Empathy Lessons

Recent Posts - page 2

• The trouble with – the trouble with – empathy

  By Lou Agosta on September 6, 2020

  

  Empathy flourishes in a space of acceptance and tolerance. But acceptance and tolerance have their dark side, too. People can be intolerant and unaccepting. Be accepting of what? Be accepting of intolerance? Be tolerant of intolerance? Yes, be tolerant, but… Read More ›

• Empathy and Hermeneutics

  By Lou Agosta on August 7, 2020

  

  Empathy has been given a bad rap in hermeneutic circles by being degraded to a psychological mechanism whereas empathy is rather a way of being in relatedness to individuals and community. Key term: being in relatedness. (For those who may… Read More ›

• Freud and empathy: Lost in translation

  By Lou Agosta on July 19, 2020

  

  Freud is explicit about his commitment to empathy. He writes and publishes the following: It is certainly possible to forfeit this first success [in therapy] if one takes up any standpoint other than one of empathy such as moralizing (“Further… Read More ›

• Empathy and gender

  By Lou Agosta on June 21, 2020

  

  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 ›

• A Lazy Person’s Guide to Empathy, the book, now available: Expand empathy in the community and individual today!

  By Lou Agosta on May 31, 2020

  

  Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide is a light-hearted look at a significant and engaging matter: how to expand empathy in the individual and the community – and do so without working too hard. The Guide includes twenty eight illustrations by… Read More ›

• Saint Linehan: Marsha Linehan dishes on what she had to survive to innovate her way to DBT

  By Lou Agosta on May 10, 2020

  

  This is the story, the narrative, of a survivor, Marsha Linehan, an innovator in the treatment of borderline personality disorder (BPD) using a method she and her team invented called Dialectical Behavioral Treatment (DBT). Linehan has written a memoir, not… Read More ›

• When Camus’ The Plague is trending, you know you [we] are in trouble…

  By Lou Agosta on April 26, 2020

  

  When Albert Camus’ novel The Plague is trending online, you know you [we] are in deep trouble. It is. We are. Published in 1947 and awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, Camus’ The Plague is surprisingly relevant to… Read More ›

• Spike in Domestic Violence (DV) Accompanies Pandemic Shelter-at-Home

  By Lou Agosta on April 12, 2020

  

  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 ›

• Illness as Metaphor

  By Lou Agosta on March 31, 2020

  

  Catching up on my reading while “sheltering at home” in Chicago, Susan Sontag’s (1933 – 2004) book length essay, “Illness as Metaphor” (1977) is especially timely in view of the psychological dynamics around the Covid-19 pandemic. The message of “Illness… Read More ›

• Alternative facts, dangerous half truths, and complete nonsense

  By Lou Agosta on March 24, 2020 • ( 2 )

  

  Granted, medical science sometimes mistakes. But medical science still makes many, many fewer mistakes than do politicians appearing on TV and pretending to be doctors, touting unproven anecdotal remedies.  Alternative facts, half truths, and dangerous nonsense are readily projected onto… Read More ›

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