In contemporary American culture, ‘The Other’ can be a family member, a close friend, a lover, a virtual character, a celebrity, a notorious criminal, a raggedy clothed homeless person, a rival in a contest, some unknown person sitting next to you in a classroom or at a rock concert, or someone of the other side of the planet. Regardless of what they actually are like, when we see or hear of ‘The Other’ all of us will tend to attribute traits, assume social status, impute intentions to them, infer that they were the cause of acts even though they were only accidentally associated and not actually observed to be causally related. People, we, can observe one single incidence of behavior, like a harsh or endearing tone, a faux pas of etiquette, an odd accent or pronunciation, an expression of taste, a lack of key in-group knowledge, and such. From this single incident, we may draw inferences about a vast array of other characteristics they probably could have.

In a TV ad, a young woman is sitting in a coffee shop reading and as she looks up, she sees a man and winks at him. He assumes she is signaling for him to come-on to her. In reality, she has an eyelid tick and is quite shocked when he makes as if he is going to give a positive response to her ‘come on’. If you see a person in the distance waving their hand in your direction, you are likely to assume they are signaling hello and perhaps they know you even though you do not recognize them. However, the same wave of the hand can signal hello, goodbye, stay away, or it may simply be an attempt to clear the air of a foul smell. When seeing some thing, some signal, or some person that is similar to what we think we have seen before, we are likely to assume that it is the same kind of thing, means the same, or is like the prior similar person. Up close, they all actually may be quite different.

However, while you are interpreting, correctly or incorrectly, the behavior or behavior as signal, ‘The Other’ has entered your world. You can decide whether to notice and if you do notice, you can decide whether and to what degree to accommodate or counter accommodate to their behavior or gesture. Your next move becomes an adventure with unknown outcomes and therefore it entails degrees of risk. A person may scream and gesticulate in what seems like an enraged manner and yet you may be stolidly underactive. It seems that the significance and not the magnitude of a person’s response is what matters and significance is context contingent. A person may make only the slightest lift of an eyebrow and ‘An Other’ may suddenly blanch and rush out of the room.

A person in disheveled and shabby cloths, redolent of booze, sits down next to you. Initially you pretend not to notice. Your friends and acquaintances are with you. If you turn and look down your nose at the intruder, you will seem rude and snobbish. If you move some distance away and act as though a human dreg has violated your space, you will seem cruel and ruthlessly insensitive. If you act in a kindly and moderately comfortable manner, you know you may lose status in the eyes of your friends since having associates that are considered social pariahs by your group means that you could not possibly ‘one of them’. In that event, your friends could even shun you. The reactions of each of your friends can have a different and complex significance for you. If only one of them were to shrug and turn their palms outward, your dread might be significantly less.

Is it not true then that ‘The Other’ conditions your existence? You are not simply you. You are a unit with ‘The Other’. You are a dyad, if you are a human being. Even if you live totally alone, as an isolate, you are a dyad because, as human, you are what you are in relation to other humans. In interaction with each ‘other’, whether in a group or not, you are a dyad. As human, you inevitably are social. Also, regardless of your self-concept, as far as your identity is concerned, you are what others ascribe to you. Suppose the disheveled person, mentioned above, that sat next to you was Howard Hughes during one of his periods of decompensation. Suppose you act kindly toward him in spite of his appearance and in spite of the fear of disapproval form your group. He asks your name, you tell him and ask his name in turn, and he says, with the tone of privilege and distinction, that he is Howard Hughes. Suddenly the hauteur posture of your friends is transformed into astonishment, but more importantly to you, awe, admiration, and even envy toward you. Immediately, your status has risen several rungs on the ladder. During the span of those few seconds, your identity went down and then up as if on a rollercoaster.

Here is a brief vignette to illustrate people and identities ascribed to people can be radically transformed. Suppose a woman called Cher had had a very close woman friend about ten years ago. Cher had not seen her friend in the interim. The friend, Beth, had been a spinster and a rather mousey, delicate, sexually inhibited, wallflower of a woman. Now, suppose you run into her and barely recognize her. Beth is lively and flamboyantly dressed. You ask about her life and find that she is a widow. Beth had married an adventurous, outgoing man but he had died a few years back. As Beth unveils her life story since last they had seen each other, it turns out that since her husband’s demise, she has traveled all over the world, been on safaris and bagged wild animals, climbed mountain peaks with only herself and local guides, had had many brief affairs, had participated in a native ritual in which she was stripped and had her body painted with exotic ritual symbols, and the list of outlandish adventures went on and on. You look at her quizzically and ask, "Are you sure you are the Beth that I knew when we were high school friends?"

