Even as adults, we always hope that fate will give us a person who will understand us perfectly. Such a person who will share with us our joys and sorrows as his own. This is wonderful feeling, which allows you to emotionally feel into your interlocutor, is called Empathy.

Other people's emotions - as their own

The ability to consciously empathize with other people's emotions, unfortunately, is very rare today. The term "Empathy" in psychology was one of the first to be mentioned in the works of Sigmund Freud, who argued that psychoanalyst for the implementation effective work with the patient it is necessary to take into account his emotional state. The psychoanalyst enters this state, after which he gains the ability to understand it by comparing it with his own feelings.

Today, the concept of "Empathy" means a lot. First of all, empathy is a conscious empathy for a person, his emotional state, without losing the feeling of external control over such a state. In medicine and psychology, empathy is often equated with empathic listening - demonstrating that the specialist correctly understands the emotional state of the patient. In forensic science, having the skill of empathic listening means the ability to gather information about the feelings and thoughts of the subject.

For psychics, empathy is considered a special feeling, available only to some people. The value of this ability in extrasensory perception is great: it serves as a tool for perceiving the emotional states of other people "directly", as well as broadcasting one's emotions, while the lack of direct contact with a person is not a hindrance. Such a feeling is equated with the concept of emotional telepathy.

The manifestations of empathy are very different: from complete immersion in the feelings of a communication partner (emotional or affective empathy), to an objective understanding of the experiences of a communication partner without strong emotional involvement. In this case, the following types of empathy are distinguished:

• sympathy - emotional responsiveness, the need to provide assistance;
• empathy - a person experiences the same emotions as a communication partner;
• sympathy - very friendly and warm attitude to a person.

Empathy is not related to the perception of any specific emotions(as in compassion). This feeling is used to indicate empathy for any state. There are many professions in which empathic listening not only desirable, but even necessary. These professions include almost all professions focused on communication with people:

• psychologists, psychotherapists;
• doctors;
• teachers;
• personnel managers;
• leaders;
• detectives;
• officials;
• sellers;
• hairdressers and others.

As you can see, the application of this amazing property our psyche can be found anywhere. People with the ability to empathize are called empaths.

Can you become an empath?

You can often hear: "He is a born psychologist." Often such a phrase indicates a person's ability to emotionally empathize without special professional skills. Can you become an empath? Is empathy an innate or acquired ability? What are its signs?

According to biology, brain activity, reflecting the actions and state of other individuals, directly depends on the activity mirror neurons. Biologists suggest that the strength of empathy depends on their activity.

An indirect confirmation of this is that people suffering from alexithymia do not have the ability to empathize, since their neurophysiological problems do not allow them to distinguish even their own emotions.

Modern experts believe that empathy is innate and genetic property, but life experience strengthens or weakens it. The power of empathy depends on having a wealthy life experience, accuracy of perception, developed skills in empathic communication. Initially more developed ability women are empathic, especially those who have children.

Provided that at least the rudiments of empathy are innate, its development can be accelerated by various training methods and special exercises that develop skills. effective application this ability in professional and personal communication. If you want to learn to understand the emotions and feelings of others, it is useful to practice such artistic studies, such as "Memorizing Faces", "How Others See Me", "Reincarnation". They also develop the ability to empathize and sympathize with any fortune-telling, the game "Association". Helps develop empathy general development emotionality through dance, watching movies, listening to music, and other methods of art therapy.

To determine the level of empathy in people, as well as certain aspects this ability, there are various ways and techniques. The most reliable diagnostic aimed at determining the level of empathy is called "Empathy Quotient", for Russian speaking users there's an adaptation of it called The Level of Empathy.

Advantages and disadvantages

Empathy is a real gift that not everyone knows how to use for its intended purpose. Often this property of the psyche brings suffering to a person, because people do not always experience only joy, happiness, love and others. positive states. What for one person seems to be the ultimate dream, for another is a heavy burden.

