A brief glimpse at how the fathers of modern mind‑science accidentally deleted empathy
And how it came roaring back like a tobacco-addicted raccoon
Empathy, that slippery little moral climbing skill everyone suddenly claims to possess, is enjoying a renaissance so dramatic you’d think it had been hiding in a bunker since 1947. And in a way, it has. Because for most of the 20th century, the fathers of psychiatry and psychology treated empathy the way a Cold War bureaucrat treated nuance:
