CHAPTER 1

A PSYCHOLOGY OF COMPASSION

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Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.

–Galway Kinnell

Compassion is the basis of connection, intimacy, openness, kindness,hospitality, and joy. It is an expression of human freedom, flowing from a soundintuition of the unity of life and all living things. "Even when we arephysically alone and experiencing loneliness we are still essentially withothers; indeed, the very fact that we can feel lonely indicates thatparticipation is a basic structural element in our being." Our connection toothers does not negate our aloneness. We are simultaneously separate and inrelation, and these two truths are ultimately revealed as coexistent and non-contradictory.We are, in the very midst of our aloneness, inextricablyconnected to others.

This dimension of being does not derive from external factors. We are by natureembedded in relationship with the world, in all its sorrow and beauty. Jungcommented on this, saying, "The individual is not just a single separate being,but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship."

Compassion is at once both deeply personal and thoroughly social. It is thefinest expression of our relationship to self and others. It begins with awillingness to open to ourselves and to life as it is. Instead of rejecting onepart of life and grasping at another, compassion moves closer to all of life. Itresolves the continual struggle against reality by fostering a willingness to beunconditionally present to the whole range of human experience. Compassion is,in part, a practice of unconditional presence. Being unconditionally presentmeans not only seeing ourselves and others, but feeling ourselves and others.Unconditional presence is both receptive and penetrating, it is both discerningand tender-hearted. Like the sun, it simultaneously illuminates and warms.

Compassion dissolves barriers and distance. Unlike pity, "compassion has thequality of respect." Respect for others comes from a sure knowledge of both ourcloseness with others and our likeness to them. The Dalai Lama, in his appeal atthe end of Ethics for the New Millennium, makes this point by reminding us ofthe profound similarity we have to others, and the respect we need to cultivatetoward those who are downtrodden, impoverished, or beleaguered. "Try not tothink of yourself as better than even the humblest beggar," he entreats. "Youwill look the same in your grave."

Compassion is the foundation, process, and goal of psychological health andwholeness. It grounds and guides us, and is the fruit of psychological work.Joseph Campbell refers to it as "the purpose of the journey." He then adds that"once you have come past the pair of opposites you have reached compassion."Arriving past the pair of opposites marks the apex of Jung's psychological goalof individuation. According to Jung, this goal is achieved through what hecalled the transcendent function, or a "quality of conjoined opposites."Conjoining the opposites or arriving past them are simply different ways ofdescribing the same thing. In either case, a dynamic unity emerges out of whatwas before a warring tension. Drawing on Jung's alchemical metaphor for thisphenomenon, we could say that compassion is the alchemical vessel holding theturbulent prima materia. Compassion transforms the original base substance, andcompassion is the purified gold that results.

Freud, Jung, and Depth Psychology

Freud and Jung are towering psychological masters whose explorations andinsights shaped the first 100 years of depth psychology. They devoted theirlives to studying the multivalent terrain of human nature, and to caring for thesuffering soul. While Freud and Jung were both remarkably independent andinnovative thinkers, they were still deeply influenced by the cultural milieu inwhich they lived. The philosophical moorings of depth psychology reveal adynamic tension between the conflicting perspectives of Enlightenment andRomanticism. Both Freud and Jung developed their psychological theories out ofthe crosscurrents of these divergent worldviews.

Freud has been called "the last great representative of the Enlightenment" and"the first to demonstrate its limitations." He championed reason as the supremehuman endowment, and simultaneously embraced the artistic and imaginativeimpulse so celebrated by the Romantics. Freud was pulled between the imaginaland the rational, and his theories reflect this. His work is suffused withimages of struggle and ultimately irreconcilable conflict between opposingforces.

Freud perceived an innate aggressive streak in human beings that was foreveropposed by an equally powerful Eros. These two impulses, one toward life and theother toward death, were engaged in eternal battle within the human psyche.Bruno Bettelheim describes Freud's conviction that "the good life—or, at leastthe best life available to man, the most enjoyable and most meaningful—consistsof being able truly to love not oneself, but others." This belief in theimportance of loving others was coupled, however, with Freud's view thatpositive states such as love and compassion were the result of either thesuppression or sublimation of narcissistic, selfish motives, and were thereforealways fraught with struggle. For Freud, there was simply no transcending thepull of opposites; there was only learning to manage them skillfully.

Jung's analytic psychology also rests upon a theory of opposites, but unlikeFreud, Jung believed these opposites were ultimately reconcilable through theprocess of individuation. In general, Jung held a more optimistic view of humannature and its potential. Distancing himself from Freud, whom he accused offocusing too narrowly on weird and neurotic states, he said, "For my part, Iprefer to look at man in light of what in him is healthy and sound."Furthermore, Jung believed the impulse toward health and wholeness was intrinsicto human life, because "within the soul from its primordial beginnings there hasbeen a desire for light and an irrepressible urge to rise out of the primaldarkness."

Yet, despite the intimate connection it has with suffering and its alleviation,neither Freud nor Jung concentrated their far-reaching and formidableintellectual powers on the subject of compassion, or more specifically onmethods for developing...