Empathy, emotions, and the ethics of love - with Susi Ferrarello
Episode 14 of Careful Thinking
My guest on the fourteenth episode of the Careful Thinking podcast is Susi Ferrarello. Susi is an associate professor at California State University, East Bay. She has a bachelor's degree in philosophy from La Sapienza University in Rome, an MA in human rights and political science from the University of Bologna, and a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris. Susi has held professorships at La Sapienza, the Florence University of the Arts, Lucerne University, and Loyola University in Chicago, and she has lectured widely in Europe and the United States. Her academic interests include phenomenology, moral psychology, practical ethics, the philosophical foundations of psychological praxis, and ancient philosophy. Susi is also a trained philosophical counsellor with more than ten years’ experience of consulting in Italy, Switzerland, and the United States.
Susi’s many books include The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy, published in 2019, Human Emotions and The Origins of Bioethics and The Role of Bioethics in Emotional Problems, both from 2021, and The Ethics of Love: Emotional Dilemmas for A Relational Life, which came out in 2023. She has also edited or co-edited a number of books, including Empathy and Ethics in 2022 and The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness in 2023. The Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood: Ethical, Social, and Psychological Perspectives will be published later this year. Susi writes a regular column, ‘Lying on the Philosopher's Couch’, in Psychology Today magazine, and she's the host of the Philosophy Gets Personal podcast. She recently launched No Bump, No Care? , an online pregnancy and motherhood support project.
I first came across Susi's work a few years ago, when I was beginning to be interested in phenomenology and its relevance for my research on care. As someone with no formal training in philosophy, I set about searching for accessible explanations online. Susi featured in a number of refreshingly accessible and informative videos that I came across on YouTube, and I’ve found that same accessible approach in her writing, which manages, unusually in my experience, to combine philosophical rigour with practical applications to everyday problems arising from personal relationships. So I was really pleased when our mutual acquaintance Maurice Hamington suggested Susi as a guest for the podcast and kindly put us in touch with each other.
Susi Ferrarello
Our conversation on the podcast began with Susi’s reflections on the academic journey that led her from an early fascination with ancient languages and literature, to the study of philosophy, and then, via her training and practice as a philosophical counsellor, to a concern with questions of practical ethics and personal relationships. We discussed Susi’s critique of bioethics, and specifically her concern about the exclusion of emotionality from the discussion of problems in medical ethics, which she regards as rooted in a pervasive mind-body dualism. This led us to talking about Susi’s interest in professional ethics, and particularly in the emotional education of professionals working in caregiving roles. We focused particularly on ways of encouraging caregivers to display ‘true’ rather than ‘empty’ or formalistic empathy. In this section of the conversation, Susi drew on her own, personal experience of suffering a miscarriage.
I was particularly taken with Susi’s ideas around intercorporeality and interaffectivity, and we discussed some practical, therapeutic applications of these notions, including the artist and ethnomusicologist Tomie Hahn’s fascinating work around ‘banding’. Moving on to Susi’s more recent writing, we talked about the ways in which she combines philosophical ideas, personal case studies and stories from ancient myths and literature in books that are both thought-provoking and of practical benefit to readers. Finally, we touched on Susi’s regular column in Psychology Today, and on her current work, both academic and practical, on the subjects of pregnancy and perinatal loss.
As always, there were echoes in this conversation of previous episodes of the podcast. Susi’s interest in the role of emotions in care, and her concern with the emotional preparation and support of professional caregivers, recalled my conversations with Carlo Leget in Episode 8 and Erica Borgstrom in Episode 9, about the emotional pressures faced by care workers. And Susi’s work around kinaesthesis, intercorporeality and interaffectivity, and their therapeutic relevance, reminded me strongly of Christine Leroy’s notion of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’, and her practical application of it in her own dance-based work with young women suffering from anorexia, which I discussed with her in Episode 7. On a personal level, I found what Susi had to say about the failings of healthcare providers in relation to women who had experienced miscarriage particularly powerful, as it resonated with the findings of my own recent research with fathers who had lost a child in the perinatal period (see this post).
Here are a few quotes by Susi from the episode:
Philosophical counselling is a job that is not that widespread yet, although the number is growing. What I usually say, a little bit jokingly, is that philosophers are fit for understanding what's going on in the mind of someone else, because…they've been trained for years. I mean, if they can understand what Kant meant in his ‘Critiques’, they can understand what an average person might be thinking in a specific moment of their lives. So philosophical counselling does not want to replace the psychotherapist, psychoanalysis, even less psychiatry. It wants to help people who are going through a moment of confusion, which might be ethical, epistemological, aesthetic in the sense of perceptive - so I don't understand what I'm perceiving now that makes me feel bad. And so we walk these people through a deeper understanding or a clear understanding of the situation.
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Imagine spending more than half of your life being emotionally absent to yourself. It's hard pretending to be an impersonal being, completely detached from what is going on at home. Now, since I recently became a mother, I think of all those mothers who had to stick to the work schedule, and they have to come back to work sometimes after one week, two weeks from their pregnancy and their delivery, and they are asked to be professional, meaning to forget all that is happening. This is inhumane…and not just for the mothers, but for the fathers, too…even worse: ‘well, you didn't deliver any baby, so you should be as fresh as a rose at the work desk’. How can this be possible, when at home you don't sleep for months?
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At the hospital...we have medical personnel that have to attend trainings to be more caring and empathetic. But empathy, care are taught as saying the right thing…‘I'm sorry for your loss’, or ‘that must be hard’. But they are absolutely not present to what they are doing...If we were capable to connect with our home...what we left at home, who we are...you might be able to be more empathetic with what kind of pain another person is feeling in that moment. As a teacher, for example, since I had a child, I think I became better rather than worse. Because I can understand much more easily how hard it is for certain students to cope with job, family, expectations from schools, pressure from society. The fact that we are emotionally present to ourselves can give us a chance to live a better life and to be more caring towards each other, and hopefully to take fewer trainings that tell us what we should think…what values we should believe in.
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How can we educate people?...We should first of all overcome the dualism, body and mind, and the reductionism for which the answer is either on the mind or all on the body. I remember a client, she had a miscarriage. The doctor gave her the card of the gynaecologist, gave her the card of a psychotherapist. Her job was done, because that's a reductionistic attitude. So this is the professional that is going to take care of your mind. Unfortunately, certain events are situational and the layers of meanings of that event tend to wrap around that place, that chair, that face. And at each moment we have the responsibility to be the best human being we can be.
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If you look at life, it's so evident that we are interconnected. I mean, a tree does not survive as an isolation in the whole of nature. A tree is there with its roots in the dirt, and they even connect with other trees to give each other information, with other organisms, and so on and so on. And we cannot think that we are different than nature. We are nature. And everything starts with kinaesthesis, with our ability to aesthetically perceive our kinesis, our movement as it goes. Life, as Aristotle reminded us, is movement. And this movement is what carries us through being, which is interconnected. There's no inside or outside…And this is another problem in healthcare. When they take care of patients...check if the patient has a network at home to take care of them. And so the rehospitalisations are higher and higher because there's no way to check on the health of the intersubjective, interaffective network of the dismissed patient.
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Care, I think is the best word we can use to understand love…because love is a very hard word to unpack…Care involves an essential quality of the human being that helps the human being to not forget about themselves. Because in love there's often this pull...that leads either to selfishness or to the opposite, to self-sacrifice, to the extreme. Care instead is that little link that connects us in these intercorporeal, interaffective organisms we were discussing before, and is this self-reflection on personal values and intersubjective values that allows us to be present to ourselves and others.
You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts:
You can download a transcript of the episode here:
The header image is ‘Empathy’ (2010) by Agnes Toth (used by kind permission of the artist)