Empathic Conduit

Two kinds of conduit run between people in this framework and confusing them causes errors, which is why Marsh wrote plainly that an anima conduit is not the same as an empathic conduit. An anima conduit carries energy from a primary source. An empathic conduit carries understanding, allowing thought and feeling to be shared or jointly experienced. The two can exist independently, and the independence is diagnostic. An endo-ideal may have perfectly working euphoric conduits and an endoself may have perfectly functioning empathy, because euphoria and empathy are different things travelling on different channels. That is how Marsh accounts for a pattern that puzzles the usual vocabulary, in which people who understand others very precisely nonetheless exploit them. An endo-ideal has inhibition of empathic conduits while an endoself has inhibition of primary anima conduits, so the two failures are distinct and produce different behaviour. The conduits are also constitutive rather than incidental. A self is a structure of empathic conduits built through interactions, which is why Marsh can suggest that a small child's apparent development of understanding may be a change in their boundaries rather than a change in their comprehension. Reflection is the pathological case, the state in which all of a person's empathic conduits are directed to a single external endo-ideal.

Neuroscience looks for the substrate of shared experience in mirror neurons and in overlapping activation when observing another's pain, and the results are contested. Psychology divides empathy into affective and cognitive components and measures each separately. Philosophy of mind debates whether understanding others works by simulation or by theory. All of these treat empathy as a capacity located in one person. Marsh treats it as a channel between two, which is a stronger claim and changes what can be said about failure. A capacity is impaired in a person, while a conduit can be blocked, ruptured or redirected, and redirection is the case she is most interested in.