How to Develop Empathy

Empathy is understanding and entering into another's feelings, according to Princeton University's WordNet. The study of empathy has been around for centuries and the word was developed by the German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-81). He combined the Greek word "empatheia" which means passion. The term empathize was coined in 1924. Its history has been checkered because the history of man has been checkered.

Jean Paul Satre delved into the seemingly blind eye of man to empathize with their fellow man in light of the Holocaust. His writings were a reaction to the horror he witnessed. Bruno Bettelheim's book, "The Informed Heart on Retaining the Self in a Dehumanizing Society," provides a first hand account of life in the concentration camps and his examination of the mass "blind eye" of society at large during the era of the Holocaust. His criticism extends to the passivity of the Jewish community as well. The surreal transformation of prisoners into the walking dead and the seemingly lack of connection that these individuals were fellow human beings allowed the Nazi offenders to perpetrate their atrocities. In short, the Nazis and the rest of the world lacked empathy.

There have been various psychologists, social scientists, economists and others that have tried to explain this lack of connection between the perpetrator and the acts which account for mass genocide, or random acts of indescribable horror between human beings. Theories of perceptions, genetic abnormalities, social dysfunctional conduct and power or class. All of these theories may have some ring of truth at least in retrospect, but offer little assistance in curbing on-going current atrocities from occurring.