Beth explains that the man she married had gradually nudged her along into trying new things until she discovered an exhilarating new freedom of spirit. She found her self was released to grow in ways that gave her self-confidence, adventurousness, and even bravery. After her husband died, she had grieved and withdrawn into her previous shell. However, she began to miss the liberating and exciting life she had had with her husband. The only friends she now had were those she and her husband had cultivated together. When she mentioned her emptiness and longing for the kind of life they had had together, her friends counseled her that he would have wanted her to go on living the kind of life they had led. She decided to do just that and struck out on her own. Now, to her delight, she found that she was capable of reengaging in the adventurous life that they had led even though she was single. He had left her financially well fixed enough to do just that.

Cher was quite amazed and astounded that anyone could change that much. Beth said that with his support, as opportunities arose, she chose to dive in and try to expand herself and truly experience life. Hearing all this, Cher had to revise her idea of Beth’s identity. Cher wondered why she, who had been the more extroverted of the two, had never been able to make those kinds of choices and expand her own horizons. Of course, what neither she nor Beth realized was that choices such as those Beth had made were a function of the differing structures of their lives.

As the wife of an adventurous man, her role had been to be a co-adventurer and as such, with his gentle encouragement, she learned, adapted, and adopted a whole, vast, new range of behaviors and social skills. In the midst of new, challenging, exotic foreign environments, her perspectives on life and her worldview expanded and her old acceptance of and conformity to provincial, conservative, social conventions and proper behavior fell by the wayside. She grew accustomed to unfamiliar ways of being and doing. She grew in comfort with doing and being offbeat things that she would never have dreamt of before. She was amazed at herself. As her identity changed, her self-concept changed, and she became, and fully owned, the new person she was becoming. Now it was Cher’s job to revise the identity she had had of Beth. Cher even wondered if they could still be friends since being Beth’s friend might require participating in some of these risqué, avant-garde behaviors. What would her family and friends think of her if they became aware of the fact that she was engaging in what they might consider decadent, even taboo acts. In other words, in the structure of her world and her identity would be perilously threatened which, in turn, would be very threatening to her.

If a teen, or an adult, idolizes a celebrity, they are involved in a dyad. However, there is only a one-way interaction. The celebrity is often taken as model and their cloths and mannerism may be imitated. However, unlike Beth’s case, the celebrity is not helping the fan grow. One may wish they were like the celebrity, but the celebrity spend long hours learning, keep themselves motivated to work hard, they had to practice long and hard, wait for opportunities, face challenges, cope with rejection, handle the attention and the income that comes with success, manage their self-concept and balance the demands on their life, and deal with many other developments that require the painful process of adapting and maturing. Beth had the constant companionship of Ben to help her learn to deal with such challenges and to help her expand her understanding of the world and mature in so many ways. Most elements of our culture seems to be unaware of that getting an education, modeling after others’ behavior, worshipping celebrity idols, and even taking others’ advice does not provide a person with kind of patient and consistent coaching, guidance, and support that Beth received from Ben. There usually are esteemed local leaders, older peers or siblings, and other local public figures that young persons may imitate as models, yet who do not provide what Beth got from Ben. How much less can celebrities provide this help for the process of maturing? In fact, most communities are littered with negative role models. An older person with a reprehensible or criminal life style may be regarded with awe by their followers. A young person can easily attempt follow and emulate these negative models. Often there are people in positions of authority with respect and prestige who, nevertheless, engage in opprobrious behavior that is condoned or ignored by the community. A young person witnessing this may be led to feel that being their audience is exciting precisely because they get away with disapproved behavior. They might even cheer them on.

In fact, ‘The Other’ is never truly known to us. With varying degrees of familiarity we typically learn to make a few correct assumptions about ‘The Other’s’ like and dislikes. We learn somewhat correctly to anticipate what they will do. We often become convinced that we know how they feel about us. Some people can be in an intimate relationship, like a marriage, for decades and never have the slightest inkling about what is hidden deep in their private selves. Assumptions about people can be extremely amiss. In many cases, people are not even aware of what is hidden in their own private selves. What we see is ‘The Other’s’ public self just as what we show to others is our public self. With respect to the people that we see at a distance, hear about, read about, or see in the media, the variety of ascriptions of traits we can make is limitless. However, there is usually no one there to instruct youth in how to resist negative peer pressure, how to be transparent in expressing their true feelings and opinions, how to assess others objectively, how to take into consideration the way a person’s life conditions and social structural forces and life history shaped them, or how to listen and be empathetic. Becoming a mature person is not like the old saw of ‘nature taking its course unassisted.

