For Whom the Bell Tolls: Context, Complexity, and Compassion in Psychoanalysis

The author claims that psychoanalytic theorizing that emphasizes system, context, and complexity is particularly compassion friendly. She hypothesizes that compassion can be an emergent property of well attuned relational fields or systems, just as hostility and contempt seem as if naturally to characterize others. Compassion, or suffering with, is presented as both process and attitude. In the essay's attention to complexity, it undermines reductionism and supports everyday clinical work by encouraging fallibilism, attention to small misattunements, dialogue, and respect for the patient's suffering. Compassion, neither interpretation nor provision, but also both, accompanies the other and implicitly affirms the worth of the other.