The ability to empathize and sympathize implies that a person has developed personality because the immature mind is unable to cope with the flurry of other people's emotions. Having decided to develop empathy, it is not superfluous to evaluate the pros and cons of such a decision.

pros	Minuses
Inexhaustible possibilities for the development of fantasy.	Man is not capable of healthy aggression and competition.
Effective assistance in many professions.	Hypersensitivity, as a result of this - emotional burnout.
This state produces many original solutions.	Easy onset of anxiety and fear, a high percentage of mental illness.
The ability to help other people, give them support and acceptance.	There is a high probability of a relationship of the “one-sided game” type, when a person only gives without receiving anything in return.
An empath cannot be deceived.	An empath is easily offended and hurt.

Develop or get rid of?

Each person must decide for himself what level of empathy he needs for comfortable life. There are 4 types of empaths in total:

Non-empaths: have completely closed their empathy channels (consciously or under the influence of trauma). These people cannot recognize non-verbal and verbal cues.

Ordinary empaths: constantly in a state of stress and emotional overload, acutely experiencing other people's problems. They often suffer from headaches. The ability to empathize is not controlled by them.

Conscious empaths: manage their ability to empathize, easily adapt to other people's emotions, knowing how not to let them through themselves.

Professional Empaths: have excellent control over their ability, often using it in professional purposes. They can control any other people's emotions, change a person's mood, relieve mental and physical pain.

If fate endowed you with a developed ability to empathize, maybe it’s still worth developing it? At least in order to fulfill its purpose - to help other people.

However, a strong capacity for empathy and empathy often comes at a cost. Empaths quite often enter into asymmetric relationships without getting enough support from the partner. Such people feel uncomfortable in conflict, are not inclined to compete and defend their interests.

They often suffer from depression as well anxiety disorders. Empaths have a hard time overcoming fear, so it is possible panic attacks. The ability to feel the pain of others leads to what psychologists call empathic stress.

For effective work with people, the presence of developed empathy is a real find. But empaths often have problems with personal relationships. They are so sensitive that it is impossible to hide anything from them, and any negative emotions partner in literally"hit on the head" Therefore, the partner of an empath must be a kind, faithful and non-conflict person.

Creation modern psychology as a science of the psyche and behavior in all their forms and ranges, to a large extent became possible thanks to the discovery and use of fundamentally new approaches to the study and understanding of the nature and essence of man.

The most significant of them, in terms of content and consequences, was the Copernican revolution of Sigmund Freud. The indisputable historical merit of Z. Freud is that he laid the foundation for a systematic psychological research unconscious mental, created the doctrine of the unconscious, psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic tradition. Awareness real achievements Z. Freud also assumes an understanding of the important circumstance that it was he who for the first time managed to overcome the internal limits of psychoanalysis and actually laid the foundations depth psychology(the concept of E. Bleuler), focused on the study of the unconscious mental, but by no means reduced to its psychoanalytically marked elements.

To a significant extent, precisely as a result of these achievements, human psychology, hitherto focused almost exclusively on the study of the phenomena of consciousness and self-consciousness, acquired new dimensions and qualities that made it possible to relatively correctly determine its object and subject, goals and objectives, ideals and norms of research, explanatory principles, methodology, methods and methodical procedures, main branches, problem fields, functions and significantly supplement, update and strengthen the conceptual potential and categorical-conceptual apparatus.

A retrospective analysis of the problems of the unconscious shows that it has a specific tradition. Some hints of the possible existence of such a problem were contained in the early forms of folklore, the mythology of religion. AT different values and meanings, the problem of the unconscious has been posed and developed in philosophy and psychology throughout their history.

