Roots and Collapse of Empathy

Roots and Collapse of Empathy

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  • Author: Stein Bråten
  • Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
  • ISBN: 9027271739
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 294

Spanning from care-giving infants and civilian rescuers risking their life to the collapse of empathy in agents of torture and extinction, this unique book deals with and illustrates the altruistic best and atrocious worst of human nature. It begins with infant roots of empathy, then turns to the neurosocial support of empathic participation, and to the nature and nurture of good and ill. It raises questions about how abuse may invite vicious circles of re-enactment, and as to how ordinary people may come to commit torture and mass murders, such as the Auschwitz doctors and the sole terrorist attacking Norway on July 22, 2011.


The Dark Sides of Empathy

The Dark Sides of Empathy

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  • Author: Fritz Breithaupt
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • ISBN: 1501735608
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 288

Many consider empathy to be the basis of moral action. However, the ability to empathize with others is also a prerequisite for deliberate acts of humiliation and cruelty. In The Dark Sides of Empathy, Fritz Breithaupt contends that people often commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of over-identification and a desire to increase empathy. Even well-meaning compassion can have many unintended consequences, such as intensifying conflicts or exploiting others. Empathy plays a central part in a variety of highly problematic behaviors. From mere callousness to terrorism, exploitation to sadism, and emotional vampirism to stalking, empathy all too often motivates and promotes malicious acts. After tracing the development of empathy as an idea in German philosophy, Breithaupt looks at a wide-ranging series of case studies—from Stockholm syndrome to Angela Merkel's refugee policy and from novels of the romantic era to helicopter parents and murderous cheerleader moms—to uncover how narcissism, sadism, and dangerous celebrity obsessions alike find their roots in the quality that, arguably, most makes us human.


Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity

Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity

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  • Author: Salvo Pitruzzella
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1317393007
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 166

Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity presents a new theoretical approach to dramatherapy. The book examines the key concepts of creativity and intersubjectivity in detail, through a comparison of their manifestations in children’s life and the major scientific studies and developing research in the fields. Linking these concepts, Salvo Pitruzzella argues that 'identity' as a construct is now outmoded, and needs to be replaced with a more relational model. His ideas impact on dramatherapy theory, updating its basic tenets, and providing insight into how it practically works, with a focus on imagination as a major tool to support change. Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity will appeal to dramatherapists in training and practice, as well as other professionals in the field of arts therapies, plus those with a general interest in Creative Arts Therapies.


The Gift in the Heart of Language

The Gift in the Heart of Language

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  • Author: Genevieve Vaughan
  • Publisher: Mimesis
  • ISBN: 8857530523
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 391

Genevieve Vaughan offers a paradigm-shifting view of the structure of material and verbal communication, based on mother-child experience and confirmed by recent research in infant psychology.This view justifies a relational epistemology that informs the material gift economy as well as the structure of language itself.Provisioning economies give value to the receivers, and the circulation of gifts consolidates community. Understanding language as verbal gifting unites other orientation with reason to liberate us from biopathic patriarchal conceptions of humanity.Sketched against this background Vaughan introduces a conception of monetized exchange as a giftdenying and expropriating psychological mechanism, which is an unintended collective by product of verbal communication. Thisview stands as a warning against visions of the future in which the institutions of money and the market can be “fixed”to be more caring, and sanitized business as usual can halt the destruction of Mother Earth. Rather a gift economy, which takes as its model the mother-child interaction, the gifting in language and the gifting in mother-centered societies provideshope for a positive future.


Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume I

Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume I

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  • Author: Paul J. Thibault
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1351215574
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 292

Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term ‘language’ as defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have drawn on, have arguably, limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault’s study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language - the Distributed Language view – that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that the fundamental architecture of language can be localized as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organization that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault’s book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of experience it actualizes is always an event, not a thing that we ‘use’. In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume 1 focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II integrates the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated.


The Routledge International Handbook of Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy

The Routledge International Handbook of Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy

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  • Author: Helen Payne
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1351659472
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 647

There is a growing interest in embodied approaches to psychotherapy internationally. This volume focuses on the respective focal professions of dance movement psychotherapy (DMP) and body psychotherapy (BP), addressing the psychotherapeutic need for healing throughout the lifespan. Within embodied clinical approaches, the therapist and client collaborate to discover how the body and movement can be used to strengthen positive relational skills, attending to the client's immediate and long-term needs through assessment, formulation, treatment and evaluation. Both DMP and BP are based upon the capacity and authority of the body and non-verbal communication to support and heal patients with diverse conditions, including trauma, unexplained bodily symptoms and other psychological distress, and to develop the clients’ emotional and relational capacities by listening to their bodies for integration and wellbeing. In The Routledge International Handbook of Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy, world leaders in the field contribute their expertise to showcase contemporary psychotherapeutic practice. They share perspectives from multiple models that have been developed throughout the world, providing information on theoretical advances and clinical practice, as well as discourse on the processes and therapeutic techniques employed individually and in groups. Presented in three parts, the book covers underpinning embodiment concepts, potentials of dance movement psychotherapy and of body psychotherapy, each of which is introduced with a scene-setting piece to allow the reader to easily engage with the content. With a strong focus on cross- and interdisciplinary perspectives, readers will find a wide compilation of embodied approaches to psychotherapy, allowing them to deepen and further their conceptualization and support best practice. This unique handbook will be of particular interest to clinical practitioners in the fields of body psychotherapy and dance movement psychotherapy as well as professionals from psychology, medicine, social work, counselling/psychotherapy and occupational therapy, and to those from related fields who are in search of information on the basic therapeutic principles and practice of body and movement psychotherapies and seeking to further their knowledge and understanding of the discipline. It is also an essential reference for academics and students of embodied psychotherapy, embodied cognitive science and clinical professions.


The Moral Psychology of Internal Conflict

The Moral Psychology of Internal Conflict

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  • Author: Ralph D. Ellis
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 110811900X
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 248

Pushing back against the potential trivialization of moral psychology that would reduce it to emotional preferences, this book takes an enactivist, self-organizational, and hermeneutic approach to internal conflict between a basic exploratory drive motivating the search for actual truth, and opposing incentives to confabulate in the interest of conformity, authoritarianism, and cognitive dissonance, which often can lead to harmful worldviews. The result is a new possibility that ethical beliefs can have truth value and are not merely a result of ephemeral altruistic or cooperative feelings. It will interest moral and political psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and all who are concerned with inner emotional conflicts driving ethical thinking beyond mere emotivism, and toward moral realism, albeit a fallibilist one requiring continual rethinking and self-reflection. It combines 'basic emotion' theories (e.g. Panksepp) with hermeneutic depth psychology. The result is a realist approach to moral thinking emphasizing coherence rather than foundationalist theory of knowledge.


The Cultural Power of Personal Objects

The Cultural Power of Personal Objects

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  • Author: Jared Kemling
  • Publisher: State University of New York Press
  • ISBN: 1438486189
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 564

The Cultural Power of Personal Objects seeks to understand the value and efficacy of objects, places, and times that take on cultural power and reverence to such a degree that they are treated (whether metaphorically or actually) as "persons," or as objects with "personality"—they are living objects. Featuring both historical and theoretical sections, the volume details examples of this practice, including the wampum of certain Native American tribes, the tsukumogami of Japan, the sacred keris knives of Java, the personality of seagoing ships, the ritual objects of Hinduism and Ancient Egypt, and more. The theoretical contributions aim to provide context for the existence and experience of personal objects, drawing from a variety of disciplines. Offering a variety of new philosophical perspectives on the theme, while grounding the discussion in a historical context, The Cultural Power of Personal Objects broadens and reinvigorates our understanding of cultural meaning and experience.


Assessing Empathy

Assessing Empathy

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  • Author: Elizabeth A. Segal
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • ISBN: 0231543883
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 132

Empathy is a widely used term, but it is also difficult to define. In recent years, the field of cognitive neuroscience has made impressive strides in identifying neural networks in the brain related to or triggered by empathy. Still, what exactly do we mean when we say that someone has—or lacks—empathy? How is empathy distinguished from sympathy or pity? And is society truly suffering from an "empathy deficit," as some experts have charged?? In Assessing Empathy, Elizabeth A. Segal and colleagues marshal years of research to present a comprehensive definition of empathy, one that links neuroscientific evidence to human service practice. The book begins with a discussion of our current understanding of empathy in neurological, biological, and behavioral terms. The authors explain why empathy is important on both the individual and societal levels. They then introduce the concepts of interpersonal empathy and social empathy, and how these processes can interrelate or operate separately. Finally, they examine the weaknesses of extant empathy assessments before introducing three new, validated measures: the Empathy Assessment Index, the Social Empathy Index, and the Interpersonal and Social Empathy Index.


A Rumor of Empathy

A Rumor of Empathy

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  • Author: L. Agosta
  • Publisher: Springer
  • ISBN: 1137465344
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 134

A rumor of empathy in vicarious receptivity, understanding, interpretation, narrative, and empathic intersubjectivity becomes the scandal of empathy in Lipps and Strachey. Yet when all the philosophical arguments and categories are complete and all the hermeneutic circles spun out, we are quite simply in the presence of another human being.