Keep these thoughts in your mind as we explore the question of persons of a different race such as the Negro or, as we say today, the African American. When slaves were first brought to America, Americans of European descent considered them subhuman. Until recent decades, most peoples of the world thought animals had no feelings and were even insensate. If an African American was thought to be subhuman, they could also be considered to be without feelings and therefore could be dealt with using physical brutality to force them to do hard labor and use the fear of it to control them. Like slaves of long ago, enemies can be dehumanized to justify inhumane policies toward them. Unless we are in face-to-face combat with them, enemies are an unknown factor, a kind of ultimate ‘The Other’. For most of us, the traits we ascribe to them, the identity we give them is completely determined by the media. If enemies attack, or if oppressed peoples counterattack, they not only tend to be dehumanized but often demonized as well. If a people as a whole are considered enemies, yet still considered humans with the capacity for feelings like our own, demonizing them can permit and encourage inflicting brutal treatment.

Inhumane, brutal treatment of the enemy or rebelling slaves is permitted precisely because they do have feelings and therefore they can be made to suffer. The more the enemy is hated and/or feared, the greater is the satisfaction gained from punishing and brutalizing them, especially if their suffering will be severely painful. If plantation owners could define slaves as subhuman, then they could oppress and work them beyond endurance. If they resisted or counterattacked, they could be demonized which justified severely torturous retribution or even murder. Since there was a low threshold for what was considered a crime and plantation owners were exempt from using due process with slaves, frequently a ghastly progression from dehumanizing to demonizing occurred with slaves who were ‘presumed’ to have committed a crime. All too frequently, rage over some minor infraction, defiance, or escape attempt resulted in lynching. This was occasionally accompanied by burning. Ironically, mobs who lynched ‘offender’ slaves delighted to see them writhe and scream in pain from being burned and lynched. However, this demonstration that they were capable of feelings and sensations belied beliefs that slaves were subhuman, like animals, and incapable of human feelings. Obviously, the cognitive inconsistency did not register with the owners. As children were allowed to witness and even laugh and clap their hands during a lynching and burning, they were learning to define slaves as subhuman and learning that treating them in this manner was socially acceptable behavior.

Southerners even heard preachers proclaim that the African slaves were subhuman and slavery was approved of in the Bible. If a preacher were to somehow have been able to convince these white citizens that African slaves were humans just like them and deserved to be treated with love, as brothers, as Jesus taught, this would leave a horrible, guilty, searing indictment burning in their brains. The economics and aristocratic life style of the culture of the south was built upon these errant beliefs about the legitimacy of slavery and mistreatment of slaves. These two factors, guilt and threat to economics and life style, are the explanation of why the south so vehemently and militantly resisted abolition of slavery.

Among contemporary African Americans, oral traditions and written history of the slavery days lingers large in their consciousness. Regardless of how subtle contemporary prejudice and discrimination is, it still evokes a pain, anxious chill, and simmering resentful heat in the victims of racial prejudice, comparable only to that of a rape victim. Just as with female or male rape victims, until recently, non African American men, even police, judges, legislators, and the like, exhibited a total lack of empathy with the both the victims of rape and victims of discrimination and racial prejudice. The American white majority seems to have a kind of perceptual or perspective blindness concerning the roles that the structures of an Anglo culture and its governmental agencies and institutions and other non-minority organizations play in perpetuating prejudices and their effects on the feelings, self-perceptions, and life prospects of minorities. To far too many of the majority, minorities remain ‘The Other’ upon whom they may project, with no justification, whatever traits toward which their personalities are predisposed. This is fertile ground for the development of paranoia toward these ‘Others’. If a non-minority media person or their political party, or a non-minority occupational group, sees these ‘Others’ as competitors for something they feel is their birthright, they may rapidly descend into the same kind of pre-abolition attribution tendencies of dehumanizing them, turning them into a form of sub humanity, and even demonizing them.

