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From the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City. National Educational radio presents the Cooper Union forum series on peace love and creativity the hope of mankind. Here now is the chairman of the Cooper Union forum Dr. Johnson. E Fairchild. Good evening ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Cooper Union forum this is your German John Swinney fair speaking to you from the great hall of the Cooper Union where we're continuing with the program on the slogan create to pity the hopes of many. The subject of the list of subjects for discussion. I mean absolutely. It was bigger than our Greece. Who is director of research at the post-graduate Center for Mental Health here in New York City. Dr. Reef educated in City Columbia University for many years served at Hunter College
for standing struct or associate professor and he was director of the vocational guy cider of Hunter College 1940 51 which time we were once removed. He has devoted his entire life to study psychology applications of same. We're very glad to welcome him back to the Cooper Union. A former hearing deficit talk we're very happy to welcome Dr. Bernard Reese back to the Cooper Union for Dr. Reef. You've always Dr. Fairchild introduces me that he's going to end up with a final space died in
1968. It's kind of a formal obituary or a formal introduction always worries me and then I get started with a paper of this sort of makes me feel that after all the parents I talked to during the day worried about their kids reading and I must be the last person in the world able to read. Look at this mess of paper and I decide to throw it away but I'm going to try and stick to it a little bit for a while. Because when Dr. Fairchild gave me the topic of antipathy and empathy I didn't know what it was all about. Perhaps I still don't I'll leave you to solve that question for me at the end of the hour. At least I didn't look up the meaning of the term. Last year at this forum I was given the opportunity to talk on a popular topic which I call learning to love and learning to talk about it. It seems that tonight I'm supposed to tell you in the other
cheek and another topic and talk among other things about learning to hate and to be hateful with the alternative direction about talking about learning to feel something about one's fellow man. I want to talk about the meaning of the words both in the formal title of tonight's discussion and the way I've translated it. Because without agreement about what words mean or about. Communication is impossible particularly with an audience's response as I know you. We have a professional dictionary of psychological slang which we call the psychiatric dictionary. And in that we read them or have a mystical word. Empathy is defined as an intellectual understanding of what is inherently foreign to our own ego and other people. It's a
form of identification with other people and is in collective. In contrast to emotional or abstract of identification or sympathy on the other hand is the existence of a feeling identical with or resembling that which another experience. According to Freud identification may arise when there is no emotional eyepatch moment to the person imitated. But I know motion stimulated by that person. For example an individual may copy the feelings and actions of another person because we imitate toy has an unconscious impulse which is set free. When he hears or looks at the one he is copying in sympathy the feelings of the imitator are essentially inside of the person who was feeling the
sympathy. One one on one one of both of the people who share common feelings the condition is called identification. If we translate back into English we find that empathy is intellectual recognition of the state of mind of another person without really feeling what the other person feels. This is a very conscious and intellectual operation which makes it possible to communicate with another person something empathize or can understand even if we can't share the feelings of the speaker. There are however some other words in the same category with which we are going to have to talk about which we're going to have to talk tonight and which are relevant to tonight's discussion I want to mention those. Among them my antipathy apathy and a new word which
I've coined for this purpose called Memphis the antipathy like sympathy is a feeling within a person. It's not the opposite of empathy which is an understanding thing but of simply it's a feeling of being again of a constitutional settled or learned version to what the other individual is feeling or thinking psychologically cycle analytically and humanly. Although we talk about hate in negative terms it's probably one of the most satisfying feelings that we have. I hope we all hate with sufficient intensity on the right circumstances which means I hope you hate the same things I hate. Sympathy like antipathy is a feeling term. One literally feels for and with the other person.
This is not to say that one has the same kind of emotional reaction that characterizes the other person. Rather it is a unique idiosyncratic. Personally developed gut response to what somebody else is reporting or really really living or really feeling and your own words. The other word which is not found in any dictionary which is useful in filling out the range of response words which deal with feelings of hours by the talk of the other person. I have called a member of my m y. The member part of which comes from the same stem as mimicry to imitate. By member a member of the I mean simulated feeling in response to one of the same nature as the feelings of the person doing the talking. I'm empathize when I say to a patient that I feel as
if I were also annoyed I feared by this situation to which my patient was reacting with anger. Memphis is the usual game of the therapist and Eric Burns is employed by ingratiating parents faced by a child with whom they are desperately trying. I'm intellectually trying to build a relationship. The angry the mother says to the child I know how you feel when she really doesn't but she wants to whisk oblation relationship with the child and she puts on the guy's feelings she imitates in a sense what the child was saying in one sentence suppose and another it's an expression of a recognition that experiences can be shared even if the feeling about what happens in the experience or feelings about what happens in the experiences are not identical. And finally you want to return to common English. We'll talk about a concept
which is necessary to round out what I call pathology. This is the most currently involved and to parents the most disturbing label of all namely apathy. Literally the word means absence of feeling. Psychologically However from what we know of the people we have observed studied and talked with. It's descriptive more of the non expression either in words or in body Terry and then EU motion. This does not mean as so many of our writers have led us to believe that there is no feeling in the adolescent about whom we use the term apathetic most frequently. The observable apathy is often said by its possessor to cover the question what's the use of showing feelings. It doesn't change
anything that today's youngsters are not apathetic shown in one way and their eagerness to experience feelings through the use of marijuana and other psychedelic media. I think that what we see when we talk to the kids who are involved in this form of behavior is an intense effort to experience things. This is the language that they use and we tend to disbelieve because we don't like the medium with which they are experimenting. But we also don't understand what these kids mean when they say we are looking for a new experience. They want to feel they don't want to be told they want to read it out of books. They don't want to get it from literature and certainly they don't get it from the idiots you know.
