I saw this obituary in the NYT today:
Dr. Jean Baker Miller, a psychiatrist who disputed traditional notions of social roles and developed a theory that serves as a foundation for treating women’s depression and other disorders through the building of fruitful relationships, died on July 29 at her home in Brookline, Mass. She was 78.
...
Dr. Miller developed her premise under what she called relational-cultural theory and explained it in an influential book, “Toward a New Psychology of Women” (1976).
The theory holds that isolation is one of the most damaging human experiences and is best treated by reconnecting with other people. Dr. Miller proposed that social competition helped provoke psychological illness and that the therapist’s role was to foster an atmosphere of empathy and acceptance for the patient, even at the cost of the therapist’s neutrality.
I don't know much about psychiatry, but this strikes as what it would look like if a Confucian did it (do Confucians do it?).
“Increasingly,” said Dr. [Amt] Banks, who also teaches at Wellesley and Harvard, “neurobiology is telling us about the importance of relationships, that we are all hard-wired to connect with each other. In that sense, to be disconnected is to be wounded.”
Couldn't you hear Confucius saying basically the same thing? We are wounded when we are isolated from our closest loving social relationships.
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