Stereotyping, Empathizing, Co-constructing Uniquenesses: A Reflection on Intimacy

ABSTRACT

An important kind of intimacy can usefully be understood as occurring through the process I call co-constructing uniquenesses. Here, conceptual analysis explains this joint process, and close reading of a clear case displays how the process happens in conversation. The conceptual analysis appropriates two familiar constructs – stereotyping and empathizing – to help define the process by contrast. The close reading applies elements of Robert Arundale’s “conjoint co-constituting model of communicating” to illustrate how co-constructing uniquenesses is accomplished in verbal/nonverbal talk, and how it may be analyzed. Researchers, teachers, and trainers interested in intimacy are invited to consider how this construct might contribute to their work.

Acknowledgment

My thanks to Professor Valerie Manusov, who provided support, insightful critique, and unusually thorough feedback on multiple drafts of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Many formulations of the empathy construct are problematic. One issue with this conceptualization of “cognitive and affective” empathy is that the former is described here as having both understanding and communicative components. As a result, the distinction that the labels appear to make cannot be maintained; neither is purely “cognitive” or purely “affective.”

² At the end of his chapter on empathy, Crosby (2004) offers his account of how two or more people can overcome the problem of individual incommunicability when they engage in what he calls “co-experiencing.” “When I show empathy and sympathy to the one who has a lost a child I seem to co-experience with that person the unique tie that binds children to their parents and the resulting vulnerability of parents… . This mindfulness of solidarity [with other parents] seems to be just the factor that enables me to understand another ‘in myself’; it lets me experience myself as being in a sense one with the other …” (p. 61). He concludes, ”We can in fact think of the act of empathetic [sic] understanding as involving a dialectic of the incommunicable and the communicable, of what is incommunicably my own and what is common to me and others, of what separates us into irreducibly distinct persons and what binds us into one body” (p. 63).

This account may complement the one I develop in this essay. It is difficult to tell without a clearer sense of the nature and limits of what Crosby calls “solidarity;” without his clarifying what he means when he writes about co-experiencing, “we become as it were members of each other, we exist in the same body;” and without any description of how “co-experiencing” might be concretely accomplished by persons communicating. In addition, Crosby’s (2004) “co-experiencing” notion is clearly still about similarity, not about co-constructing uniquenesses.