Emotional detachment from others can serve constructive protective purposes

Evidence

Depersonalization should be distinguished from dehumanization. In the latter, others are stripped of human qualities or invested with demonic or bestial ones, whereas in the former, others are treated with emotional detachment and little regard for them as persons. Under certain conditions, some emotional detachment can serve constructive purposes. Members of the helping professions must deal day in and day out with people whose lives are full of suffering and hardships that do not lend themselves to easy solutions. For example, those who staff social welfare programs see endless lines of people ravaged by poverty, disease, and years of maltreatment and neglect. Were they to empathize fully with the suffering of their clients, they would be too overwhelmed emotionally to be able to help them. Emotionally moderated concern for other people’s suffering spares them impairing personal distress. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 618

Categorization

• DEFINE: Draws the precise line between depersonalization (emotional detachment) and dehumanization (stripping human or bestial qualities), a distinction that matters for the whole book’s argument.
• XREF: Connects to compassion-fatigue and ‘emotional labor’ literature in care work and to Hochschild’s concept of managed emotions.
• SEED: A paradox essay: the helping professions must partially dehumanize clients in order to keep helping them — the functional necessity of distancing.