Here are twelve (12) top radio shows on empathy. Lou Agosta interviews thought leaders in the community about work they are doing that expands empathy. Note: interviews are edited to delete the commercials. Biographical information about the speaker and interviewer… Read More ›
The reader arrives at the “good parts.” One is bound to be impressed by just how modern is the challenge with which Freud engages, namely, the distinction between intimacy and sex. Without revealing anything confidential, one can still register for training and development seminars with titles similar to “intimacy and sex,” precisely because people are still grappling with the problem. Find out how the conversation got started here.
The key point on which Freud’s argument turns and which is responsible for the surprising results that shocked Freud’s contemporaries is the distinction between the aim, the sexual drive (or instinct (“Trieb”)) and the sexual object. We shall have to work with this; but basically the drive or instinct aims at satisfaction. The sexual object is highly variable and different objects are relatively readily substitutable for one another.
Ours is the age of compliance. There are so many “shoulds” – so many rules – that doing one’s job is a challenge. Resistance to empathy is subtle, and it deploys institutional mechanisms, usually unwittingly, to disrupt empathy. The psychosocial dimension complicates resistance to empathy on the part of “behavioral health” professionals.
It is not the purpose of this engaging and thought provoking book to get the reader to feel comfortable; it is the purpose of this book to get the reader to think – about psychoanalysis.
Empathy is oxygen for the soul. Short of breath? Maybe one needs expanded empathy!
Shorter narrates from the point of view of the practicing psychiatrist. The thesis is that psychiatry has struggled to differentiate itself from neurology (and brain science), psychoanalysis (and psychotherapy), finally securing for itself the secure path of a respectable scientific enterprise in the second psychopharmacological revolution, featuring Prozac (floxatine) along with a willingness to make use of some version of “the rapport,” talking with patients as human beings with complex lives and emotions.
