It is well known that empathy — the experience of seeing and feeling the world through the eyes of another human being—is essential to healthy human development and relationships, and that, in its absence, people become psychologically wounded. It is also true, but less well known, that when the institutions upon which we depend fail to be responsive to our particular needs or are indifferent to our pain, we suffer in similar ways. The personal and the social are wedded together in everyday life, and they are too often in short supply.

This empathy deficit was powerfully illustrated in the March 14 edition of The Union, in a tragic story by Cory Fisher about Stephen Jobe’s quest for institutional care to support him as he faces death from brain cancer. His quest was marked by hours upon hours of frustrating bureaucratic dead-ends, interminable phone queues, constant mixed and confused messages from insurance companies, and repeated denials of health coverage and care on spurious and insanely irrational grounds.

In dealing with this impossibly corrupt system, Mr. Jobe’s advocate was repeatedly rendered frustrated, helpless, and enraged. The “system” was not simply failing Mr. Jobe; it was treating him as if he were burdensome and unimportant.

BUREACRATIC INDIFFERENCE

Jobe’s experience rang a bell for me, not because I have ever been in such dire straits, but because I have experienced similar feelings of helplessness, albeit in milder forms, in getting though to decision-makers about important personal matters, or eliciting even a crumb of empathy from people empowered to help me in various areas of modern life. These encounters include the bureaucracies of insurance companies, pharmacies, and doctor’s offices; phone, internet and power companies, technical support centers — and, finally, to the numerous governmental departments that oversee tax collection, social security, as well as small agencies involved with construction, road repairs, building permits and zoning. It seems to me that everywhere we turn, we often get stuck on the phone, waiting for some tiny ray of understanding or responsiveness, only to be frustrated and forced to either put off getting help or giving up completely.

Such bureaucratic indifference reminds me of a psychological study done almost 40 years ago. In 1978, developmental psychologist Edward Tronick and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry that demonstrated the psychological importance of the earliest empathic interactions between mothers and babies. These interactions involved the playful, animated and reciprocal mirroring of each other’s facial expressions. Tronick’s experimental design was simple: A mother was asked to play naturally with her 6-month-old infant, play that invariably involved facial expressions. The mother was then instructed to suddenly make her facial expression flat and neutral, to remain completely still, for three minutes, regardless of her baby’s activity. Mothers were then told to resume normal play. The design came to be called the “still face paradigm.”

REPERCUSSIONS

When mothers stopped responding with appropriate facial expressions to their babies, when their faces were still, babies first anxiously attempted to reconnect with their mothers. When the mothers’ faces remained neutral and still, the babies quickly showed ever-greater signs of confusion and distress, followed by a turning away from their mothers, and finally appearing sad and hopeless. When the mothers in the experiment were permitted to re-engage normally, their babies, after some initial hesitation, regained their positive affective tone and resumed their relational and imitative playfulness.

When a primary caretaker (the still-face experiments were mostly done with mothers, not fathers) fails to mirror a child’s attempts to connect and imitate, when she fails to be empathically responsive, the child becomes confused and distressed, protests, attempts to engage, and then gives up.

Tronick’s study showed how much the human organism needs empathy in the course of development. Adults need it as well. As Mr. Jobe’s story about being systematically stymied in his efforts to get medical care illustrates, too often our most important social institutions fail to provide it. Empathy is absent. Schools are notorious failures in this regard as are government bureaucracies. As we become increasingly dependent on technology, we fall victim to its breakdowns and are unable to get the corporate behemoths behind that technology to help us fix them. The results are feelings of helplessness, frustration, and sometimes despair. The world keeps putting us “on hold.” We look around us for help and all we see are “still faces.”

I would argue that this experience accounts for a large part of the distrust of government that so many people in our society seem to feel. Too often, government appears to be rewarding undeserving “others,” but ignoring us. Whether it’s not being able to find a hospital to care for us when we’re dying, waiting on hold with the IRS, or dealing with building inspectors who rigidly apply codes and rules to hold up our remodeling projects, many people in our society feel like cogs in an unempathic and indifferent machine.

Michael Bader, DMH, is a psychologist in private practice in Grass Valley. He can be contacted at michaelbaderdmh@gmail.com.