‘The Empathy Exams,’ by Leslie Jamison - NYTimes.com

Regarding the pain of others requires more than just a pair of eyes. It necessitates an act of the imagination: a willingness to think or feel oneself into the interior of another's experience, to cross between what Susan Sontag once designated as the kingdoms of the sick and of the well. This kind of empathetic border crossing can be both difficult and dangerous, the sort of journey of which one might say: "I get across quickly because I'm headed in the right direction, by which I mean the wrong direction. I'm going where no one wants to stay."This statement, actually describing a trip into Mexico, serves as a manifesto for "The Empathy Exams," Leslie Jamison's extraordinary and exacting collection of essays. Jamison is a young writer and the author of a novel, "The Gin Closet." For the past few years she's been publishing a steady stream of intense, original essays, gathered here for the first time. Though they roam widely in topic and location, their collective preoccupation is with pain: what it means and what to do about it, both when it occurs in our own lives and when its location is far distant from us.Jamison opens with her experience as an actor playing patients for medical students. "I'm called a standardized patient, which means I act toward the norms set for my disorders." Sometimes, working from a script, she plays a mother whose baby's lips are turning blue, and ...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs