People who are able to name their emotions and feeling experience expanded power in getting what they want and need from other people. They also get expanded power in contributing to building meaningful connections and community. community. Try substituting the word “empathy,” for “connection.” It works.
Like Mount Everest, Tomkins’ work is on the border of several gigantic kingdoms, extending from philosophy to psychology, neurology to evolutionary psychology, data rich empirical research to high speculation, phenomenology to an early version of critical theory, behaviorism to personality theory and psychoanalysis.
The emotions are much more than the disruptive passions such as appetite and desire and anger (and so on), since the emotions have come to include feelings of neighborliness, sentiments of kindness, pleasure in music and intellectual inquiry, and so on.
Biology is not destiny. As Simone de Beauvoir noted in The Second Sex, woman is not a mere womb. Though de Beauvoir did not explicitly say so, I believe de Beauvoir [and many feminists] would agree: man is not mere… Read More ›
This is a republishing with light editing of a book review from May 19, 2019 on Rachel Louise Snyder’s important work on domestic violence (DV). Difficult situations are further breaking down and becoming intolerable under the stresses of the pandemic…. Read More ›
Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967–2020) died at the age of 52 on January 7th in New York City of metastatic breast cancer. Wurtzel became a notorious “bad girl,” with a wicked sense of black humor, sparing few, least of all herself, and… Read More ›
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 ›
I am catching up on my reading. Christine Ann Lawson’s Understanding the Borderline Mother is a classic in its field, with a whopping 396 Amazon reviews (Q1 2019), enjoying a rating of 4.7 out of 5.0. Impressive. (See the bottom of this review… Read More ›
The force of empathy is strong with Helen Riess, MD, and her team. In The Empathy Effect: 7 Neuroscience-based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences(with Liz Neporent, Forward by Alan Alda (Sounds True… Read More ›
When people do not get the empathy to which they feel entitled, they get enraged. De-escalate rage by providing empathy and empathic relatedness.
Empathy Lessons 