The empathic physician
W. Zinn
Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass.
Empathy is a process for understanding an individual's subjective
experiences by vicariously sharing that experience while maintaining an
observant stance. It is a useful tool in the medical encounter as it
provides the physician with a fuller, more personalized view of the
patient, and it provides the patient with a sense of connectedness to the
physician that may allow him/her to more freely express his/her emotional
distress. The roots of empathy are explained as a process that evolves from
a developmental substrate with the addition of relevant experience, memory,
and fantasy. While understanding the patient alone is a worthwhile goal,
the physician's empathic insight can have therapeutic impact by its
reflection back on the patient, through the use of language, to express
support or sympathy, to justify behavior, or to foster deeper emotional
expression.
