Empathy, professional empathy, medical empathy: an attempt of a comparative approach
Abstract
The article attempts to make comparative characteristics of empathy in assisting professions to clarify the specifics of medical empathy. The author perceives the possibility of differentiating the types of professional empathy according to the specifics of the empathogenic (existential) situation, which enables to find out the structural difference of assisting behavior in the work of specialists of various profiles, taking into account certain nature of help, both psychological and practical. The comparative method showed the influence of the empathogenic situation on changes within the structure and procedurality of various types of professional empathy. The tendency to universalize the theoretical model of empathic processes, widespread in modern discourse, is viewed as one of the reasons for unjustified attempts to "dismember empathy", to distance practical activity of professional help from empathy. It is shown that in the complex structure of helping behavior, which combines psychological and practical assistance, certain forms of help can have a dominant character, others - subordinate. In a dynamic aspect, the structural unity of psychological and practical help in certain types of professional empathy, in particular, in medical empathy, determines specific algorithms for its implementation with elements of discretion. The author marks the importance of professional role-based aspects of the formation of empathic skills of future doctors; he emphasizes the understanding of the role-playing dimension of professional medical empathy as one of the safeguards against emotional burnout and reveals the epistemological potential of medical empathy, its philosophical and anthropological basis.
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