Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Empathy

A Proposed Application in Educational Contexts

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to highlight some possible applications of Steinian empathy in education. Starting from “becoming aware” of the original core through empathic experience, we will try to demonstrate how trainees can be guided by the trainer towards learning a particular form of listening – which we will call “suspensive” – and towards an awareness of the interrelatedness that links each core to the other. In this experience of the other that leads back to the Self, we will finally see as a further application of Steinian empathy the possibility of self-training as a work of social training where each individual, although different from every other, has equal rights to the expression and realisation of their particular embodied personality.