In the European rational tradition, the idea of ​​the unconscious mental goes back to the era of the creation of philosophy (to the teachings of Socrates and Plato about anamnesis - knowledge-remembering, Aristotle's teachings about different parts souls, etc.). A significant contribution to the subsequent pre-psychoanalytic and extra-psychoanalytic understanding and study of the problem of the unconscious was made by B. Spinoza (unconscious "reasons that determine desire"), G. Leibniz (interpretation of the unconscious as lower form mental activity), D. Hartley (connection of the unconscious with the activity nervous system), I. Kant ("dark ideas", the connection of the unconscious with the problems of intuitive and sensory cognition, "in the deepest sleep the soul is most capable of rational thinking"), A Schopenhauer (ideas about unconscious internal impulses), K. Carus (key of the unconscious in the subconscious), E. Hartaman ("Philosophy of the Unconscious"), G. Fechner (the concept of the "soul-iceberg"), T. Lipps ("unconscious ideas" and "unconscious sensations"), W. Wundt ("unconscious thinking ", "unconscious nature of perception processes"), G. Helmholtz (the doctrine of "unconscious inferences"), I. Sechenov ("unconscious sensations or feelings"), I. Pavlov ("unconscious mental life"), V. Bekhterev (activity "unconscious"), A. Liebo and I. Bernheim (post-hypnotic suggestion and behavior), J. Charcot (ideas of invisible and unconscious mental trauma), G. Lebon (unconscious nature of people's behavior; the unconscious as the dominant set of mental processes, always prevails possessing in the crowd and controlling the "collective soul" of the crowd), G. Tarde ("laws of imitation"), P. Janet (mental automatisms and unconscious factors of neurosis), A. Bergson (intuitionism, the unconscious, "superconsciousness") and many others. In general, these ideas and concepts can be understood as a kind of growth points in the awareness of the problem of the unconscious mind.

In the twentieth century, the most detailed and systematic idea of ​​the unconscious mind was developed within the boundaries of the psychoanalytic tradition, which now has a number of teachings, theories, concepts and models. varying degrees generality, reliability and heuristics.

Fundamentally important results were obtained by Z. Freud, who created the correct psychological definition the unconscious, the doctrine of the unconscious, the corresponding categorical-conceptual apparatus and methods of cognition; established some elements of the content, functioning and regulation of the unconscious.

Defining the unconscious as mental processes, "which manifest themselves actively and at the same time do not reach the consciousness of the person experiencing them", Z. Freud proposed a reasonable understanding of the unconscious as the main and most meaningful system of the human psyche (unconscious - preconscious - conscious), regulated by the principle of pleasure and including various innate and repressed elements, drives, impulses, desires, motives, attitudes, aspirations, complexes, etc., characterized by unconsciousness, sexuality, asociality, etc. According to Z. Freud, in the unconscious there is a constant struggle between Eros (drives and forces of life, sexuality and self-preservation) and Thanatos (drives and forces of death, destruction and aggression), using energy sexual attraction(libido). According to classical psychoanalytic teaching, the content of the unconscious includes: 1) content that was never present in the mind of the individual and 2) content that was present in consciousness, but was forced out of it into the unconscious (desires, memories, images, etc.). ).

In fact, in the teachings of Z. Freud, not two (as is usually believed), but three types of the unconscious are distinguished: 1) The latent unconscious, the content of which, in general, corresponds to the preconscious system of the psyche and can be realized by the individual, 2) The repressed unconscious, the awareness of which involves the use of special (according to Z. Freud, psychoanalytic) methods and 3) Inherited universal human unconscious, represented, for example, in immanent principles mental life, universal complexes of Oedipus and castration, drives, motivations, etc.

But, unfortunately, Freud did not qualify the inherited unconscious even with the degree of completeness, categorical certainty and systemic nature that are characteristic of his interpretation of other forms of the unconscious, as a result of which additional and excessive incorrectness appeared in psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic tradition. AT this case, perhaps, it would be more expedient to state the fact of the existence of a phylogenetic (i.e., species, universal) and ontogenetic (i.e., individual) unconscious. Moreover, the representation of the unconscious in certain phylogenetic and ontogenetic hypostases almost automatically opened up opportunities for their concretization, search for relationships and other potentially possible forms the existence of the unconscious.

