ABSTRACT
At the end of his book on The Psychology of Sympathy Lauren Wispé asks what kind of a world
would this world be without sympathy.1Curiously, he then fails to answer the question, partly,
I suspect, because the experimental psychological cast of his approach is signally inappropriate to
the question. The phenomena of sympathy and compassion, of hatred and pitilessness, are
intrinsically cultural and historical in their make-up. An essentially ahistorical, acultural theorisation
of sympathy such as Wispé’s, while well-meaning and correct in identifying the relative neglect of
sympathy by psychology, is rather like trying to analyse cooking without taking account of heat,
chefs or recipes. It may tell us something about the various relationships of the ingredients, but
nothing about how they transmute into a coherent distinctive dish nor about how they could
have turned out differently under other conditions. The absence of any account of ‘belief’, self,
identity, or distinctive social ‘worlds’ prefigures the inevitable failure of this type of psychology
when confronting such a complex social psychological phenomenon as sympathy. The phenomenon
is far too complex for the method.
