ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the beautifully captured lines of Anne Carson’s poem. Compassion involves and shares, while pity and mercy are often considered more distinct, more distant and impersonal, and may include aloofness, feelings of superiority, and condescension toward another’s suffering. Compassion, by its very nature, cannot be touched off by the sufferings of a whole class or a people. Compassion has hardly been addressed in the psychoanalytic literature. A. Bernstein attributes this avoidance of compassion in psychoanalytic work to “the fear of compassion” or of “being human, though a psychoanalyst”. P. Young-Eisendrath views the amelioration of suffering during and after treatment and increased compassion for self and others as the main objectives of a successful psychoanalytic treatment. Despite the paucity of psychoanalytic writing on compassion, psychoanalysts in Israel have, produced some intriguing writing on this subject and in particular on compassion as a patient–analyst interconnected occurrence.
