Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

On Kindness

3.4/5 ( ratings)

Kindness is the foundation of the world’s great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it a pleasure we often deny ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?

In this brilliant book, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor examine the pleasures and perils of kindness. Modern people have been taught to perceive ourselves as fundamentally antagonistic to one another, our motives self-seeking. Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this book explains how and why we have chosen loneliness over connection. On Kindness argues that a life lived in instinctive, sympathetic identification with others is the one we should allow ourselves to live.

Bursting with often shocking insight, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind’s “greatest delight”: the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.

Language: English

Pages: 128

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Release: May 26, 2009

ISBN: 0374226504

ISBN 13: 9780374226503

On Kindness

3.4/5 ( ratings)

Kindness is the foundation of the world’s great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it a pleasure we often deny ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?

In this brilliant book, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor examine the pleasures and perils of kindness. Modern people have been taught to perceive ourselves as fundamentally antagonistic to one another, our motives self-seeking. Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this book explains how and why we have chosen loneliness over connection. On Kindness argues that a life lived in instinctive, sympathetic identification with others is the one we should allow ourselves to live.

Bursting with often shocking insight, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind’s “greatest delight”: the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.

Language: English

Pages: 128

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Release: May 26, 2009

ISBN: 0374226504

ISBN 13: 9780374226503

More books from Adam Phillips

The Uncanny

3.9/5 ( ratings)

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

3.4/5 ( ratings)

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

3.9/5 ( ratings)

On Flirtation

Winnicott

Terrors and Experts

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Unforbidden Pleasures

3.4/5 ( ratings)

The Cure for Psychoanalysis

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney

4.2/5 ( ratings)

New Masters of Flash: Volume 3

4.4/5 ( ratings)

Stories from Funeral Celebrants

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Matthew Barney: The Drawings

4.5/5 ( ratings)

Michael Douglas: The Unofficial Biography

2.5/5 ( ratings)

The Fictioneer Summer 2014: A Literary Journal

The Concise Dictionary Of Dress

2.3/5 ( ratings)

Flash MX Most Wanted Effects and Movies

Wunschlos Glucklich?: Uber Seelische Gesundheit Und Den Alltaglichen Wahnsinn

Rate this book!

Write a review?