Is empathy necessarily accurate?

If there is an overlap or blurriness of people’s subjectivities, empathy is what call the ability to tell what another is experiencing. We say, “He gets me,” “She understood,” “I know what that’s like”. We speak of stepping into another’s shoes, of seeing the world through their eyes.

When empathy fails we say, “You don’t understand what it’s like,” or “She doesn’t get me.”

Empathy implies that person A experiences something which person B then experiences too (be it through identification, mirror neurons, or intuition – perhaps these are the same thing). It is as if person A gives off something which person B detects.

Human communication, in other words, is more than the literal content of what one person says to another. Indeed, that level of interchange, some would say, is less about communication and more about hiding and manipulating. Here’s Harold Pinter: