Second Opinion | 18 December 2004

Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts.

In my own small way, I also sometimes empathise. Last week, for example, a patient came to see me who seemed very nervous. He looked around him as though he expected at any moment to be taken by a giant raptor.

‘Are you like this all the time?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Since when?’

‘Since I was young.’

‘Why?’

‘You know how you feel when you’re stealing a car?’ he said.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’ Then I thought this sounded rather priggish and unempathic. ‘But I can imagine,’ I added.