In terms of knowledge of the psyche, behavior and the unconscious mental person special role the dialectical energy-information model of the psyche created by Z. Freud (Unconscious - Preconscious - Conscious) has played and is playing. In the light of modern scientific ideas this model can be understood, among other things, as a psychological imperative and a prototype for the construction of the latest energy-information models of the psyche, without which effective development modern psychology and frontier disciplines is hardly possible.

Taking into account the role that was given in the psychoanalysis of Z. Freud to the knowledge and interpretation of dreams, as " royal road"into the world of the unconscious psychic man, it should be noted that in the psychoanalytic tradition, some important issues have not been properly explained or even formulated with the desired degree of certainty. These may include, for example, problems of understanding the nature and essence of dream consciousness and dream self-consciousness (including self-control) and their interaction with unconscious forces and tendencies. As special problems the problem of the possibility of controlling dreams (that is, of influencing their content and direction) and the problem of the possibility of achieving artificial dream catharsis can and should be comprehended. The study of these problems is all the more important, since the principle of external similarity proposed by Z. Freud and the sexual symbolism of dreams, as it turned out, do not at all have the universality that was attributed to them.

The teachings of Z. Freud initiated and stimulated the emergence and development of many different approaches to the study of the unconscious mental, within which were formulated interesting ideas and important results were obtained (for example, ideas about intrapsychic communications, compositional features and stratification of the unconscious, the brain substrate of the unconscious, the holographic nature of the elements of the unconscious, the content and functional asymmetry of the interhemispheric interaction of the unconscious, the probabilistic nature of unconscious processes, etc.).

But on the actual psychological level The most stable vector of development still remained the psychoanalytic tradition, the evolution of which, in general, is aimed at moving from teaching to a modern scientific theory of the unconscious mind through successive approximations.

In this regard, it is essential milestones and the concepts of C.G. Jung, J. Moreno and E. Fromm became the results.

According to analytical psychology K.G. Jung, the unconscious consists of three layers: 1) Personal unconscious - the surface layer of the unconscious, which includes predominantly emotionally colored representations and complexes that form the intimate spiritual life of the individual, 2) Collective unconscious - the innate deep layer of the unconscious, common center and the core of the psyche, which has not an individual, but universal nature, representing the experience of previous generations of people and including super-personal universal content and samples that act as a universal basis mental life. The main content of the collective unconscious, according to C.G. Jung, is archetypes, that is, inherited universal patterns, symbols and stereotypes mental activity and behavior and 3) the psychoid unconscious - the most fundamental level the unconscious, which has properties in common with organic world and a relatively neutral character, due to which it, being completely neither mental nor physiological, is practically completely inaccessible to consciousness.

AT general view these ideas are, for the most part, a kind of psychoanalytic remake, because, ultimately, through updated designations, they reproduce the basic ideas of Z. Freud about the existence of the unconscious, its phylogenetic and ontogenetic forms, the stratification of the unconscious, the dominant role, etc. However, at the same time, C.G. Jung introduced certain innovations, mainly related to the existence and functioning of archaic mental structures. Having carried out the reduction of the collective (i.e., phylogenetic) unconscious to mental evolutionary archaic, expressed in archetypes, he significantly contributed to understanding the basic concepts and dimensions of the unconscious mental and significantly increased the heuristic potential of the psychoanalytic tradition. At the same time, it should be noted that C.G. Jung's assumptions about the existence of some specific archetypes, their forms and role need further critical verification and appropriate justification.

Developing the hypothesis of Z. Freud about the possible existence of a direct relationship and communication between the unconscious different people, J. Moreno formulated the concept, according to which it is essential important reason and the mechanism of communication and interaction between people is the "common unconscious", which arises and functions during a relatively long contact between partners and contributes to the removal of interpersonal role conflicts. Generally presented as a generalization cognitive activity and the results of practice, it has not received any theoretical or practical confirmation.

A significant event in the development of psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically oriented ideas about the unconscious was the creation by E. Fromm of the concept of "social unconscious", which is a repressed sphere, common to most members of society and containing what this society can't let its members bring to awareness. However, the description and explanation of the social unconscious did not receive the necessary elements of organization, evidence and validity.