We can't as adults frequently free ourselves and we can't get excited and turned on by so called Psychedelic art and music. As a matter of fact we don't even usually refused to try because perhaps we're afraid to give up our apathy and to wall ourselves to experience feelings which may get beyond the point where we want them to go or we feel safe. The problem with the youngsters of whom I speak is to turn their so-called apathy from dealing exclusively with their self feelings and emotions around objects to having feelings for people and to understand what other people feel. The disturbing thing about these kids is that they can feel a lot about colors and music and all art but they don't frequently talk about
what they feel about the other people in the room. It's as if they have turned their attention away from the human factor to the object world and they get all their kicks out of things and not out of people. Prescriptions for the task of turning from the object world to the people world are not so difficult to find. The prescriptions are not difficult to find but how to work them out how to implement them is far tougher. We know that in every So society use looks for models even among animals some behavior is determined by at the very by the actions of the parents who serve as models for the young animals we speak about these parents are imprinting agents. We have to ask ourselves what modes of feeling empathic sympathetic or antipathetic or apathetic we furnish.
Do we empathize or it worries members of the victims of bombing. Or the victims of the paralyzing gas and mace used yesterday against those who felt emotionally they had to show their antipathy to our Vietnam policy. What model are we projecting. As we light one cigarette after another and have our regular after dinner drinks while we talk to our children about the dangers of becoming habituated. The marijuana we could go on and on. We talk about how we've evaded the income tax and scold the kid for cheating on a school exam. We sympathetic and Paktika apathetic to the continued smoking propaganda on radio TV and in the magazines and newspapers. Do we feel anything and
express it. If we do when we see an ad as I saw recently on television television or an automobile in 1968 model which showed a crowd of hoodlums investigating about the steal this wonderful product the kids were massed around. The script was talking about the wonderful advantages the kids were talking about how they were going to steal it when in walked a cop. That's where the stuff is there another stimulus for us but only reserved for potential purchasers of 968 model. If we as adults show I have no feelings on these and similar incidents what do we expect of those who are looking to us as a model for how apathy becomes the pathology of our kids. The importance of these words is that they all refer to interpersonal
relationships. And to understand how we come to the end to make way apathetic way sympatric we have to look somewhat carefully at what goes on in our relationships with people and particularly our children. It's also necessary to remember that too about terms we furred to gut feelings emotions. And the other two we flirt to see if reactions or intellectual understanding which is quite a different kettle of fish. One of the temptations facing us as social scientists and particularly psychologists is to jump from what we know about individuals or pairs of individuals or groups of individuals to larger groupings called societies cultures and countries. If we happen to find someone set of characteristics to be true of a number of
individuals. We're often apt to talk in similar ways about nations and countries we call civilization sicko disease and even use words like paranoid to describe the political and international events in a given political social area. I don't have to point out that this kind of cheap analysis which is characteristic of a lot of popular fiction is apt to be very misleading when we try to understand what happens nationally. To accept the analogy of individual and culture is to accept the state as a kind of superhuman with the will and psyche of its own brings us pretty close to fascism. Actually what wise scientists and practitioners agree upon when they try to jump from what they know about individuals to what they suspect about state or nation. Is that large social units like nation
have their own characteristics that are unique to them. They must be studied as such and not as if they were merely enlarged individuals. This applies to us tonight and that I find it impossible for fundamental reasons. To argue as has been done by two prominent. Social scientists and psychologists now it was between these ought to be on the stored by what we know about Robin's Squire old Sparrow from the stickleback fish. Dr. LORAN and one of his collaborators have written books about aggression which they claim that territoriality which is the tendency of an animal for reasons which not even the specialist in animal behavior know very much about the setup limits the territory around it which it defends against
any invader. That this concept of territoriality applies to the behavior of a nation that we are defending our territory in the. Hi Lana. Pretty ambitious territory for us to feel at home in and to jump from fish to Johnson may be a pretty wide leap. We have to fight this tendency to try and explain complex phenomena like was and social revolution in terms of what is true about the behavior of an individual human being let alone what's true about a white rat or a red breasted Robin. So tonight we're going to I'm going to try and deal only with the feelings and the pseudo feelings
of individuals both single in small groups family size and then go on to some observation that might profitably be asked of nations and to see what some of the studies of a nation and as unique entities as showing us about the possibility of predicting our understanding national behavior. The questions to which we will address of the how and under what kinds of stimulation do feelings of hate and sympathy develop out of these feelings express themselves and behavior. Is an aggressive child a child we call aggressive really expressing and sympathy for hate. Conversely is a dependant non-aggressive kid free of hatreds and incapable of defending himself against exploitation and hate how do parents force to the development of socially useful behaviors
are anti-social and the use of more destructive that it is you. In this connection I'd like to do what I said I wouldn't do and go back for a moment to laboratory experiments with psychologists favorite subjects white rats in this case white mice. No color distinction intended to zoom it could have been done as well with any other kind of mice except that we breed white by white mice more readily. One man found that he could separate out by breeding three strains of animals which differed in their success in fighting on Kadian members of one of the other strains. In other words there were three groups of animals which were in cages with each other would fight and in all instances one could find the strain was more successful in fighting with B and C than was be with say USC would be.
