"Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine. "

Leo Tolstoy

Compassion lecture: what? why? how? so ... ?

June 1, 2017

I'm due to give a short lecture tomorrow on "Compassion".  Here is a downloadable copy of the slides ... sadly with most of the images removed for copyright reasons.  The event is a "Collider session".  It's a kind of upmarket brainstorming exercise with an invited group of participants to look at how compassionate ideas & interventions might be helpfully introduced when the new Edinburgh university student intake arrives this autumn.  I'm being wheeled on to give a brief introductory overview.

Useful to have Paul Gilbert's very recently published book to refer to:

I will be using a pretty classic evolutionary/attachment based explanation for why these issues are at the heart of being human ...

Emphasising the toxicity of excessive isolation ...

Playing with Jennifer Crocker's egosystem/ecosystem metaphor ...

Underlining the centrality of values ...

And glancing at some of the already published research that can inform any new interventions we might try ...

And segueing into what might be used in the autumn with the students ...

Mm ... hope it will be useful ... and difficult not to end with a glance at the old foursome!

 

 

compassion self-compassion