On Kindness

Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor trace kindness across Western thought and set it against the psychoanalytic account of what happens to our generous impulses. Moving from Seneca and the early Christians through Hobbes, Rousseau and the Victorians to Freud and Winnicott, they argue that kindness was once treated as central to a life well lived, and has since become suspect: a soft indulgence at odds with a competitive, self-protective culture. They read this suspicion as a defence, since to be kind is to expose oneself to the needs and vulnerability of others.

For a clinician, the book connects a cultural history to the consulting room. It draws on Freud and Winnicott to show kindness as bound up with dependence, ambivalence and the fear of being open to another person. Phillips and Taylor treat the wish to be kind, and the anxiety it provokes, as ordinary rather than exceptional. The short book was published in 2009.