Feeling misunderstood is a universal lived experience. For centuries, philosophers have attempted to explain human understanding. Writings reflecting the quest to know human understanding can be found as early as the 17th century when Locke (1689/1996) wrote An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In this essay Locke explicated his belief that total understanding of another is not possible since no two minds or understandings process ideas exactly the same. Nor is it possible, according to Locke, for a person to utter or verbalize exactly what they have by reason, deter-mined to be important, and therefore no two persons can ever completely understand each other. In the 18th century, Hume (1777/1993) composed An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume gave further credence to the notion that a person can never entirely understand another.
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A 1989 study studied this question.