ABSTRACT
Empathy is crucial to all forms of helping relationships. Although there is a considerable debate about whether empathy is a personality dimension, an experienced emotion, or an observable skill, empathy needs to involve the patient’s actual awareness of the helper’s communication in order that patients know whether they are being understood. Accurate empathy is a form of interaction, involving communication of the helper’s attitudes and communication of the helper understanding of the patient’s world. It is an essential component of the therapeutic, one-to-one nurse-patient relationship discussed in Chapter 36, since without empathy, there is no basis for helping. The cumulative research evidence supports this view in spite of attempts by some contributors to the literature to argue that empathy may not always be useful.
