variables have, in fact, already been identified, only one of them being emotional empath: physical empath, intuitive empath, dream empath, plant empath, Earth empath, animal empath. Can an empath love? we are asked, only to be told yes, with anyone but it is better if it’s with someone who expresses emotion, possibly because empaths are described as “emotional sponges”. Marrying an empath is preferable to marrying a narcissist, needless to say, though are the words antonyms? We are even told of the presence of toxic empaths, who over-identify with others’ problems and adopt them as their own. (Why this is toxic and how ‘toxic’ is today’s omnipresent negative adjective, is another story.) About the best-known empathy story in our culture is the Good Samaritan, a man who according to the Greek has a gut reaction to finding this man beaten up in the middle of nowhere. I have yet to hear a sermon in which he is called an empath, but is it only a matter of time? The implication is that those who passed by on the other side of the road knew about empathy, were even taught to be empathic, but one thing or another stopped them. It was the wrong person who did the right thing, in fact a person so outside proper society that it never occurred to the listeners (then or now) to extend empathy to them. Figures are not in for those who chose the colours of the narcissist, but we may assume that the figures for empath are pretty high, of whatever scale of empathy. Only how can we tell?

Image:  Wood engraving of the Good Samaritan, copied from the work of the German painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794-1872). published in Paris in 1860