Más allá de la empatía: la mirada compasiva en el cine

Abstract

Compassion is a complex concept with a wide semantic field, surrounded by terms such as pity, sympathy, empathy, and other emotions that arise when meeting people who are suffering. In this paper, compassion is not understood as a passive emotion (as would be pity), but as a more complex human emotional network that involves the hope that others will stop suffering and actively seeks relief from suffering. In these terms, it exceeds empathy, insofar it entails “bringing it to action”. Compassion can therefore be defined as an active response to the suffering of others.

Can we teach compassion? At least, we may show compassionate behaviors to facilitate its recognition. This seems specially useful in the training of health professionals, who sometimes have difficulty in speaking of compassion, especially if it is perceived or interpreted as an attitude of superiority (phys? ical and moral) towards the person suffering.

We believe that the spectatorship of inspiring stories may provide a better understanding of compassion, a crucial element in the practice of healthcare professionals. To this end, we selected eleven movies that show different types of compassion, ranging from professional compassion to mutual compassion among peers, or self?compassion.