A List of the Top 10 Books (publications by Lou) on empathy

Click here to order (most publications also available as ebooks):

Need more details? Please check out the following –

01. Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide takes a light-hearted look at a significant topic: how to expand empathy in the individual and the community – including some two dozen color illustrations by the celebrated artist Alex Zonis. So you can chill: look at the pictures if you require an empathic break from the reading.

Click here to order: Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide: [short URL]: https://shorturl.at/HJXZ0

-Perform a readiness assessment for empathy
-Get the one-minute empathy training
-Engage empathy as a dial, not an “on off” switch
Learn the evidence: empathy is good for your health & well being
Use empathy to sooth anger and rage
-Overcome compassion fatigue and empathic distress
-What are the Big Four empathy breakdowns and how to overcome them
Your brain on empathy
Engage empathy as a method of data gathering
Take the other person – difficult though they may be – as your empathy trainer
-How empathy is the new love
-Feeling like you could use some empathy? Get some here!
-Concise and direct with actionable recommendations to expand your empathy
This book is reasonably priced – especially given the color printing. Order this and related books on empathy here:
Order here: https://amzn.to/3OoQMu7
02: A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy: click here to order: [short URL]: https://shorturl.at/HJXZ0

Empathy gives us our humanity. You will get an orientation and:
A critical review of core issues about empathy
A critical review of the history of empathy
A critical review of empathy and understanding
A critical review of empathy and morals
A critical review of empathy in art and aesthetics
A critical review of empathy and individual and cultural differences

This book is compellingly (reasonably) priced in order to spread the love – and empathy! Order this and related books on empathy here:
Order here: https://amzn.to/3OoQMu7

03. Are you feeling like a natural empath who can’t seem to get any empathy? Get some empathy here. Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, the book, is for a general audience – a readable approach to expanding empathy in your life and the community. 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. Most people are naturally empathic, but the cynicism and denial needed to survive everyday life drives empathy away. Remove the obstacles to empathy and empathy naturally develops and grows. That is the empathy lesson in a nutshell without all the guidance and practice needed to succeed. Find out how to take your empathy to the next level.

Order from author’s page: Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition: https://tinyurl.com/29rd53nt
The following professional publications are included for those

The following professional publications are included for those visitors to this site who have an academic, scholarly interest. Okay, I acknowledge there are actually more than ten. These are peer-reviewed publications and tend to be scholarly. No apologies for that – just noting that if you as a reader want specific personal guidance on expanding your empathy or other specific personal issues, then the recommendation is to give me a call for an initial complimentary consultation. Finally, for videos of presentations and interviews, you may go to the Media page on this site or my Youtube.com channel named “Lou Agosta”.

04. A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, and Recovery: Available now: Click here to order: https://shorturl.at/HJXZ0

Empathy is an essential component of the psychoanalyst’s ability to listen and treat patients. It is key to the achievement of therapeutic understanding and change. A Rumor of Empathy explores the psychodynamic resistances to empathy, from the analyst themselves, the patient, from wider culture, and seeks to explore those factors which represent resistance to empathic engagement, and to show how these can be overcome in the psychoanalytic context. Lou Agosta shows that classic interventions can themselves represent (unconscious) resistances to empathy, such as the unexamined life; over-medication [Plato not Prozac!], and the application of devaluing diagnostic labels.
This work innovates in disentangling the role of empathy in transference with rich clinical examples using micro-narratives to create a clearing for the reader’s empathy to expand and then applies the hermeneutic circle of empathy and therapy to the challenging context of recovery from domestic violence (and related trauma).

05. A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy. This work provides a short history of the distinction “empathy” in the ideas of Hume, Kant, Lipps, Freud, Scheler, Stein (Edith), and Husserl. “Okay, I’ve read enough – I want to order to book.” Click here to order from Amazon – A Rumor of Empathy: Rewriting Empathy in the Context of Philosophy.

The deep, underground history of empathy is surfaced and reconstructed in Hume, Kant, Lipps, Freud, Scheler, Stein, and Husserl. Yet when all the philosophical arguments and categories are complete, the phenomenological methods reduced, and hermeneutic circles spun out, in empathy, we are quite simply in the presence of another human being.

The philosopher David Hume writes extensively of “sympathy,” which for Hume has at least four meanings – one of them is what we mean by “empathy.”
Immanuel Kant writes of “enlarged thinking” from the other’s point of view and Kant’s aesthetics works with “the communicability of affect” – this work connects the dots with empathy.
Find out how a rumor of empathy becomes a scandal of empathy in the work of Theodor Lipps, who Freud studied in depth.
Find out how Freud’s deep commitment to empathy [Einfühlung] gets lost in translation.
Learn of Max Scheler’s penetrating phenomenological analysis of vicarious experience – an “after image” of the other person’s experience – as the foundation for empathy.
Discover how empathy in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl evolves from the periphery of his thinking to the foundation of intersubjectivity.

