By Robert Levin, LCSW

I love the idea of psychoanalysis. I love its attempt to inspire interest in the mind and enliven our souls with imagination and play. At its best, psychoanalysis is a love of life and celebration of the creativity of the mind, an invitation to know ourselves and to heal ourselves through the re-collection of what’s been lost and by imagining what has yet to be found. 

Analyst and patient, for the time they are together, put their minds together as one for the purpose of understanding pain and giving voice to hope in an attempt to transform the entrenched self-narratives that can weigh the heart down in repetition and despair. The overall general experience, the relationship between the participants, should inspire a wish to trust, connect, share, and to experience oneself as part of a larger social world. How the participants get there is the work of psychoanalysis. 

In the vulnerable conditions in which an analysis takes place, kindness is essential. In exposing one’s private logic and one’s worldview, the foundations of the self and the stories that hold it together are shaken up. Core beliefs and values are inquired into, fears and irrational thinking (all the thinking that is not easily consensually validated) are laid bare, and for this to translate into something constructive one must feel that this effort will bring one closer to others and out of the isolation of private suffering. 

Kindness has the ability to inspire trust and encourages those who feel it to venture forward into the unsayable and to accept the unacceptable about themselves. For reasons I can only guess, kindness has been sorely lacking in our psychoanalytic language. Our interpretations of people’s emotional lives and the actions they take to ensure emotional security, our diagnostic terms especially, have too often lacked a kind or compassionate lens. Perhaps the associations of kindness with softness or surface-level inauthenticity have not been considered powerful enough to penetrate the defenses surrounding a person’s presentation. Not enough to produce change. Yet I believe that an analysis worth having cannot be conducted without kindness. It is under the canopy of kindness that one joins their fellow beings as a part of a larger “Us.” Within a kind environment many of the pitfalls of any analysis can be explored and avoidable enactments diminished. An analysis that encourages rather than merely exposes, and invites thoughts that are risky to the self rather than defensively safe, must exhibit kindness to support those efforts. 

Different from empathy, kindness allows us to hold onto our views and voice our opinions, sometimes firmly, and yet still show respect for other thoughts and ways of living. Kindness is humility in action. Disagreements and conflicts are anticipated experiences in our work with others and often lead to protracted impasses and significant confusion. Often these difficulties can be attributed to the experience of a lack of kindness by one or both of the analytic pair. When we feel the absence of kindness we experience the isolation of blame and shame and dig our heels in and will go no further, feeling justified to stand our ground and often then condemn (or just diagnose?) our “partners in thought.”

Psychoanalysis as a treatment that is social must bring the self back into a relationship with others. Interpersonal and Relational analysis has made this the cornerstone of its modality and has urged us all to keep an eye on the nature of the developing relationship between the participants. I think it might even be enough to notice whether the relationship is a kind one, a supportive and encouraging one. If not, we must ask why not, and clear the air as fast as possible. Admitting to mistakes, apologizing, offering our thoughts out loud, thinking together as one, and inviting criticisms are all ways to restore the good will of an analytic relationship.

From a state of isolation and secret wish for glory, we can bring the self back to earth, to humility, by accepting its commonality with others. What we speak we know was once spoken to us. What we do was once done to us. What we believe is part of a heritage of beliefs and has an ancestry of similar beliefs to those we hold. By abstracting these beliefs and taking them as objects to be observed (negative self images, experienced inferiorities, imagined grandiosities, ingrained must-have needs), we remove them from the self and detoxify them from individual shame and blame. We can, temporarily at least, return much of our thinking and emotional lives to the domain of the social and the shared. We may then participate in these ideas/emotions as one! Erich Fromm conveys this idea with the thought that: “The patient will not have the feeling I am talking about him or her, nor that I talk down to him or her, but the patient will feel that I am talking about something which we both share.”

Psychoanalysis has always told a story of the self as one that is impersonal. Oedipus was a myth and Freud attributed that myth to all people. Jung expanded that myth to include many other myths that govern the psyche and take hold of us. The stories we tell are like any mythological creation story. They are stories of beginnings and stories of belongings. They are the stories of the “I” that are also a story of the “You.” “I-and-Thou.” 

For a story to be therapeutic it must help transform its subject, the “I” (of fragmentation, separation, shame and blame), into a common story of “We.” A story of shared realities and struggles that can be thought about and overcome. Transference and countertransference, the attitudes that emerge from the experience of being together, truly become mirrors of each other, two sides of a coin that each participant can find himself in and each can begin to identify the uses, utilities and limitations to such attitudes both in the moment and in general. 

For any person attempting to live better with themselves and relate better to others, to heal from life’s challenges and from the defensive splitting we’ve all surgically performed on ourselves in order to belong, kindness allows us that chance. Kindness allows us to experience ourselves as worthy, acceptable and as part of a common human society that can all say: “There but for the grace of god go I.” We are a society of people who are expected to be different, unique and special, and yet we lose our connection with others because of our individuality (when taken too literally as undivided). The selves we enhance are the selves that get us into trouble. Kindness, different from empathy, allows our differences to exist, our multiplicity of ideas to thrive, and holds us together, as each side can see itself in the other and share a common goal of making our fragmented selves whole again. 

Reference:

Fromm, E. (2005) The Art of Listening. Continuum New York. (p. 100) 

Robert Levin, LCSW, is in private practice in New York City and is on faculty at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

If you enjoyed this post, we recommend:

Why Psychoanalysis? by Irwin Hirsch, PhD

Transference and Countertransference Reconsidered by Robert Levin, LCSW