A slowdown in posting January 29, 2008

My posting is going to be a bit slower/haphazard for a while. Real life, wouldn’t you know.
I don’t want to lose my wonderful reader-commentators, but I do understand the vastness of the web-world – there’s a lot of good stuff out there.
If you register via RSS feed you’ll be notified when something new appears.
Be well!

What is it to be empathic? January 20, 2008

Empathy is a primal level of interpersonal interaction whereby signals from one person are picked up by another. These may (or may not) become actualised as feelings, and/or thoughts, and/or behaviours.
As readers point out, features of this basic interpersonal signal-detection are authenticity, unthought/unfelt, somatic.
Empathy, then, is but the raw material for being empathic.
What is it [...]

Quickpost – An interesting set of posts January 13, 2008

Evan Hadkins is taking an interesting direction on his blog Wellbeing and health. Over the last week or so he has written a set of three posts in the form of a brief autobiography. Now this part is not exactly unusual in the blogging world – indeed writing about the minuiae of life is the [...]

‘Daily Con’ launch (please give generously) January 1, 2008

Lies, bull, confidence trickery, verbal jujitsu, paramoralisms, being jesuitical, mendacity, twisting the truth, false apologies, truthity, evasiveness, telling porkies, phoniness, quibbling…these are just some of the ways people have of interacting in bad faith.
I have started a spin-off blog Daily Con where exemplars of mendacity can be exhibited. In order to become anything the contents [...]

Quickpost: Jobs for psychopaths? December 15, 2007

My correspondents ‘DuMuarier-Smith’ and Evan Hadkins have been worrying away at the question of whether certain jobs attract/require psychopathy.
DM-T: I’ve been reading Robert Hare’s depiction of the psychopath. Does anyone else think the depiction fits politicians to a T?
EH: I guess the big question is: are there some situations where psychopathology is useful (or, [...]

The silences of psychotherapy December 2, 2007

If therapy is a talking cure, why is there so much silence in it?
The professional therapist and patient can answer this no problem. Sometimes, however, it’s forgotton that not every patient is up with the play. It’s a bit like infantile amnesia where adults forget what it’s like to be a child.
What happens in the [...]

The artist is not the art November 14, 2007

A comment from Arthur reminds me of one of my pet hates – the fallacy of confusing the life events of an artist, scholar, etc. with the art, scholarship, etc. which they produce.
I know this parlour-psychoanalysis is fun, but it cannot be serious. It doesn’t work; it’s not even wrong. Freud (who resorted to it [...]

Norman Mailer, psychologist November 11, 2007

From today’s New York Times:
Norman Mailer, the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation, died on Nov. 10, 2007 at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. He was 84.
Like many a great novelist, Mailer was a great psychologist. It might be worth [...]

Grit, hanging in there, stick-to-itiveness… November 11, 2007

Imagine treading water in deep sea, out of sight of land for, say, an hour. Surely there can’t be a more lonesome experience.
What primal fears would this stir up? How long before hopelessness sets in? And if it carried on longer than that, the exhaustion, the sunburn, the thirst…. How long before hopelessness sets in? [...]

Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. #2 November 9, 2007

Same joke as yesterday, except this time the older analyst’s response is to shrug and say, “Who listens?”