The alien ‘Other’ is yoked with you in your dyad. If an alien ‘Other’ is prominent in a person’s life, that person can ruminate about them and emotions can escalate until he or she is obsessed with them and what they perceive as their threat to them. The obsession can grow violent so that one is constantly thinking of ways to rid yourself of them. Each time this person sees the alien ‘Other’, rage and fear can swell, pumping adrenaline, and predisposing the person to rash acts. This person probably lives in a social milieu that, while quite unstructured, holds congruent opinions and attitudes. Group members feed each other’s malevolence toward this ‘Other’. There is nothing in the structure of their little society to contravene in this process. Therefore, in reality, the nature of this ‘Other’ remains unknown and unknowable. During the Johnson administration, there was a determination to facilitate integration. The government funded educational groups designed to facilitate mutual cultural understanding and sensitivity and empathy toward one another.

From the beginning of the twentieth century and its industrial revolution, the establishment, that is to say, our institutions and socio-political systems had begun to be transformed in especially deleterious ways. Over the last century and a half, integration of institutions has increased and, nationally, violence from antipathy has subsided somewhat, yet random, impersonal, and hate-based violence such as toward gays and abortion clinics has increased. Unfortunately, these more integrated institutions have either maintained their antiquated structures or gradually evolved into more dehumanizing structures. As a result, especially over the last half century or so, America has witnessed trends with respect to increased personal space or the tendency to avoid approaches from or to strangers and even to avoid personal contact with neighbors. There is an increased exploitation, increased impersonal violence, decreased mutual positive facilitation, decreased authentic transparency in communication, and decreased empathy within our institutions, agencies, and various other segments of our society. The trends in the categories below have been particularly psychologically damaging:

1. American families;
2. Schools and colleges;
3. Our justice and legal system as a whole;
4. Adult and youth prisons;
5. Our health system as a whole;
6. Mental hospitals;
7. Public human services agencies in general;
8. Private helping professions;
9. Social organizations;
10. Religious groups or denominations;
11. Adjoining different ethnic ghettos;
12. Communities stratified and segregated along lines of socio-economic status;
13. Our economic system as a whole;
14. Businesses in relation to customers;
15. Large work settings;
16. Our political system as a whole;
17. Political parties;
18. Our defense and military system;
19. Nations categorized as allies, and
20. Economic rivals, alien cultures, or alien forms of government
    

Reviving the vignette about Beth and Cher for the moment may help to expand our perspectives on these ill-omened macro trends. Cher pursued her curiosity about Beth’s amazing personal transformation. She asked Beth to explain to her how such a radical transformation was possible; what events in her life were the catalysts? Beth chose to begin helping her friend to understand by describing her husband, Ben. She said that early in their relationship Ben had told her about his transformation. As a young man, he had had a rather prosaic life. He was a good student and a fairly good athlete. He was not a rebel but rather somewhat of a conformist. He was the first of four children. His parents were both high school teachers and therefore of modest means. His father taught History and Civics and his mother taught Biology and Chemistry. He had a job on the weekends so that he would not have to be a burden on his parents. He went to a state university where he could afford the tuition. He studied Business Administration and worked part time in work-study programs to put himself through school. He continued to be a good student throughout his college career and graduated in five years. In his last year, he met the woman who would be his wife and married her soon after graduation. After graduation, he began work managing paper routes for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times Weekend Edition and Review of Books and for the main newspaper in town. After two years, he moved up in his department with his hometown newspaper. His wife was an attractive woman who was quite extroverted. She worked as a supervisor in the fashion section of a large department store. In her spare time, she participated in many women’s social and professional organizations.

His was an ordinary life. Yet, there was another side to him. He was always wondering why the world was the way it was. Perhaps being associated with newspapers and seeing the stories about what was going on in the world provoked this philosophical questioning. Since, after his promotion, he no longer had to work on weekends and his wife was usually occupied with her social groups, he began to take up his favorite hobby of hiking and mountain climbing. He loved to climb to the top of nearby mountains, just sit up there in the clean air and breeze. On clear days, he could gaze over his city and the surrounding territory and just sit there and meditate. About twenty miles from their home there was a high mountain that stood alone. It was many years before he made the hike up that mountain. It was summertime, yet it was a cool, clear day. He started his trek early on a Sunday morning. By the time he reached the top, it was mid morning.

