Author Archives
Dedicated and committed that empathy becomes less of a rumor and more of an expanded reality in the community...
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Rhetorical empathy in the context of ontology
Empathy is an authentic way of being with the other individual after all the inauthentic ways of being have been overcome or at least set aside and quarantined. A reversal takes place, and the empathic way of being is the foundation for the psychological mechanisms. Projection, projective identification, and transient identification are valid and important, but not fundamental. What is fundamental is empathic relatedness, being present with the other person.
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Henry James’ Depiction of Unreliable Parental Empathy in “What Maisie Knew”
James’ incomparable empathy with Maisie and his penetrating and astute comprehension of human relations writ large applies empathy in the extended sense to who people are as possibilities, walking in the other’s shoes (after, of course, first taking off one’s own to avoid projection), translating communications between adults and children (and adults and adults) as well as affect-matching and mis-matching (empathy in the narrow sense).
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Juneteenth: Beloved in the Context of Radical Empathy
“Beloved” is the name of a person. Toni Morrison builds on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person, who escaped with her two children even while pregnant with a third, succeeding in reaching freedom across the Ohio River in 1854. However, shortly thereafter, slave catchers (“bounty hunters”) arrived with the local sheriff under the so-called fugitive slave act to return Margaret and her children to slavery. Rather than submit to re-enslavement, Margaret tried to kill the children, also planning then to kill herself. She succeeded in killing one, before being overpowered. The dead returns as a ghost – Beloved.
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How I Changed My Relationship to Pain
Expanded power over pain is a significant result that may usefully be embraced by all human beings who experience pain – which describes just about everyone at some time or another. Acute pain communicates an urgent need for intervention; chronic pain is demoralizing and potentially life changing.
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Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, is now an ebook – and LIVE!
Empathy is oxygen for the soul (see Chapter 6: Evidence-based empathy training). So, if you are short of breath due to life stress, get the expanded empathy delivered in this book. Just as the body needs oxygen to live physically, the soul needs empathy to live emotionally.
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Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide is now an ebook and live!
Empathy training is all about practicing balance: You have to strive in a process of trial and error and try again to find the right balance. So “lazy person’s guide” is really trying to say “laid back person’s guide.” The “laziness” is not lack of energy, but well-regulated, focused energy, applied in balanced doses. The risk is that some people – and you know who you are – will actually get stressed out trying to be lazy. Cut that out! Just let it be! Drive out hostility and aggression, and empathy naturally and spontaneously comes forth!
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Alternative facts, harmful half-truths, damn lies, and total nonsense – about empathy
Empathy works. Empathy makes a profound and lasting difference. But in the age of TikTok does it work fast enough? Empathy and its many successes are themselves the occasions for the skepticism, resistance, and seeming embrace of the obstacles to empathy. A rigorous and critical empathy can be hard work; better to take the easy way out. The reader may say, I want instant empathy, like instant coffee, just add hot water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice?
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Review: Empathy and Desire in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction by Thomas Horan
Invoking desire is like throwing a libido bomb – the result is going to be an explosion of emotional anarchy. No one escapes the chaos. In so far as one has to tear down the old temple (or government) before raising up the new one, desire will do the job nicely. Totalitarian rule is the systematic canceling and nullification of empathy, indeed of the possibility of empathy.
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Paul Ricoeur, Philosopher of Empathy
This article on Paul Ricoeur, empathy, and the hermeneutics of suspicion in literature will be engaging to students of Ricoeur and empathy alike. One can download the PDF : http://ricoeur.pitt.edu/ojs/ricoeur/article/view/628
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Top Ten Empathy Trends for 2024
The first casualty of war is truth—the second is empathy. Empathy has to call for backup. The backup is in the form of radical empathy.
Empathy Lessons 