Two people meet, discover an uncommon electricity flowing between them, exhilarate each other into forgetting the abyss that always gapes between one consciousness and another, until one day they realize they are having profoundly different experiences of the same situation and find themselves suddenly hanging from the precipice of the abyss with one hand, sparring over the reality of the situation with the other. In 1951, as the Cold War was menacing the world with mutually assured destruction, the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902–February 4, 1987) addressed the Centennial Conference on Communications at Northwestern University with a revelation of a talk plainly titled “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation,” later included in his classic On Becoming a Person (public library) — an inquiry into the crux of mutual misunderstanding and the remedy for it, as applicable to love as it is to war, revealing the same psychological forces coursing beneath the bloodiest conflict between groups and the subtlest discord in our intimate relationships. The major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person, or the other group… Although the tendency to make evaluations is common in almost all interchange of language, it is very much heightened in those situations where feelings and emotions are deeply involved.
Author: Maria Popova
Published at: 2025-11-11 22:31:00
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