Empathy, caring and compassion: Toward a Freudian critique of nursing work

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to summarize key psychoanalytic concepts first developed by Sigmund Freud and apply them to a critical exploration of three terms that are central to nursing's self-image-empathy, caring, and compassion. Looking to Menzies-Lyth's work, I suggest that the nurse's strong identification as a carer can be understood as a fantasy of being the one who is cared for; critiques by Freud and others of empathy point to the possibility of it being, in reality, a form of projective identification; reading Lacan and Žižek, I propose that repeated research into caring and repeated complaint about barriers to caring can be understood as manifestations of the death drive first posited by Freud. I conclude that psychoanalytic insights suggest that caring roles can raise profoundly ambivalent issues for those who care but they can also point the way to freedom from painful and self-destructive symptoms inherent in such work.

Nursing's professional character: A chimera?

“…Where positive character attributions meet or support what might be termed nursing's professionalising agenda then, following Olson (1974Olson ( [1965), unless it is in someone's interest to dispute such claims (and it rarely is), whatever their logical status or legitimacy, these attributions are likely to pass without comment. That said, first, seemingly positive character traits/values attached to nursing (e.g., being empathetic or tolerant), reference concepts that have been witheringly critiqued in nursing and non-nursing literatures (see e.g., Bloom, 2016;Brown, 2008;Traynor, 2023), and even banalities such as 'niceness' are problematised (Jackson, 2022). Not every positive attribution is uncontentious.…”

On the misguided search for a definition of nursing

“…Others depicted their own kind of theorizing as “holistic,” again implying that competing theories offered a partial or fragmented view of the persons that nursing serves (Sarter, 1987; Thorne, 1991). And in what likely may have become the most pernicious case of language signification, the term “caring” was taken up by an influential set of theorists to distinguish their particular form of theorizing as reflecting a distinctively superior conceptual interpretation of the mystical essence of the discipline (Garrett, 2021; Paley, 2001, 2002; Traynor, 2023).…”