Jenny Oliveros Lao Phillips is the Dean of the School of Business and Law at the University of Saint
Joseph. Prior to her current position, Prof. Phillips held the positions of Registrar and Head of Public
Relations Office, on top of her Academic career at USJ since 2008. Prof. Phillips holds a PhD in Business
Administration, an MBA in Management, and an MA in English Literature. She is now a Post-Doctoral
researcher at the Faculty of Human Science at the Catholic University of Portugal (Católica Lisbon)
working on a research project bridging cognitive science in empathy and literature studies in catharsis
focusing on the tragic theatre. Prof. Phillips has taught a wide range of courses including:
Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Global Strategy, Creative Writing, and Literature. Her research interests
include family business management, social entrepreneurship, organizational behavior and innovation,
empathy and catharsis in tragedy and the modern theatre. And she writes a bi-weekly column Made in
Macao on Macao’s culture and tradition for the local English Newspaper Macau Daily Times.

Towards a Theory of Empathic Catharsis: from Oedipus to Game of Thrones

At the end of Jeremy Rifken’s (2009) Introduction in his book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to
Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, he raised the question “Can we reach global empathy in time
to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?” (p. 3). It may be a bit ambitious attempting to
answer this question, and Rifken was of course talking about bigger world view in the development of
humans and civilization. But to provide a small piece to the large puzzle towards world peace, there is
Drama. To be exact, the cathartic relief originated from studies of Greek Tragedy, which contains
elements that creates empathy among spectators that triggers a cathartic relief. This research suggests a
new concept of – “empathic catharsis”, a bridge between the science of empathy in cognitive studies
and the Aristotelian catharsis from the culture of the Ancient Greeks. Although there are arguments that
modern form of performance arts through cinema and television are some of the causes to the death of
tragedy Artaud (1977), this research argues that there are elements in Tragedies that can also be
present in modern drama on screen. One such link is from the studies of “empathy” in literature, an
emotion of virtue, which is to be developed through reading fiction, and has been explored through
motion pictures since the early 20 th century (Keen, 2007). This research attempts to explore elements of
empathy and cathartic relief from Greek Tragedy that exists also in Shakespearean Tragedy and Modern
Tragedy such as those in Peter Shaffer’s Theatre taken into account the differences in the cultural
background, and apply such elements to modern onscreen drama using as an example the Game of
Thrones, building a theory of “empathic catharsis” that is applicable to “drama” in the general sense.