Recent Posts - page 2

  • Review: A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory by Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson

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    Cover Art: A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory by Frank and Wilson

    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.

  • Review: Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past by Thomas A. Kohut

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    Cover Art: Paul Klee, In the Magic Mirror (1934) Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past by Thomas Kohut

    Kohut’s definition of empathy is a rigorous and critical one. Empathy is a mode of observation that gives one access to the thoughts and feelings of other human beings as subjects. Key term: subjectivity. Empathy is the foundation of intersubjectivity and that intersubjectivity has a temporal horizon extending from the past into the future.

  • Empathy is the New Love

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    Socrates getting drunk with friends and talking about love in Plato's Symposium by Anselm Feuerbach

    If empathy is the new love, what then was the old love? A bold statement of the obvious: the old love is akin to a kind of madness. The one who is in love is hypnotically held in bonds by an idealization by the beloved. In one way, love presents as animal magnetism, a powerful attraction; in another way, in a quasi-hypnotic trance, love idealizes the beloved, and, overlooks the would-be partner’s shortcomings and limitations.

  • The Limits of Empathy in Politics

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    Even in politics empathy is always empathy. However, politics brings along a whole new set of questions, issues, and challenges by with which empathy is confronted and to which empathy gets applied.

  • Empathy, Brain Science, Stress Reduction – the Video!

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    This is your mind on neuroscience – mirror neurons: do they exist, and if not, what about it?
    Sperry on the split brain: the information is in the system: how to get at it
    The neuroscience of trauma – and how empathy gives us access to it
    MRI research: as when Galileo looked through the telescope, a whole new world opens

  • Top 10 Empathy Trends in 2021

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    It’s gettin’ crowded under the bus. We confront the paradox of “embracing” our socially distanced neighbor. There is something about humans that makes us want to breathe on one another. Empathy? There is nothing that says an empathy trend has to be positive – but don’t try and hold your breath. Expanding neighborliness is the ultimate empathy trend.

  • Review: From Passions to Emotions

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    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.

  • Narcissism gets a bad rap: On empathy and narcissism

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    Echo and Narcissus by JW Waterhouse: Narcissus captivated by his own image

    Narcissism has gotten a bad name. “Narcissism” has become a euphemism – a polite description – for a variety of integrity outages and bad behaviors. These extend from antisocial, psychopathic actions through bullying and domestic violence all the way to bipolar spectrum disorders or moral insanity. “Narcissism” has become the label of choice when an individual is behaving like a jerk…

  • Empathy and the True Believer

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    It is a high probability you are dealing with a True Believer when, in the face of a setback to the Belief System (whether religion, political party, social movement, or spiritual cause) the adherent to the cause Doubles Down. Key term: double down.

  • Noted in passing: Arnold Goldberg, MD, innovator in self psychology and empathy (1929-2020)

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    Arnold I. Goldberg, MD (1929-2020) was an innovator in psychoanalysis and self psychology, a prolific author (really prolific!), an inspiring educator, and simply a wonderful human being.