ABSTRACT
Latané and Darley’s research on bystander intervention in an emergency situation provided strong support for the claim that the presence of other people inhibits the desire to help. Their assumption, inspired by the Kitty Genovese murder, was that the failure of the bystander to helpfully respond was not due to cold-heartedness or apathy about the crime victim, but rather because of three interdependent social-psychological processes that operate when an individual in the presence of others fails to help the victim: “audience inhibition,” “social influence” and “diffusion of responsibility.” Psychoanalysis has explained onlooker indifference in terms of self-protective narcissistic behavior and affect denial, of which there is no empirical evidence. Latané and Darley’s five-step theory describes the conditions of possibility that make it most likely that a bystander will choose to help a stranger in an emergency. For the psychoanalyst, the take home points of the bystander effect is the need for the analyst to encourage the analysand to be a responsive bystander, to fashion an internal world in a manner that makes this morally praiseworthy way of being in the real world more likely.
