If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird) In 1909 Edward Titchener introduced a new word in the English language: ‘empathy’. He went back to the
Heinz Kohut, father of the school of self-psychology, in the last lecture of his life, when considering the most significant factor leading to mental illness, said, "The absence of the mother". Whilst his words could be taken literally, he was talking symbolically about the loss of a nurturing caregiver and the lack of a supportive environment and consistent parental figures. In short, the lack of a secure base. Bowlby’s term
How is it that some people seem to breeze through life effortlessly? What secret do they have that enables them to ride pressures and demands? Sometimes from the outside it seems that other people's lives are simple and easy. We know that this is far from reality, but often it doesn't look that way. Bowlby Working with war orphans in London in the 1940s and 1950s, psychiatrist John Bowlby
When we're thinking about when someone's involved in interpreting his or her own actions on the basis of intentional mental states (such as physical sensation, desires, needs, feelings and the like), the related concept of ‘mindfulness’ is particularly helpful. Langer In the late 1980s, after a decade or so of research, Ellen Langer wrote her book ‘Mindfulness’ as a way of translating the technical jargon of psychological research
‘Mentalising simply implies a focus on mental states in oneself or in others, particularly in explanations of behaviour. That mental states influence behaviour is beyond question. Beliefs, wishes, feelings and thoughts, whether inside or outside our awareness, determine what we do’ [1]. Mentalising involves a capacity for interpretation of thoughts and actions, to ‘think about thinking’. It's experiential in the sense of being a starting point for thinking. A
‘Know thyself’ (Delphic maxim) A CIA interrogation manual from the mid-1960s admitted that ‘regression’ in the psychic sense is the aim of interrogation. The anonymous author wrote that it was necessary to ‘obliterate the familiar and replace it with the weird’. He called it ‘the Alice in Wonderland or confusion technique’, and the object was ‘to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee. He is accustomed to
