On Kindness
On my drive to the University of Saint Francis, where I teach, there is, as I round the last corner before pulling up to the campus, a small house with a sign stuck in the front lawn immediately adjacent to the street. In catchy blue and yellow colours, and without any other logo or language on it, it says simply "Be Kind." It went up about 2 weeks ago, and every time I see it I get a little thrill that someone has put this up there for it seems not just powerful but almost forbidden today for people to be kind rather than angry.
That leads me to recommend--as I gladly would and do with all his books--a short book, On Kindness, co-authored by the great Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor. Phillips is, in my view, the most compelling and important, and certainly most prolific, psychoanalyst writing today. After first starting to read Freud thirty years ago now, my return to him over the last 5-7 years has been almost entirely through both the encouragement of, and a hermeneutic greatly indebted to, Phillips.
This book, like so many of his others, raises key questions about what we forbid ourselves from doing and why. In this case, why is kindness a pleasure we so often deny ourselves even as we can see how greatly it moves others, and matters to us when we receive it?
Perhaps even more germane to our moment, especially in Anglo-American countries, are further questions he asks in a book that was--nota bene--written more than a decade ago (2009): why are we so adamant about pretending to be independent, and about denying our dependence on others, which is viewed as the province of only the young, the sick, and the elderly? In fact, we are all dependent on each other all the time, but Anglo-Americans live in denial of this thanks in no small part to the "prophets of free-enterprise capitalism" (p. 96). Lest we miss the point, Phillips and Taylor return to this point several times late in the book, noting that "capitalism is no system for the kindhearted" and that such a system is profoundly destructive of all the communities of kindness, including the family.
These are points made in greater detail and with deeper philosophical development in Alasdair MacIntyre's 1999 book Dependent Rational Animals, which I have used with undergraduates over the years. (MacIntyre and Phillips are aware of each other and occasionally one quotes the other. MacIntyre, e.g., has recommended Phillips' 1989 biography of D.W. Winnicott, which is quite good, though I think Dodi Goldman's In Search of the Real: the Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott is richer.)
That leads me to recommend--as I gladly would and do with all his books--a short book, On Kindness, co-authored by the great Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor. Phillips is, in my view, the most compelling and important, and certainly most prolific, psychoanalyst writing today. After first starting to read Freud thirty years ago now, my return to him over the last 5-7 years has been almost entirely through both the encouragement of, and a hermeneutic greatly indebted to, Phillips.
This book, like so many of his others, raises key questions about what we forbid ourselves from doing and why. In this case, why is kindness a pleasure we so often deny ourselves even as we can see how greatly it moves others, and matters to us when we receive it?
Perhaps even more germane to our moment, especially in Anglo-American countries, are further questions he asks in a book that was--nota bene--written more than a decade ago (2009): why are we so adamant about pretending to be independent, and about denying our dependence on others, which is viewed as the province of only the young, the sick, and the elderly? In fact, we are all dependent on each other all the time, but Anglo-Americans live in denial of this thanks in no small part to the "prophets of free-enterprise capitalism" (p. 96). Lest we miss the point, Phillips and Taylor return to this point several times late in the book, noting that "capitalism is no system for the kindhearted" and that such a system is profoundly destructive of all the communities of kindness, including the family.
These are points made in greater detail and with deeper philosophical development in Alasdair MacIntyre's 1999 book Dependent Rational Animals, which I have used with undergraduates over the years. (MacIntyre and Phillips are aware of each other and occasionally one quotes the other. MacIntyre, e.g., has recommended Phillips' 1989 biography of D.W. Winnicott, which is quite good, though I think Dodi Goldman's In Search of the Real: the Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott is richer.)
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