UCLA

Empathy is a serious issue for understanding how everyday communication happens, especially for anthropology since it is crucial to the quality of sound fieldwork. This thesis examines marked empathy in the clinical context of psychodrama by focusing on a specific case from a psychodrama group I oversaw. I argue that through six key strategies, a psychodramatist gradually perceives the protagonist's referential totality toward other subjects and the world, helping the psychodramatist better empathize with the total embodied situation of the protagonist (the client). The most fundamental of these techniques is role reversal, through which psychodramatists, protagonists, and group members rebuild the situation of a particular event, and its related subjectivities and intersubjectivity that a protagonist has embodied in the past. This thesis also discovers four basic positions for understanding the essential positions of understanding a particular event in psychodramatic context. Finally, this thesis discusses the difference between intimacy and closeness, which rely upon different bodily horizons and, thus different means of empathizing.