How Does a Therapist Stay Neutral?

Counseling Couples or Families Is About Empathy, Not Objectivity

Can we, and should we, ever really be neutral? In a new series, Zócalo explores the idea of neutrality—in politics, sports, gender, journalism, international law, and more. In this essay, therapist Craig Libman explains how he helps families figure out a way forward when there are no good options.

“He just doesn’t listen to me!” “She never understands what I’m going through!”

There I sat, their psychotherapist, sandwiched between this couple who had been married at least 50 years. The husband, a Vietnam veteran with metastatic …

by Craig Libman | June 17, 2024

How Do We Disagree in the Public Square?

Those Who Study and Work to Keep Civil Discourse Civil Share the ‘Secret Sauce’ for Productive Debate

April 25, 2024

The public square is the meeting ground where people make society happen. In these spaces, physical or metaphorical or digital, we work through our shared dramas and map our collective …

The Stories Doctors Tell

Physicians and Patients Stitch Together Narratives to Diagnose and Heal

by Jay Baruch | February 1, 2023

The belly pain is so bad that Mrs. Alves*, a woman in her 40s, is worming uncomfortably on the ER stretcher. “I need an answer,” she says. I promise her …

Why Is It so Hard to Mourn the Vast Number of COVID Dead?

An Empathy Scientist Reveals How Our Brains Get in the Way of Comprehending Calamity on This Scale

by Sara Konrath | December 7, 2020

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first U.S. death from COVID-19 on February 29. Within a month, more than 1,000 Americans were dying on a single day. …

The Missionary Children Who Taught Empathy to Americans

Raised Abroad, John Hersey, Pearl Buck, and Others Brought Back a Faith in Open-Mindedness

By David A. Hollinger | January 29, 2018

Published in 1946, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which described the impact of the atomic bomb on residents of the city, is an extraordinary book. It not only described the bomb’s effects, …

How Our Evolving Understanding of Individual Autonomy Led to Human Rights for All

A Cultural Historian Traces Empathy From Epistolary Novels to Abolition to Act Up

Lynn Hunt — Interview by Lisa Margonelli | July 17, 2017

In Inventing Human Rights: A History, UCLA historian Lynn Hunt traces the modern concept of Human Rights to a series of mid-18th century epistolary novels with a strong first person …

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