Change begins with awareness. Dr. Faith Bethelard’s passionate desire is to make us aware of the key role of tenderness and how it impacts each of us when missing or under-represented in our lives. This intent has continued to grow over the span of her distinguished 25 year career as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst.
Change begins with awareness. Dr. Faith Bethelard’s passionate desire is to make us aware of the key role of tenderness and how it impacts each of us when missing or under-represented in our lives. This intent has continued to grow over the span of her distinguished 25 year career as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst.
As a teenager Faith learned Transcendental Meditation,™ which led her to explore the tenets of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. After undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr College she earned her doctorate from Widener University’s Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology. Her interest in these ancient philosophies motivated her to also continue her spiritual studies, pursuing and obtaining a Doctor of Spiritual Science (DSS) degree. Her life-long mind-body-spirit approach to health and wellness all came together in Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart, which she co-authored in 2000 with renowned psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Ph.D.
While earning her Doctor of Psychology degree at Widener, Faith unexpectedly encountered Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi’s concept of amae in an obscure footnote in a psychoanalytic textbook called The Basic Fault (1968) by Michael Balint. At the time she was undergoing her personal analysis, preparing herself to work with patients directly by doing her own exploratory therapy work.
Amae, she discovered, is a basic human need—a need for affection—that appears first in the relation between an infant and the infant’s caretakers, and then remains the foundation for all other loving human relations.
Faith’s serendipitous encounter with amae felt like a perfect marriage of her interest in Eastern sensibilities and Western Psychology. It led to her dissertation “The Amae Environment: Theory and Therapy,” where she tracked similar concepts from several of the greatest minds in her field.
Cherishment is a lucid, deliciously sensitive book which begins with a mystery –a missing word in the English language—and concludes with important implications for human development and the practice of psychotherapy.
— Irvin D. Yalom, MD
This ranged from Sigmund Freud’s affectionate current, to D.W. Winnicott’s good-enough mother, to John Bowlby’s attachment psychology. Always focused on listening for amae themes in therapy and emotionally based interventions, Faith, later in Cherishment, elaborated further on amae, enlightening her readers to amae being everywhere—in the arts, culture, collaborations of all kinds, and day to day life.
amae: The expectation to be sweetly and indulgently loved.
amaeru: To depend and presume upon someone’s sweet and indulgent love.
As she explains: “This tender, open, playful, heart to heart kind of love is something we all recognize spontaneously when we encounter it. It takes us right back to childhood because it is rooted in the loving care a baby expects pre-verbally. Amae (i.e. tenderness), when you are able to receive it, makes you able to give it. Frustration of this need is the key ingredient in all sorts of states in which people are isolated from the world, cut off from each other, unreceptive to love, and unable to ask for help.”
In a span of over 25 years in both private and clinical practice, providing individual psychotherapy to late adolescents and to adults and couples of all ages, Faith continues to assist her patients to manifest healthier, more satisfying and more joyful lives. Now, with this website, and a new book titled Tenderness: The Way to a Deeper and Sweeter Connection with Ourselves, Each Other and Mother Earth in the works, Faith is extending her message and bringing tenderness teachings to the world at large.
As a teenager Faith learned Transcendental Meditation,™ which led her to explore the tenets of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. After undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr College she earned her doctorate from Widener University’s Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology. Her interest in these ancient philosophies motivated her to also continue her spiritual studies, pursuing and obtaining a Doctor of Spiritual Science (DSS) degree. Her life-long mind-body-spirit approach to health and wellness all came together in Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart, which she co-authored in 2000 with renowned psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Ph.D.
While earning her Doctor of Psychology degree at Widener, Faith unexpectedly encountered Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi’s concept of amae in an obscure footnote in a psychoanalytic textbook called The Basic Fault (1968) by Michael Balint. At the time she was undergoing her personal analysis, preparing herself to work with patients directly by doing her own exploratory therapy work.
Amae, she discovered, is a basic human need—a need for affection—that appears first in the relation between an infant and the infant’s caretakers, and then remains the foundation for all other loving human relations.
Faith’s serendipitous encounter with amae felt like a perfect marriage of her interest in Eastern sensibilities and Western Psychology. It led to her dissertation “The Amae Environment: Theory and Therapy,” where she tracked similar concepts from several of the greatest minds in her field.
Cherishment is a lucid, deliciously sensitive book which begins with a mystery –a missing word in the English language—and concludes with important implications for human development and the practice of psychotherapy.
— Irvin D. Yalom, MD
This ranged from Sigmund Freud’s affectionate current, to D.W. Winnicott’s good-enough mother, to John Bowlby’s attachment psychology. Always focused on listening for amae themes in therapy and emotionally based interventions, Faith, later in Cherishment, elaborated further on amae, enlightening her readers to amae being everywhere—in the arts, culture, collaborations of all kinds, and day to day life.
amae: The expectation to be sweetly and indulgently loved.
amaeru: To depend and presume upon someone’s sweet and indulgent love.
As she explains: “This tender, open, playful, heart to heart kind of love is something we all recognize spontaneously when we encounter it. It takes us right back to childhood because it is rooted in the loving care a baby expects pre-verbally. Amae (i.e. tenderness), when you are able to receive it, makes you able to give it. Frustration of this need is the key ingredient in all sorts of states in which people are isolated from the world, cut off from each other, unreceptive to love, and unable to ask for help.”
In a span of over 25 years in both private and clinical practice, providing individual psychotherapy to late adolescents and to adults and couples of all ages, Faith continues to assist her patients to manifest healthier, more satisfying and more joyful lives. Now, with this website, and a new book titled Tenderness: The Way to a Deeper and Sweeter Connection with Ourselves, Each Other and Mother Earth in the works, Faith is extending her message and bringing tenderness teachings to the world at large.