"Becoming the Other": Empathy and Biographical Interpretation

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Abstract
Empathic acts are widely employed in everyday life to establish knowledge, accurate or inaccurate, about the experiences of other people. Such acts are occasionally documented in popular biographies when authors leave evidence of having projected their own experiences upon the life of a subject to create a more coherent narrative. In the social sciences, empathy may similarly play a significant, but rarely documented role in the interpretation of others' lives. Within the phenomenological tradition, empathy may be described as an act of consciousness in which one orients to objects and their value in another's experience. Materials from a life history of a woman born with quadrilateral limb deficiencies are presented, to demonstrate a method for clarifying the accuracy of one's own empathic constructs with living subjects. The method may be applied to general biography writing.

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