In 1995, a curator at the New York State Museum opened a door in an attic of the soon-to-close Willard Asylum for the Insane and found hundreds of suitcases. The cases once belonged to people institutionalized at Willard, and they contained books, photos, letters, and other personal items. They have since inspired a photographer, a poet, and other artists, while also raising questions about the uses and abuses of historical archives, particularly ones pertaining to medicine:
Usually, hearing of other people’s secrets and private lives held a special kind of pleasure. This, after all, is one reason why we read novels or listen to gossip: to experience an interior life other than our own. My fascination with the people who lived at Willard wasn’t without some salacious curiosity and an expectation that their lives, presumably more extreme, more vivid than mine, were worthy of art.
But from an ethical standpoint, was it right to transform into art the lives of those who suffered quietly for so many years? What was the cost to the patient when photographs were taken, poetry written, song cycles composed, magazine essays published? Was I taking narrative pleasure from Freda B.’s suffering? Or was Crispin right in his belief that the primary emotional relationship that most people feel when they look at the suitcases is empathy? And what to do with the fact that Freda B. herself had no choice in the decision to photograph her suitcase, to have her personal effects displayed for everyone to see?
Empathy was an aesthetic term before it was a psychological one. The German word Einfühlung was once used to describe the feeling of emotional resonance with a piece of art, of knowing it from within. In the early 20th century, English-speaking psychiatrists translated the word to empathy, expanding its meaning to include the sense of feeling one’s way into the experience of another. Psychologists long believed that empathy was an inborn, fixed trait. More recent research suggests that it is a competency that can be strengthened or weakened with experience or training. Meditation can increase empathy. So can reading novels.
My whole life, I’ve believed that all of us share a few essential desires, fears, and perceptual experiences of being human. Our differences, I’ve always thought, were the result of differing life circumstances, which shape our preferences, our style, and our narratives. I have persisted in this belief because it has allowed me to imagine the possibility that I could understand other people, that we could be decipherable to one another. Someone told me once that sharing your life with a partner is consolation for only being allowed to live one life. That when you know someone else intimately, when you participate in the daily joy and sadness that person feels, it is as close as you can come to living more than one life. It seems to me that we need that consolation many times over, in many forms.
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