As he stood there and looked around, the view stunned him, giving him goose bumps. It seemed like he could see forever in every direction. Since he had never explored the territory beyond his city and the other side of this mountain, he was surprised by what met his eyes. To the south, there was his city. To the east, he saw a lush green forest with a stream running through it and small clearings here and there. If he looked closely, he could detect animals like deer, coyotes, wild mustang horses, javalina hogs, and a wealth of different types of birds. To the north, there was an Indian Reservation with few trees, no streams or lakes, parched land, and sparse vegetation. To the west, there was a military base with airplanes and landing strips and further out he could see fighter planes engaged in target practice on a zoned off bombing practice range. Looking back to the south, he saw something he had never noticed before, there were quite a few oil derricks, pumps, and storage tanks strewn about on farm fields with thriving crops. He continued turning from south to east, north, and west. He started to wonder about how very different these four territories were. He was deeply pondering the significance of these contrasts. The contrasts were speaking loudly and promising volumes of new understandings of the world. He knew there was something about this particular view that was suggesting there were powerful lessons about the world awaiting him. Whatever it was that he was grasping while turning round and round was causing a strange new awakening his mind; his thoughts were spinning and his gut was churning.

As he descended the mountain, he was so inwardly focused and so caught up in this revelatory experience that he had to force himself to watch his step. He was feeling inspired and yet he sensed the gravity of the possibilities of life changing insights that would spring from his view and his vision on that mountaintop. He sensed a new intellectual distance developing between himself and these vastly different communities as well as what they represented about the rest of the world. On the other hand, he somehow felt more of a belonging to and caring bond with all of what he had seen. Not as though all was well with the world, but rather these communities and the world could be understood and empathized with in terms of how their world-structures, interacting systems, and histories had caused them to be what they were. Strangely, at the time, he felt the same bond with the whole world, the universe, and with the marvelous and long journey that led it all to be the way it was at this particular moment in time. The dyad he was now in was himself and all of life and the creative universe. This view of "The Other" had changed him forever.

Come Monday he told his wife he was not going in to work that day. He called in sick to work. He filled his backpack with enough food and water to last all day and then stuck a writing pad and several pencils in it. As he was putting the pencils in, he was arrested in motion and was shocked when he realized he was trembling. He felt a little dizzy, sat down, and thought aloud, "Today is the beginning of a new life. Damn, I realize at this moment that since I was a teen I have felt that there was something I had been put on this earth for but I did not know what that was." The feeling never left him. It lingered in the back of his mind, surfacing periodically with fuzzy words saying, "I should keep my mind open, because ‘it’, whatever it is, its reality will be made known to me and it will be at the right time and I will know it when I mentally see and feel it. It is then and only then that I will know it. When that day comes I will know, but only when that moment arrives, so be patient, but be watchful and ready." The feeling, the mystery, was always there in him, as a haunting vague watchfulness and yet a sense of anticipation. Then he said to himself, "Today it is being revealed to me." He took a deep breath and as he did, his eyes teared up, and he wanted to shout, ‘Hallelujah! ’. And so, he did just that, he shouted and raced out to the car to go and meet his destiny on that mountaintop.

Driving to the mountain and making the climb, his mood had changed. He was somber and kept himself in check. He did not want to impose himself on what the panoramic view from the top might suggest to him. He had to be patient and wait. Even though he knew that was virtually impossible, he must try. He must let ‘it’ affect him as though he were a blank slate, as completely bare of his presumptions, assumptions, fears, or wishes as possible.

He reached the top and bent over to rest and to catch his breath before looking. The physical world he was to perceive would be the same as the day before. However, now he would take his time, look, and think. He would look with his mind and earnestly try to learn what its four sides were there to teach him. He stood began to slowly turn around and as he did he felt that what lay in each of the four territories and the uniqueness of their being arranged next to each other held a big part of the lesson. He had from mid morning to dusk to contemplate this arrangement. He turned counterclockwise as he had done yesterday and then turned clockwise. Then he slowly moved to one, then back and forth several times, and did this with each direction.

Finally, he notes that he really knows very little about each of these sites. Sure, he has lived in his city for four years now, ever since graduation and marriage. But, he knows it as an insider, as one who, like everyone else, just takes it for granted and has not asked questions such as why it is the way it is. His questions were the usual such as how this church denomination or religion is different from the others and why. He asked what campaigning politicians stood for and why. He asked why people of different ethnic groups tended to gather in separate sections of the city. He wondered how some people came to live in big, expensive homes on large plots of land up on the greener areas of the hilly northwest sections and some live in brand new suburban developments even further out to the northwest. He wondered why the housing around the center of the city was more run down and even downtown was becoming somewhat trashy with less traffic from customers while suburban malls were glistening and thriving. While he could not see them, he knew the general location of the less well financed schools with the lowest standardized test scores. They were in the central south and southeast areas. The ‘better-richer’ schools with better scores were west and north. He had seen, year after year, discussion in the news about inequalities among schools. He had read enough to know that local and national politics had a lot to do with these patterns. These and many more questions that had never occurred to him before were popping into his mind. He looked at his city in a different light now. There was so much he did not know, understand, and felt that there was much work ahead for him if he was going to gain a real understanding of what makes his city work.

