Mutual Empathy

Over one hundred years ago, the Russian scientist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin asserted that “[p]racticing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.”​

Kropotkin made a convincing case that human evolution and social life were only possible because more often than not humans practiced mutual aid in the form of altruism, reciprocity and cooperation. This mutual aid was in large part propelled by empathy or, in the words of famed Scottish economist Adam Smith, “by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.”

Recent studies have shown that empathy exists as a neurological phenomenon in the human brain, which may evidence that humans have had the capacity to be empathic for quite some time. Yet the word “empathy” is relatively new and emerged around the same time that Kropotkin published his writings on mutual aid. 

Empathy was originally coined as a way to describe the projection of feelings and emotions onto inanimate objects. Since then, it has morphed as a term and taken on many other meanings, from being able to metaphorically walk in someone else’s shoes and better appreciate their experiences to applying the kind of social-emotional intelligence that helps you connect with diverse groups.

Empathy has become a buzzword that is popular in marketing, research and development, education, and design, to name a few areas, with each instance of its use modifying its meaning. We deftly tailor the definition of empathy for our own purposes and then deploy it to obtain the desired result, ranging from trying to close a sale, making a product or service more appealing, predicting what a student might need to learn, or discovering and tackling an overlooked problem.

Fleurs et mains by Pablo Picasso

In humanitarian and environmental matters, empathy has served as a means to relate to and communicate the plight of oppressed people, climate migrants, and refugees. Harkening back to its original definition, empathy has even been used to help prototype ocean trash collection systems that are based on research into how plastic moves in aquatic environments. In the case of well-known autism advocate and author Temple Grandin, empathy gave her a deeper understanding of farm animal behaviors and enabled her to engineer more humane conditions for their management.

What is the dynamic between autism and empathy?

Autism adds an additional ingredient to the complex mix of being human and invites us to follow a neurodiverse approach in how we frame the challenge of effectively helping families with autism. 

By seeing autism as a form of neurodiversity, we can grow our appreciation for the different ways that the brain of an individual diagnosed with autism works and responds to the environment. This approach lets go of the rigid and regressive view of people with autism that treats them as lacking “normal” empathic feelings in favor of growing and embracing a more malleable empathic mindset where we acknowledge that empathy can take diverse forms.
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Neurodiversity by Erin Human

In the neurodiverse approach, nonautistic people are not simply and mechanistically tasked with “fixing” the behaviors of autistic people so that they can learn “normal” empathy or mask perceived deficits in their empathy. Rather, as speech and language pathologist Dr. Laura Thorne, herself the parent of a child with autism, writes: “[I]n addition to helping an autistic individual understand nonautistic behaviors and expectations, nonautistic individuals also need help understanding autistic behavior.” 

In other words, empathy and autism are multidirectional. The job of a therapist is not to train a person with autism to behave as if they were neurotypical; instead, it is to help the individual gain skills and adapt their behaviors in ways that realize their potential to feel safe, become independent, and communicate their needs, desires, and aspirations with the world. 

The behavior of individuals with autism and the prevailing characteristics of empathy that are attributable to so-called nonautistic or neurotypical individuals may not necessarily align, but that hardly means that autism deprives people of their ability to empathize. If anything, the argument has been made that people diagnosed with autism often experience what might be called “deep empathy”.  

We Are Just A Species by Luchita Hurtado

Treating individuals with autism as deficient in empathy devalues them as human beings and runs the real risk of dismissively regarding their life experiences as the byproducts of a neurological disorder. 

Autism provides us with an opportunity to expand our understanding of how variously human beings can process, experience, and express empathy. In so doing, we enrich our world, embrace transformative empathy, and build more accepting and inclusive communities. 

As the blogger and self-described autistic parent Ryan Boren reminds us, “There are many ways to be human.”