Thank you for the comment Debby. I agree that love is used so much more. It sounds more complicated to me for some reason than kindness but yes, I think they point to something similar. I just read a lovely sentence from an Israeli author that encouraged me which said: “you can’t point out a star to someone without putting the other hand on his shoulder”.

I think that what I refer to as a perceived “lack of kindness” has many levels, some of which are intuitive, some purely of poetic license and another that I think is factual.
The factual part is the limited use of the word kindness in psychoanalysis. I think that the word itself and the attitude it points to carries some usefulness in our daily work. We don’t talk about it enough as a concept to think about in my opinion. We talk about empathy, we talk about curiosity, we talk about transference and countertransference feelings of various kinds and get very specific about those.
But kindness doesn’t appear too often in our work as a feeling we speak as we wonder about what we do with people. Kindness is also something we don’t talk about as a goal for therapy. As in “to help the patient be kinder to him/herself and to others”. I think that is interesting. Psychoanalysis has always implicitly held the goal of making the “patient” more accepting of his/her unconscious attitudes. These unconscious attitudes are mostly the rejected parts of the personality. I think that kindness towards these parts of us are in accord with this goal. I find it a gentle word with a lot of potential to heal fractures.
Kindness is also “sorely” lacking in our culture today in general. Republicans cannot speak to Democrats, Self psychologists can’t speak to Interpersonalists and no one wants to speak to Freudians. We talk about “cancel culture”. We are more interested in being right than kind. I’m wondering whether kindness as a concept to work with and towards could help us out. A simple and I think useful question to add to the many we already do ask is “are we being kind when we do our jobs as analysts?” Many might say yes. Many might say it’s irrelevant to the work. That’s fine by me.
Im playing with the idea that kindness can help orient some of us when we seem mired in a bad impasse or enactment and help realign us.
For those that believe it is just there in our work naturally by being “analysts” and that it is “up to the patient to feel or not feel” I respectfully disagree.
The concept of being kind as I see it and am playing with here is close to working as one would with a cherished and loved friend. I wonder about its potential for advancing the relationship between the participants and between the many sides of our own selves.