The person is a function of relations with "The Other". For each person, his or her half of the dyad is continuously being transformed in the process of interacting with "The Other". The way the "I" relates to "The Other" and "The Other" relates to the "Me" perpetually creates and recreates us both. If I am my brother’s keeper, I am one kind of person. If I am not or do not see myself as my brother’s keeper, I am another kind of person. If I perceive the stranger as a danger, then I am one kind of person. If I perceive the stranger as most likely to be friendly and as being someone I would welcome getting to know, even if only for a fleeting moment, then I am an inclusive, accepting, approachable person. Perceiving the stranger as menacing or a nuisance means I am probably an exclusive, suspicious, and antagonistic person. A benefactor could relate to the beneficiary in a way that diminishes or devalues them while enhancing or augmenting his or her own prestige. An ungrateful, resentful beneficiary who feels diminished could undermine the benefactor’s prestige. Feeling their prestige under siege by beneficiaries, benefactors can plot to inflict a disproportionate retributive cost on their beneficiaries. Empathizing and understanding the delicate psychological balancing act of self-esteem involved in such transactions, the benefactors covertly can appear, at least to their inner circle, to be magnanimous. It is the everlasting, complex dance between the dyads’ noumenal worlds in infinitely, kaleidoscopically, choreographed patterns. The ‘I’ and the ‘You’ are one, even if we are enemies. When we recognize this pneumatic, tandem-like process, we can disengage, momentarily, take stock of how we are altered by "The Other", and imagine alternative ways of being in the relation. By trying out different ways of being and exercising their behavioral expression, we may find a way that converts the process from mutual harm, or mere insignificance, to meaningful mutual benefit.

What about Nature as ‘The Other’ ?

On loving bad others

On loving or hating a presented description of an other which turns out to be totally false and opposite to their nature or history of behavior.

20 years and I discover I never knew him.

What about training parents and school teachers and school peers to train in how to relate to ‘The Other’ maturely and the impersonal, outsider, ‘D’autres’ maturely as well? Is this not another problem with schools, and, ironically, with churches as well?

Psychology of personality of everyday people fits with Natural Systems.

Empathy and transparency dichotomization egocentrism altruism decentering – centering abuser abused people as things animals as things objectification individuate vs. over generalize `l'autre' (person) d’autres (other people) stranger foreigner subhuman alien outsider competitor and maltreatment insensate animal transition from dehumanizing to demonizing – assuming others capable of feelings like oneself but not presuming to know precisely what their feelings are.

Jews and Arabs (Palestinians)

When I am talking:

I am trying to make it possible for the person listening to know and understand exactly how and why I perceive my situation to be what it is.

I try to make sure they understand what all of my feelings at that moment are and why I feel these feelings.

I try to make sure they understand exactly what I am, at this moment, wanting, needing, and trying to accomplish, and why these things are important to me.

I am trying to communicate as frankly, openly, and honestly as I can, as clearly and understandably to the other person as I can.

Since it is easy for me to assume that the other person understands, yet it is often that they have not fully understood what I am trying to communicate, I ask gentle questions and provide clarifications to insure that the other has fully understood.

When I am listening: VERSUS INTERROGATION—PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC

I am using my imagination to try to put myself inside of the other person so that I can identify with their unique personal, social, and environmental history, with the way they are perceiving the world.

I am using my imagination to try to put myself inside of their immediate situation, and I am trying to understand exactly what their feelings are.

I am using my imagination to try to understand exactly what they are wanting and needing and what they are trying to communicate.

Since this is usually a very difficult thing to do because my own feelings, wants, needs, and presumptions can easily get in the way, I ask gentle, clarifying questions and ask the other person if they feel that I am understanding and accepting what they are trying to communicate.

Childhood pseudo disincorporation

Private vs. public

Self-enhancement versus care

Success, ambition, attention, status in the eyes of

Invidious comparisons to raise self-esteem

The other as mirror

Alone possessing the other security as control

Lay psychology and Natural Systems structuralism