You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As Tolstoy famously noted, all happy families are alike. What Tolstoy did not note was that many happy families are also unhappy ones. That painful paradox is not easy to parse, but this memoir is Sherry’s answer to Tolstoy, in which she tells us her own story.
Empathy often emerges in clarifying a breakdown of empathy. Sherry Turkle’s work might have been entitled, less elegantly, “The Breakdown of Empathy Diaries.” I found the book to be compellingly written, even a page-turner at times. The short review: the title, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir (Sherry Turkle New York: Penguin Press, 2021, 357 pp.) reveals that empathy lives, comes forth, in empathy’s breakdowns and failings.
For those concerned about empathy and the dynamics of the self in the digital age, Turkle’s body of work, culminating in this memoire, is especially engaging. Turkle makes an initial splash as a promising and innovative thinker by writing a dissertation at MIT on psychoanalytic politics in France, chock full of good gossip about the May 1968 Paris revolution, engaging with Lacan personally without becoming an adherent or compromising her integrity.
Now a named professor in MIT’s initiative on technology and the self, Turkle goes on to elaborate a critique of technology that smart phones, screens, and digital everything have negatively impacted our ability to conduct person-to-person conversations, including psychoanalytic ones (Turkle, Essig, & Russell, 2017), and left us with acquired attention deficit, hindering our ability to be fully present with one another in our authentic humanity. Here “being fully present” with another person is a synonym for empathy (Turkle, 1976, 2015). Turkle’s appreciation that empathy is more than a mere psychological mechanisms intersects powerfully with this reviewer’s own argument that empathy is the foundation of human intersubjectivity and community (Agosta 2015; Agosta, 2018).
Turkle’s mom (Harriet), Aunt Mildred, grandparents, and the extended Jewish family,