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The compassion community has ongoing criticisms and attacks on empathy and trys to promote compassion as being better. Here are articles where compassion advocates 'attack' empathy.
Some random popular articles pitting them against each other:
Four Reasons Why Compassion Is Better For Humanity Than Empathy by Rasmus Hougaard
Compassion Is Better than Empathy: Neuroscience explains why. By Tara Well Ph.D.
Compassion vs Empathy – Who is The Winner? by Dr. Nereida Gonzalez-Berrios, MD
Is Empathy Our Most Dangerous and Self-Indulgent Emotion? By Danny Penman
Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom
Turn Empathy Into Compassion Without the Empathic Distress by Veronika Tait Ph.D.
What’s Missing From Empathy - Feeling others’ pain can make everyone less happy if you don’t learn to tolerate it. By Arthur C. Brooks
What is the Relationship Between Empathy and Compassion?
The question comes up a lot about what is the relationship between empathy and compassion? What first needs to be acknowledged is that there are many definitions of empathy and compassion. People point to different phenomena, experiences, or actions and call it empathy or compassion. So it's easy to be using the same word but be pointing to different experiences.
Compassion vs. Empathy by JACINTA JIMENEZ
What’s Missing From Empathy
Feeling others’ pain can make everyone less happy if you don’t learn to tolerate it.
By Arthur C. Brooks
Empathy Versus Compassion
While empathy involves catching a wide range of emotions from others, compassion is specifically a feeling of concern for someone who is suffering, coupled with a desire to alleviate that suffering. As stated in The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, “While affective empathy may be considered a catalyst to feeling compassion, affective empathy does not guarantee, nor is it sufficient to engender, compassion (p. 26).”
Paul Bloom
Is Empathy Our Most Dangerous and Self-Indulgent Emotion?
Compassion has numerous health benefits and is inherently kinder than empathy.
Danny Penman
January 31, 2018
Compassion and empathy are fundamentally different but are closely related. Compassion is an emotional response to sympathy and creates a desire to help. Empathy is our feeling of awareness towards other people’s emotions and an attempt to understand how they feel
Turn Empathy Into Compassion Without the Empathic Distress
Research shows ways to avoid empathy's pitfalls while remaining altruistic.
Dec 05, 2019
"The idea that there can actually be too much empathy can be traced back to early Buddhist teachings. Instead of focusing on empathy to the point of draining ourselves emotionally, Buddhism teaches the practice of compassion, called karuna. This is the idea of sharing in suffering, having concern for another, but essentially “feeling for and not feeling with the other.”"
Enhancing compassion in general practice: It's not all about the doctor
DIFFERENTIATING COMPASSION FROM EMPATHY
Antonio T Fernando
"Compassion comes from the Latin roots com, which means ‘together with’, and pati, ‘to bear or suffer’.3 Compassion is built on the capacity to empathise — a form of cognitive and emotional perspective taking — but involves the additional step of wanting to alleviate suffering.
The distinction is important. An after-hours GP may recognize and feel the distress of a crying child having an asthma attack but, because he is now 30 minutes late in picking up his wife at the airport, rushes to the car park and lets colleagues manage the child. The family concerned might feel fobbed off and is unlikely to have experienced compassion as part of the clinical interchange. The doctor was empathetic but, technically, was not compassionate.
Empathy without compassion is not only out of step with professional requirements but also is differentially likely to sustain negative emotional states (for example, distress), which may contribute to emotional fatigue and burnout. When confronted with intense suffering, shifting from empathy to compassion fosters positive emotions in the clinician rather than creating a situation in which empathetic misery results. "
Compassion Is Better than Empathy
Empathic people feel the pain of others acutely. Is it possible to be too empathic? Could feeling too deeply for someone else’s pain or sorrow actually hurt you? Indeed, too much empathy can be debilitating. When we become too distressed about the suffering of others, we don’t have the cognitive and emotional resources available to do much to help them.
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