In contrast to the psychoanalysis of S. Freud (and partially analytical psychology of C. G. Jung), the undeveloped and unconjugated concepts of the general unconscious and the social unconscious, with all their merits and heuristic potential, are a specific form of opinions and assumptions, and not justified working hypotheses, and even especially scientific theories corresponding to the standards of modern scientific knowledge.

Nevertheless, the introduction of ideas about the general and social unconscious into psychoanalytic circulation gave rise to the seeming completeness of the psychoanalytic picture of the unconscious mental and illusory ideas that modern psychoanalysis has some kind of general theory of the unconscious.

Historically important achievements psychoanalytic traditions in the formulation, comprehension and private solutions of the problem of the unconscious are great and indisputable. However, at the present time there are no necessary and sufficient grounds for believing that modern psychoanalysis has such a theory or the ability to monopoly create a general theory of the unconscious that meets the standards modern theory and practices. And in this regard, the actual departure of the psychoanalytic community from discussing this fundamental problem is very revealing.

The current fragmentation and approximateness of ideas about the unconscious and the very significant role of this problem give reason to believe that the modern general theory unconscious mental is not the result, but one of the most actual tasks theoretical psychology and borderline disciplines, the solution of which naturally implies the need to use the huge potential of positive psychoanalytic ideas, approaches and results.

V.I. Ovcharenko

Do you perceive other people very closely, as if they were your own? Perhaps you have awakened empathy! Find out how to test it!

What is empathy and how does it arise?

Empathy (empathy)¹ - the ability to subtly feel the emotions of another as your own. People who can do this are called empaths. An empath is someone who feels the emotions and feelings of others. Sometimes empathy is accompanied by ability.

People naturally acquire this ability in two ways:

1. They are born empaths.

2. This gift awakens on its own during maturation and socialization.

Empathy is a great gift if you know how to use it properly. Not all empaths are able to control the ability consciously - in most cases this happens unconsciously.

Many people sometimes "catch" the sensations of other people. In most cases, the gift of empathy is not recognized: such manifestations are explained by the logical mind as ordinary psychology or spontaneous NLP².

Signs of having superpowers

If this happened in your life and you suddenly felt emotions unusual for yourself, it is quite possible that it was a feeling received from another person - empathy manifests itself!

Until you learn to manage and control it, you will absorb other people's emotions and experience them as your own.

There are several signs that a person is an empath:

1. Empaths feel the suffering in the world on a massive scale and want to do something to help the world.

2. They find it difficult to look at someone else's pain because it feels like their own.

3. People with this ability have a hard time watching disturbing news: they feel all the suffering and then can’t for a very long time recover.

For example, it is enough to watch a news report about a disaster or some kind of catastrophe anywhere in the world, and such a person can feel pain (psychological, and sometimes physical) from this event.

4. Empaths have a hard time finding themselves and being fully aware of their own feelings.

For example, during a conversation with another person, people with the gift of empathyfeel his emotions and feelings. Often, they know the answers to their life questions, but at the same time they do not find an answer to their own.

5. Often empathy can make a person shy because he knows very well how the other feels and what he wants.

6. If a person does not know how to control his ability, he may lose critical perception. Such people always say “yes” to all requests and demands, without thinking about whether they need it, whether they really want it.

An empath becomes so immersed in the other person's experience, knowing what they need, that they can't say no. And only then he realizes that he did not think about himself and his desires.

7. People with empathy help others at their own expense.

8. Empaths love from a distance just as if they were close by.

9. They feel a deep affinity with nature, animals and plants.

Such people are able to feel not only people, but also animals, for example, meeting a dog or a cat along the street.

10. An empath feels responsible for how other people feel and tries to help them feel better.

11. Such people are very sensitive: relationships and friendships can be taken too close to the heart.

12. Because of empathy and the inability to manage it, they often become an outlet for other people to dump their emotions on them.

13. While reading a book or watching a movie, an empath experiences events very emotionally, almost completely identifies with the characters.