Order this book and related by Lou Agosta here: https://amzn.to/3OoQMu7
This work is also available in a [relatively] reasonably priced electronic version.
Hey, at least have the university, institute or local library order a hard copy.
For those of you who knew Michael Franz Basch personally, read the tribute to him in the Preface – an empathic moment indeed.

06. Empathy in the Context of Philosophy is the title of a web site and the title of a book:

To order the book, Empathy in the Context of Philosophy click: here

“An insightful and provocative exploration of a topic that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves and the conceptual clarity needed for a proper understanding. Agosta’s study is rich in historical context and thorough in covering the intersections of philosophy and psychology on the question of empathy. It is also accessible and stimulating for a host of applications to current concerns. Agosta rightly, in my view, finds in Heidegger a primary vehicle for advancing the discussion, yet he has his own voice and sense of how to think it through. An impressive achievement.”

Lawrence J. Hatab
Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Philosophy
Old Dominion University

07. A Rumor of Empathy in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. click here: HeideggerRumorOfEmpathy [Note: May also be purchased at Springer.com if you do not want a pre-publication page layout version.] Heidegger was one of the inventors of existentialism, though he rejected that label. This essay develops a four part definition of empathy out of the Dasein-analysis of Martin Heidegger – empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness (in language) are developed out of Heidegger’s design distinctions for human beings (affectivity (Befindlichkeit), understanding, interpretation as a derivative form of understanding, and speech):

08. Chapter Six of my empathy book is where Heinz Kohut’s notion of empathy as vicarious introspection is engaged from the perspective of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic discipline: click here: ChapterSixEmpathy

09. Chapter Three of my empathy book on “Empathy Between Death and the Other”: click here: HeideggerChapterThreeEmpathy

10. This essay is a chapter in the two volumes Empathy I and II edited by Joe Lichtenberg and others. It looks at how empathy is the foundation of human intersubjectivity, where “intersubjectivity” is used in the sense of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. A kind of Kantian transcendental argument is developed out of a single paragraph in Heinz Kohut’s Self Psychology: click here: EmpathyIntersubjectivitybyAgosta

11. Before there was “empathy” there was “sympathy.” This essay engages four different definitions of “sympathy” in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739), and, yes, the overlap and differences with “empathy” are significant. Click here: HumeOnSympathyEmpathy

12. A book review by yours truly of Arnold Goldberg’s book, The Analysis of Failure on what can be learned from failed psychoanalytic cases (which is much). Click here: GoldbergAnalyticFailureReview2014

13. This is one of my favorite legacy publications, which looks at images of fragmentation and integration of the self in one of the classic folktales edited by the Brothers Grimm. It makes the point that without empathy a significancy aspect of our humanity is missing. The hero of the story does not know who to experience shuddering (visceral fear, goose flesh). That experience is a “proxy” or substitute for his entire capacity to experience emotions. Without that capacity, he lacks humanity. The hero’s fairy tale journey and adventure in the world allows him to recover his empathy and become a whole and complete human being. The Recovery of Feelings in the Folktale. Click here: JRHRecoveryFeelingFolktaleAgosta

14. Heidegger on Aristotle’s Account of the Emotions. This essay engages the account of the emotions provided by Aristotle. Amazingly enough, the most complete account of the emotions provided by Aristotle is not in his psychology but in his Rhetoric. The speaker has to understand the emotions in order to arouse and de-arouse (quiet) them. Heidegger points this out in Being and Time (1927) where Heidegger says (in so many words) that this is the “best ever” account of the emotions. However, Heidegger is doing fundamental ontology and leaves this aspect of the emotions undeveloped. This essay develops it further. This Hot Link is an essay on this subject published in Philosophy Today (Dec 2010) – click here – AgostaHeideggerIssue4 2010-Agosta

15. An early version of the above-cited multidimensional definition of empathy: Click here: Vol.6-2AgostaHeideggerianApproachtoEmpathy

16. This legacy essay explains why Kant scholars should be interested in fairy tales. Click here: KantStudienKantsTreasureHardToAttainAgosta

17. An essay that looks at archeological metaphors in Freud and philosophy, inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s book on Freud and its use of the archeological metaphor. Caution – the attached file is large (21MB) – so if it does not load for you, please leave me a comment and i will break it up into parts, okay? For further details, click here: – IJPPPsychoanalysisandPhilosophyAgosta and part two – IJPPPsychoanalysisandPhilosophyAgostaPart2

In conclusion, my commitment is to a gracious and generous listening – empathy. I have performed significant academic, scholarly work on empathy in order to make my commitment to a gracious and generous listening (empathy) a professional as well as a personal reality. My intention is that empathy be less of a rumor and an expanding reality in the life of the community.