Blog Post #3: Leslie Jamison, Devil’s Bait
Jamison’s piece suggests that you can feel empathy for someone, even if you haven’t experienced what they have. She writes “though I also feel how every attempt to metaphorize the illness is also an act of violence–an argument against the bodily reality its patient insist upon.” (Jamison 226). What she means is that when you try to relate someone else’s experiences to your own, you obscure the experience itself. In terms of Morgellons, by comparing poor body image to having Morgellons, you erase the parts of the experience that make it a Morgellons experience. You prevent the focus from being on healing from the pain and suffering. This alternative way of understanding the definition of empathy challenges the definition of empathy seen in Ma’s piece. In Ma’s piece, he states that the definition of empathy is being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, so you can understand what they have been through or what they are currently going through. Jamison says that you don’t need to have had the same experiences to show empathy towards someone. Bloom states that empathy can get out of control and can lead someone to have bias towards another individual. This supports Jamison’s definition of empathy because when you try to relate someone else’s experience to your own, it alters their experience and erases what makes it theirs. When you try too hard to understand what someone is going through, it can backfire sometimes.
Jamison’s approach to understanding people who have profoundly different experiences from her challenges both Ma and Bloom’s understanding, because Ma says people with similar experiences understand each other better than those who don’t share similar experiences. Bloom however says that you don’t need to know someone personally or have had a similar experience in order to get a glimpse of what they are going through. Jamison writes about a girl she met named Kendra. Jamison says, “Somehow this makes me feel for her as much as anything–that she has the grace to imagine her way into the minds of people who won’t imagine hers.” (Jamison 229). She is talking about Kendra here and how she is able to understand how others think about her. She is able to understand where someone’s disbelief is coming from, even when that disbelief is what’s stopping others from giving the kind of empathy she is asking for.
