Recent Posts - page 2

  • Resistance to Empathy (Part 1): Organizational Resistance to Empathy and How to Overcome It

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    Resistance to empathy: like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up hill?!

    that make organizations successful are not always the qualities that enhance their empathy. Hear me say it, and not for the last time: the things that make us good at business, including the corporate transformation of American medicine and education, do not always expand our empathy. What to do about it? The battle is joined. The recommendation? Let your customers, constituents, or stake-holders train you in empathy: Realize that if you do not respond empathically, the customers are just going to go quietly to the competitor that does. Empathy is good for business. If the customer has a complaint that he is having trouble expressing, then use one’s listening skills to get to the bottom of things.

  • The Natural Empath Encounters the Good Samaritan

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    The Parable of the Good Samaritan: Two experience empathic distress and pass by - the Samaritan recognizes his neighbor in the survivor

    curate. Cross the street away from the neighbor to “down regulate” your empathy, and experience less empathic distress; and cross the street towards your neighbor to expand your empathy in the direction of creating an inclusive community of persons, who recognize the value of cooperation. 

  • Review: Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger – Speaking Truth to Power – and Power Talks Back

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    Cover art: Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice by Alice Dreger

    A scientist has not been burned at the stake in over 350 years – and even then it was Giordano Bruno, not Galileo. Find out how Professor Alice Dreger (PhD) become an advocate for survivors of intersex sexual reassignment surgery and she becomes a strong candidate to be burned in effigy by those for whom she was advocating.

  • Perform a Readiness Assessment: A Rigorous and Critical Empathy

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    A Rigorous and Critical Empathy t-shirt, courtesy of the UChicago Community Outreach Program and Xavier Remy

    Empathy is never needed more than when it seems there is no time for it. Empathy is never needed more than when it seems the budget does not allow for it. Empathy is never needed more than when the cynicism and resignation about life, whether in the family or the corporate jungle, are so thick you can’t catch your breath.

  • EDITED OUT while being assessed for publication: Review: The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle

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    Cover Art: The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle

    The short review: the title, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir (Sherry Turkle New York: Penguin Press, 2021, 357 pp.) reveals that empathy lives, comes forth, in empathy’s breakdowns and failings. Empathy often emerges in clarifying a lack of empathy. This work might have been entitled, less elegantly, “The Lack of Empathy Diaries.” I found the book to be a compellingly written, even a page-turner at times, highly recommended, but, caution, this is not a “soft ball” review.”

  • The Case of Dr Know-It-All: Empathy gives us our humanity

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    One does not need a philosopher to tell one what empathy is. What then does one need? How about a folktale, a fairy tale, a Märchen? Rather than start with a definition of empathy, my proposal is to start by telling a couple of stories, in which empathy (and its breakdown) plays a crucial role. Both stories are anonymous folktales from the collection edited by the Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The distilled wisdom of the ages accumulated in traditional anonymous narratives will do nicely. Now available to listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pCIwUknKqxZwIqau0m1YW

  • Review: Politics of Empathy by Anthony Clohesy

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    Cover art: Politics of Empathy by Anthony Clohesy

    Clohesy’s big idea is that empathy is about identity and similarity, but it is just as fundamentally about differences. Key term: empathy of differences. This provides a powerful angle on that vexing issue of empathy and ethics, which has the frustrating aspect of being a chicken and egg dilemma.

  • 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.