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Comment by adam kondor on November 24, 2009 at 12:40pm

a raft of new research in humans suggests that oxytocin underlies the twin emotional pillars of civilized life, our capacity to feel empathy and trust.

Natalie Angier in the NYT

Comment by adam kondor on November 23, 2009 at 8:25am

so, empathy at its extremes:
"On July 5th, a twenty-two-year-old C.L.T. member named Britnee Brown, who has been with the company for a little more than a year, took a call that was a record five hours, twenty-five minutes, and thirty-one seconds long, from a woman on the East Coast interested in Masai Barefoot Technology shoes"

Be humble!

Comment by adam kondor on November 22, 2009 at 11:43am

What I am recommending is empathy itself.
This is his latest book and he made his name by all his earlier publications so of course there is value to reading his previous books.
I love the fact that he is still an evolutionist/Darwinist!
(also love the fact that he was born in the Dutch city of Hertogenbosch)

Comment by David Rubenstein on November 22, 2009 at 11:13am

So Adam, are you recommending this book "The Age of Empathy"? It has received some very good reviews on Amazon. The author has written a number of books on this subject. Is this book the best of them? Should I just read this one book, or is there value to reading his previous books, too?

Comment by adam kondor on November 22, 2009 at 10:10am

Comment by adam kondor on November 5, 2009 at 3:38pm

Comment by adam kondor on October 25, 2009 at 6:20am

Re: Bion
It seems to me that the act of reading of the books itself is a living experience into the realm of psychic reality and unreality as they are.

Comment by adam kondor on October 25, 2009 at 6:17am

Wilfred Bion: A Memoir of the Future

The concept of "memoirs of the future" or "inherent preconceptions" reveals Wilfred Bion's indebtedness to the ideas of Plato and Kant. The very wording of the concept was so appealing to Bion that he employed it as the overarching title for his psychoanalytic autobiography.

The paradox in the wording of the concept, "memoirs of the future," designates the platonic idea of Ideal Forms, preconceptions which inherently accompany us from birth—and long before! They are older than the thinkers that think them and can anticipate their rendezvous with their future, external counterparts. Thus, the infant, "hard-wired" with the pre-conception of the idea of the breast, can anticipate and then locate that breast, when found, and thereby confer "conception" upon it as the reward for its success in finding what its pre-conception had already anticipated.

"Memoirs of the future" poetically implies that we are born with an atavistic "memory" of the history of the species, to which the specific pre-conception is a subset. Perhaps a concrete example would help. The human infant is born with a number of immune bodies in its immunological armamentarium which have already been "programmed" to anticipate future antibodies who are, as in the phenomenon of dejà vu, "strangely familiar."

In his triadic autobiography (A Memoir of the Future, 1975, 1977, 1979), Bion proffered a highly original aspect of dialogics in the spirit of Bakhtin. He wrote, for instance, of different, split-off, personified aspects of fetal mental life which appeared to be independent of one another and yet could communicate as if they were separate selves from different time zones of maturation—speaking to another, one from the future and other from the past.

read more

Comment by Allan J. Cronin on October 24, 2009 at 8:52pm

the map is not the territory

Comment by Allan J. Cronin on October 24, 2009 at 7:42pm

Krishnamurti!!!

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