Back Talk: Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor

Aaron Bellesguard

Historian Barbara Taylor was frustrated with articles touting the benefits of kindness as if it was a new fad. Her friend psychoanalyst Adam Phillips had noticed his patients' preoccupations with their own kindness, or lack thereof. The two decided to write collaboratively on the subject, and the result is On Kindness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $20). They argue that "magical kindness," the sentimental notion of a bloodless remedy for social problems and rocky relationships, has obscured true kindness--the recognition that we are all vulnerable, interdependent beings who find in sympathy and fellow feeling some of our greatest pleasure.   --Christine Smallwood

In the book you speak of "the kindness instinct." What is it?

Adam Phillips: One of our fundamental predispositions is to care for other people. "The kindness instinct" is an attempt to formulate a phrase that could capture the way in which kindness might be as elemental as sex. There would be, as it were, profound biological reasons having to do with survival and reproduction that would mean it was intrinsic in our nature to be capable of kindness.

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