As an exercise, consider that the other person is one’s empathy trainer. The other individual calls forth one’s empathy. If the Other behaves in a challenging way, the challenge is to one’s empathy. If the other person is in an… Read More ›
empathic responsiveness
Empathy sells; empathy’s limitations sell even better
But if empathy still sells, its limitations sell even better. The latest trend is to denounce empathy as a weakness and a danger to western civilization. What’s with that? How to answer the anti-empathy critics aidrectly and powerfully. Find out here.
Suicidal Empathy is Back in the News: Here is some “Tough Love” For Advocates of the Idea
Suicidal empathy is back in the news and deserves to be put in its proper place. Empathy exists on a spectrum between empathic kindness and “tough love”. This post contains some of each—but mostly tough love—for the anti-empathy skeptics. The… Read More ›
Automating Empathy – Issues and Answers
I saw an advertisement today: “Empathy can’t be automated”
Made me think: What is the evidence pro and con?
The obvious question is “Well, can you?”
The debate is joined. This turns out to be a trick question. The intuition on my part is that one cannot automate empathy, but perhaps one can simulate it, and then the simulation turns out to be something quite like the “automating empathy” of the title.
Empathy and tragedy – connecting the dots to a new definition of tragic drama
Radical empathy is attained when standard empathy honors the commitment to empathize in the face of empathic distress – the reaction on the part of audiences to circumstances in which tragic protagonists become entangled.This is empathy the “hard way,” and it is rare. However, no other way exists of attaining radical empathy than through empathy pure-and-simple….
Noted in passing: Anna Ornstein (1927-2025)
To enhance the parents’ therapeutic potentials does not mean to give recommendations as to how to interrupt or actively discourage the child’s disturbing behavior. Particularly destructive are recommendations which ask for changed parental behavior without an appreciation for the parents’ difficulty to comply; such recommendations are “grafted” onto the parents’ pathology.
The empathic dozen: Top 12 empathy lessons
Drive out aggression, hostility, bullying, prejudice of all kinds, dignity violations, hypocrisy, making excuses, finger pointing, cynicism, resignation, bad language, manipulation, injuries to self-esteem, competing to be the biggest victim, and politics in the pejorative sense of the term, and empathy naturally comes forth.
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.
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!
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?
Empathy Lessons 