ArticlePhenomenology and the cognitive sciences2026
The epistemic harms of empathy in phenomenological psychopathology.
Article in Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Overvalued Ideas: Conceptual Analysis and Literature Review.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Including people with lived experience in the development of the self-Dehumanisation in Psychosis Scale (DiPS): a reflective account.Journal of patient-reported outcomes · 2025Article
- Silence as epistemic agency in mania.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2025Article
- Fundamental issues in epistemic injustice in healthcare.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2025Article
- The future of phenomenological psychopathology.Philosophical psychology · 2025Article
- Open-mindedness and phenomenological psychopathology: an intellectual virtue account of phenomenology and three educational recommendations.Philosophical psychology · 2025Article
- Examination of self patterns: framing an alternative phenomenological interview for use in mental health research and clinical practice.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
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Abstract
Jaspers identifies empathic understanding as an essential tool for grasping not the mere psychic content of the condition at hand, but the lived experience of the patient. This method then serves as the basis for the phenomenological investigation into the psychiatric condition known as 'Phenomenological Psychopathology'. In recent years, scholars in the field of phenomenological psychopathology have attempted to refine the concept of empathic understanding for its use in contemporary clinical encounters. Most notably, we have Stanghellini's contribution of 'second-order' empathy and Ratcliffe's 'radical empathy'. Through this paper, we reject the pursuit of a renewed version of 'empathic understanding', on the grounds that the concept is fundamentally epistemically flawed. We argue that 'empathic understanding' risks (1) error, leading to misdiagnosis, mistreatment and an overall misunderstanding of the experience at hand, (2) a unique form of epistemic harm that we call 'epistemic co-opting' and (3) epistemic objectification. To conclude, we propose that empathic understanding ought to be replaced with a phenomenological account of Fricker's virtuous listening.
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