Sympathies and Antipathies

29-30 May, 2009

Conference report

This conference, jointly funded by CRASSH and the Wellcome Trust, brought together researchers from the UK and abroad who work on sympathy and altruism across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. The history of sympathy is marked by extensive transmission between fields, from astronomy to medical theory, from moral treatises to the novel, from psychoanalysis and literature to neuro-psychology and criminology. It was one of the aims of our conference to begin to chart this territory in which early modern and enlightenment models of fellow-feeling, compassion, and commiseration are taken up in modern science, medicine, philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis; and to explore how these models are re-worked in conjunction with new constructs like empathy, altruism, and humanitarianism. Thus alongside a historical understanding of sympathy and its cognates, the conference investigated how these concepts have become normative, yet ambivalent, social formations today. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference also allowed us to address methodological questions acutely problematised in the study of feelings and affects: the question of objectivity in the sciences, medicine and the humanities, the transmission of sympathy across cultures, and the appeal to or the erasure of affects in the rise of disciplines. Speakers addressed these themes from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including English literature, history of science and medicine, sociology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience.

The first day began with a panel on historical perspectives of sympathy, from 18th century moral philosophy (Sylvana Tomaselli, University of Cambridge), to the 19th century theorists, Darwin and George Eliot (Thomas Dixon, Queen Mary University of London), to the emergence of empathy in fin-de-siècle physiological aesthetics (Carolyn Burdett, Birkbeck College, London). The next session examined the nature of emotional response in poetry reading and teaching (Emma Mason, University of Warwick), human-animal relations and vivisection (Paul White, University of Cambridge), and modern media presentations of humanitarian acts (Keith Tester, University of Hull). The day concluded with a session on the practice of sympathy in contemporary psychoanalysis (Margot Waddell, Tavistock Clinic, London) and organ donation (Ayesha Nathoo, University of Cambridge). The second day began with a session on the embodiment of sympathy, with papers on the changing role of the heart as a locus of feeling (Fay Bound Alberti, Queen Mary University of London), on the role of blind subjects in 19th century studies that privileged vision as the medium of sympathy (Heather Tilley, Birkbeck College), and current research in neural imaging that models empathy as a stimulus-response circuit in the brain (Christopher Frith, UCL). The next session examined the role of antipathy in political discourses about the violence of the French Revolution (Ildiko Csengei, University of Cambridge), the social and psychological structure of collective evil-doing (Arne Vetlesen, University of Oslo), and the pathology of history in the work of William Godwin (Tilottama Rajan, University of Western Ontario).

The conference closed with a round table discussion, led by Dean Mobbs (University of Cambridge), Peter de Bolla (University of Cambridge), Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt University), Rhodri Hayward (Queen Mary University of London), and Marianne Noble (American University, Washington D. C.). The organisers would like to extend a warm thanks to all participants and attendees for making this a lively and successful event.

Paul White and Ildiko Csengei (co-organisers), 29 June 2009