The Pandemic of the Separate Self – PART 1

DAN SIEGEL is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute. Here he speaks to UDAY KUMAR about creating a kinder, more compassionate world, the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, and the other pandemics that are worthy of our attention right now during Covid times.

- UDAY KUMAR

Q: Hi Dan. For the longest time I have wanted to reach out to you. Especially in the current times in which we are living, people are seeking so much help. If you could talk a little bit about your work, I think that would be a good place to get started.

You know, the notion of bringing science into how we live our individual lives, how we live as families and communities, how we live as nations, and how we live as a human family on Earth, offers the opportunity to think deeply across many different disciplines of science, and then ask the questions: Why are we here at all on the planet? While we’re here, what can we do to try and create a kinder, more compassionate world?

I think everything I’ve been doing professionally has been to take my background as a scientist, who’s also trained as a physician, and then think deeply in my particular field of psychiatry – how the mind develops – so as to ask questions like, “How has the human mind been shaped by modern culture?” and “How might that be affecting our relationships with each other, and also our relationships with the broader world of living beings, which you can simply call nature?”