All of these animals had been isolated from the time they were weaned until they were sexually mature and then they were allowed to meet with members of the other strangers to see what would happen. Since it was found that with his winning that was the difference that one group of animals the superior to the other groups fighting ability. It looked as if this was an end I inherited trait. However when the experiment I handled a very hostile aggressive successful during infancy while they were in the period before complete weaning their aggression disappeared and they became submissive upon meeting members of the other strangers with whom they would normally go for another worry. The extension of some degree of relationship with the
environment in this case but the experiment ended pretty rapidly. To do away with the hostility which somehow been bred into these animals doing the weaning period. So here on a relatively simple level we have an example of the influence of early experience in modifying and the past and aggressive behavior. Let's look at some of the studies on the development of aggression. A few years ago was fashionable to define aggression as an inevitable outcome of frustration and frustration. Like other simple explanations this was much too simple. A fresh frustration and aggression were found to be bungled. That is they contain many other behavioral personality and emotional emotional components
which have to be sorted out in the study. One question that arose was that of individual differences in the toleration for frustration the cause of these differences and the meaning for the individual. Second it was apparent that both prostration and aggression had many different outlets which had to be studied in relationship to the individual who showed frustrated or aggressive behavior. And finally we had to ask what is the average of the culture toward the expression of his aggression is something that we like or dislike. We found some rather peculiar things in other studies which deal with the general area of what we expect of a child. I think as parents we all feel that we would like to be open and friendly to go up and speak to strangers quite
easily to greet people with a smile not to be upset not to have too much not to be cautious shy and hesitant. This is something we frown on. And yet it was found in a long long study of Sarah Lawrence College. But the kids who were such nice youngsters they could be easily approached. They were open. Twenty years later these youngsters were far more neurotic than the kids who were very much more suspicious about people in the beginning. Despite our expectations from these kids and because we expected them to be friendly they found that when they got into one unfriendly world we took it in the neck. And they couldn't understand these youngsters 20 years later couldn't understand why it was that people didn't treat them the way they treated other people. The golden rule just doesn't seem to work somehow. Where we live
the kids who are more fortunate and suspicious of other people who test their environment before they trust themselves for what turned out generally to need much less help 20 years later and to be open. So we have to look at what our expectations of children do to force behavior which later becomes harmful in the field of aggression and antipathy. We begin to ask what happened within the family. How are the parents added you about what they tolerate or what they don't tolerate. I've seen experienced and interpreted by the kids in the family. We had to look for attitudes and behavior within the nuclear family the parents and brothers and sisters.
Once we got started on this current of study parental attitudes toward children very early in life has become a topic which is mushroom today that we have a tremendous bulk of data which only a computer can handle one kind of analysis that's going on is done by computers. I'd like here only to refer to some of the outstanding initial impressions from all of this stuff. One that seems to be surprising and perhaps a little remote from our topic but still which should be publicized is that the ways in which parents treat their kids whether this victim is the punitive or rewarding all the scolding or all the protective robot praising is in no way related to the development of emotional difficulty in the child. It doesn't matter how you treat your kid knows areas that you know are not relevant to the production of a
healthy or a mentally disturbed youngster.
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Series
Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind
Episode
Empathy and antipathy of Man, part one
Producing Organization
WNYC (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-959c985h
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip/500-959c985h).
Description
Episode Description
This program presents the first part of a lecture by Bernard F. Reiss, Postgraduate Center for Mental Health.
Series Description
This series presents lectures from the 1968 Cooper Union Forum. This forum's theme is Peace, Love, Creativity: The Hope of Mankind.
Date
1968-01-23
Topics
Psychology
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:28:14
Credits
Producing Organization: WNYC (Radio station : New York, N.Y.)
Producing Organization: Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Speaker: Fairchild, Johnson E.
Speaker: Reiss, Bernard F.
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 68-10-8 (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:27:58
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Citations
Chicago: “Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind; Empathy and antipathy of Man, part one,” 1968-01-23, University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-959c985h.
MLA: “Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind; Empathy and antipathy of Man, part one.” 1968-01-23. University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-959c985h>.
APA: Peace, love, creativity: Hope of mankind; Empathy and antipathy of Man, part one. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-959c985h