Author Archives

Dedicated to the commitment that empathy becomes less of a rumor and more of an expanded reality in the community...

• Review: Building Empathy in a Fractured World: The War for Kindness by Jamil Zaki

  By Lou Agosta on November 5, 2019

  

  Short review: two thumbs up. Zaki and his work are the real deal. Zaki “gets it” as regards empathy. The most important take-away: empathy is trainable, teachable, malleable, acquirable, and an expandable competence and skill rather than an unchangeable personality… Read More ›

• The one-minute empathy training (no kidding!)

  By Lou Agosta on October 27, 2019

  

  People want to know: Can empathy be taught? People complain and authentically struggle: I just don’t get it—or have it. In spite of the substantial affirmative evidence already cited, the debate continues. The short answer is: Yes, empathy can be… Read More ›

• Empathy is good for your health and well-being (the evidence)

  By Lou Agosta on October 4, 2019 • ( 1 )

  

  Empathy is good for your health and well-being: Empathy is on a short list of stress reduction practices including meditation (mindfulness), Tai Chi, and Yoga. Receiving empathy in the form of a gracious and generous listening is like getting a spa… Read More ›

• Online (cyber) therapy: The genie is out of the bottle

  By Lou Agosta on September 13, 2019 • ( 2 )

  

  Psychotherapy invokes a virtual reality all of its own – even without cyber space. This is especially the case with dynamic psychotherapy that activates forms of transference in which one relates to the therapist “as if” in conversation with a past or future person or reality, the latter not physical present. Indeed, with the exception of being careful not to step in front of a bus while crossing the street on the way to therapy, we are usually over-confident that we know the reality of how our relationships work or what people mean by their communications. This is less the case with certain forms of narrowly focused behavioral therapies, which are nevertheless still more ambiguous than is commonly recognized. Never was it truer that meaning – and emotions such as fear – are generated in the mind of the beholder.

• Dynamic Therapy “Lite”? Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) Gets Traction

  By Lou Agosta on August 29, 2019

  

  Review of: The Guide to Interpersonal Psychotherapy: Updated and Expanded Edition (2007/2018), Myrna M. Weissman, John C. Markowitz, Gerald L. Klerman; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 283 pp. ($34.10 (US$)). Interpersonal therapy (IPT) is a promising, evidence-based, talk therapy. IPT is the… Read More ›

• Real Hallucinations by Matthew Ratcliffe (Review) – Okay, so what would FAKE hallucinations be?

  By Lou Agosta on August 17, 2019

  

  “Reality testing” is a distinction that is in the background of Matthew Ratcliffe’s penetrating and incisive book Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017, 290 pp.). Disturbances of the sense of reality are among… Read More ›

• Radical Empathy Confronts Depression: Review of Matthew Ratcliffe’s The Experience of Depression

  By Lou Agosta on August 7, 2019

  

  Over the summer I have been catching up on my reading. Matthew Ratcliffe’s Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015, 318 pp, (44.09 $US)) is an important and eye-opening book for anyone who engages with depression or… Read More ›

• Review: The Soul of Care by Arthur Kleinman

  By Lou Agosta on July 7, 2019

  

  When I say, reading Arthur Kleinman’s books changes one’s listening, I do not mean changes one’s listening the way reading Lacan or being hit on the head with a rolled up newspaper changes one’s listening. What I mean is, reading Kleinman… Read More ›

• Conversion Disorder: The Human Body is the Best Picture of the Soul

  By Lou Agosta on June 26, 2019

  

  Jamieson Webster writes like a combination of an Exocet missile and a feline feather tease. Webster has previously published on The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (2012) and with Simon Critchley on Hamlet (Stay Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2014)). Her latest… Read More ›

• A Message of Hope and Hard Work: The Brain that Changes Itself

  By Lou Agosta on June 16, 2019

  

  I have been catching up on my reading. Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself (Penguin, 427pp. ($18)), was published in 2007, now some twelve years ago. This publication occurred towards the beginning of the era of neuro-hype that now… Read More ›