14. Due to the constant workload, people with this gift forget what it is to have fun and enjoy life.

15. Empaths tend to be deeply spiritual people: the gift of empathyallows you to feel the unity of all being.

If many of the above signs are close to you, it means that the ability to empathize lives in you!

Answer the following questions:

• Can you control this gift?
• Are you able to share your own and others' experiences?
• Are you able to manage your gift, "turning on" it only when you need it?

If you answered yes, then you yourself have learned to control your gift of empathy; otherwise, you need to learn how to manage empathy: in the notes to this article there is a link to useful material to develop control over empathy.

Notes and feature articles for a deeper understanding of the material

¹ Empathy - conscious empathy with the current emotional state of another person without loss of feeling external origin this experience (Wikipedia).

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There are two systems for assessing emotional images and forming one's own emotional response. One for conscious signals, the other for unconscious ones.
Digression: I must say that the "unconscious" and "subconscious" are not the same thing. Freud's "subconscious" includes active suppression, repression from consciousness. No confirmation real existence this system has not yet been found in the human brain, as far as I understand. (In general, I get the impression that Freud, although he was a man with an amazing imagination, played in the sense of neurobiology, but did not guess a single letter.) “Unconscious” is that which does not reach consciousness. There are two main reasons for this:
1) Insufficient stimulus strength to generate a response in those parts of the brain that are associated with conscious processing of the stimulus, for example, the contrast of the image is too low or the speed of movement is too high;
2) At the moment the stimulus appears, attention is directed to something else. Processing of incoming information to which attention was not paid essentially does not occur. We only see what we focus on. More precisely, only we are aware of it.
To study the system of unconscious emotion processing in healthy people, use such schemes of experiments that make a person skip part of the stimuli past consciousness. For example, built on the "attentional blink" effect. I do not know how this term is used in domestic literature and whether it exists there. Let's translate it as "blinking of attention." Its essence is as follows: if a person is presented with two images sequentially with an interval of 200-500 milliseconds, then the second image is not detected at all. Alternative option"backward masking" - "reverse masking" - if presented to a short time two stimuli with an interval of less than 30 milliseconds between them, then, on the contrary, only the second stimulus in the sequence is perceived. Even more interesting are the data obtained in the study of patients with "cortical blindness" - blindness that occurs when the primary visual cortex is damaged. (Primary in the sense that the main input to the brain of signals from the retina goes through them). These people are on conscious level they do not see at all, since they have destroyed areas of the cortex, without which there is no conscious processing of the visual picture. But at the same time, they retain intact third-party paths that are not related to conscious processing, but allow them to see at an unconscious level. Such a person, for example, remarkably bypasses obstacles in his path, but is not able to say anything about them and does not himself understand how he bypasses them. Well, they also react to certain emotional images, and can describe their emotions, but remain in absolute ignorance of their causes.
The unconscious processing system* is faster: the reaction to the demonstration of an emotionally significant stimulus here occurs already after 20 milliseconds, and in the conscious processing system** - not earlier than after 40-50. The “unconscious” system, apparently, is able to work not with all kinds of stimuli, but only with strong and evolutionarily significant ones. For example, in facial expressions, she reacts to fear, aggression, happiness, disgust, but more complex ones, such as feelings of guilt or arrogance, are already for the “conscious” part. The "unconscious" is good at highlighting obvious dangers, like snakes or spiders, but it doesn't care about things that evoke compassion (pictures like burning horses) or cultural rejection (cockroaches). It must first pass through consciousness.
It is assumed that the unconscious system is used to quickly draw attention to a significant stimulus, to speed up and improve its processing, and that the two systems eventually become connected. However, the existence of an "unconscious" system creates the possibility for the emergence of emotions, the source of which remained unconscious, and for the influence of emotional stimuli on decision-making, especially fast ones.

————
For inquisitive biologists:
* retina - superior colliculus - pulvinar - amigdala
**retina - LGN - cortex (especially orbitofrontal and cingulate) through V1 - amigdala and other subcortical structures.

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