Empathy Lessons

Recent Posts - page 17

• Soul Machine: John Locke, Inventor of CBT [Cognitive Behavioral Therapy]?

  By Lou Agosta on January 31, 2016 • ( 1 )

  

  By the end of George Makari’s engaging – indeed monumental – Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (W.W. Norton 2016: 652 pp.) one comes to understand that the modern mind is more ancient than most people believe and the… Read More ›

• 3 Empathy Books: Meet the Author Book Signing: Short of breath? Empathy is oxygen for the soul! Get expanded empathy.

  By Lou Agosta on January 16, 2016

  

  Empathy is oxygen for the soul. Short of breath? Maybe one needs expanded empathy!

• Trends and Predictions in Empathy for 2016

  By Lou Agosta on December 27, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  The idea is to pause for a moment and consider the relationship of empathy trends and predictions. I include empathy as an enabler or something enabled in diverse forms of relatedness. Now admittedly, so many of my predictions for last… Read More ›

• Top Ten List: Give Empathy for the Holidays

  By Lou Agosta on December 19, 2015

  

  How is Christmas like a day at the job? Give up? You get to do all the work; and the big guy in the suit gets all the credit. [Note: if I have to explain the joke, it is not… Read More ›

• A Rumor of Empathy in the History of Psychiatry: A Review

  By Lou Agosta on December 5, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  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.

• Historical Empathy and Strict Constructionism: About Guns

  By Lou Agosta on November 29, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  When the framers of the US Constitution wrote the Second Amendment, the standard weapon was a single shot musket, powder and ball. This time out I am a strict constructionist.

• A Rumor of Empathy in the Philosophy of Kant

  By Lou Agosta on October 25, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  Kant famously asserted he was awakened from his “dogmatic slumbers” by studying Hume. This occurred not only in Kant’s theory of knowledge, but [arguably] also in taste, aesthetics, and the communicability of feelings. The “communicability of feelings” (1790/93a: 174; §40… Read More ›

• Review: Illusions of a Future by Kate Schechter

  By Lou Agosta on September 19, 2015

  

  The picture is of Socrates drinking the hemlock by the celebrated French painter, Jacques-Louis David. After reading Kate Schechter’s Illusions of a Future (2014) one has to wonder if psychoanalytic politics have brought the practice of psychoanalysis to a similar result…. Read More ›

• Plato Not Prozac!

  By Lou Agosta on September 12, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  The neurochemical reshaping of personality has had many unanticipated consequences. I acknowledge that the debate is not ended by the Chapter in my A Rumor of Empathy on “Plato Not Prozac,” the name of which is hereby acknowledged to be from… Read More ›

• One Person’s Empathy is Another’s Counter-Transference

  By Lou Agosta on August 30, 2015 • ( 1 )

  

  One person’s empathy is another’s countertransference. I will not confess my weaknesses, since they will be obvious to the reader in any case. The short – very short – definition of “countertransference” is one’s reaction and response to the other… Read More ›

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