Leaps of faith: Is forgiveness a useful concept?

Abstract

Using detailed clinical vignettes, the author argues that, despite the current idealization of the concept of forgiveness, the term has no place in psychoanalytic work, and there are some hazards to giving it one. Clinically, the concept of forgiveness is seductive, implying that there should be a common outcome to a variety of injuries, stemming from different situations and calling for different solutions. Every instance of what we call forgiveness can be seen to serve a different defensive function. While the conscious experience of what is called forgiveness is sometimes confused with the unconscious process of reparation, the two can only be described at different levels of psychic life. Despite the fact that in ‘the unconscious’ there is no such thing as forgiveness, the term has an adhesive quality in our thinking that also blunts the analyst'’s appreciation of the aggressive components in the work. In a final vignette, the author illustrates an analytic outcome that has the appearance of forgiveness, but is best understood as the complex result of the everyday work of analysis.

Key words:

• acceptance
• aggression
• compromise
• countertransference
• defense
• forgiveness
• reconciliation
• reparation
• resentment

1. Henry F. Smith is the Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. This paper was presented in abbreviated form at the 45th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Berlin, Germany, July, 2007.

1. Henry F. Smith is the Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. This paper was presented in abbreviated form at the 45th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Berlin, Germany, July, 2007.

Notes

1. Henry F. Smith is the Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. This paper was presented in abbreviated form at the 45th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Berlin, Germany, July, 2007.

2. In an argument consistent with my own, Van der Walt (2003, 2008) is highly critical of the TRC’s “discursive preoccupation” with forgiveness, which he sees as a “performance” that tended to bypass the “messy process of understanding” South Africa’s trauma, diverting attention from its continuing legacy of violence, hatred, and desire for revenge (Van der Walt, 2008, pp. 17–18). Theidon (2006, 2008), too, objects to the term. Writing on the aftermath of political violence in Peru (with its own Peruvian TRC), she notes that, unlike forgiveness, reconciliation does not mean that people have to give up their ‘rancor:’“To reconcile also means to resign oneself to what is” (Theidon, 2008) toward a more realistic goal of “co‐existence” (Theidon, 2006, p. 100), a term she favors. Thus the function of the concept of forgiveness is being questioned in other fields as well.

3. In a commentary on The Merchant of Venice, Heschel (2006) points out that there is a long tradition to viewing Judaism as the mother religion and Christianity as the daughter religion, with Christianity’s legitimacy based on its “fulfilling the divine promises of the Old Testament” (p. 398). In that sense Shylock, while manifestly on the outside of the dominant religious culture, is also at its core. This poses a theological problem that may not have been lost on Shakespeare. The laws of Venice demand that Shylock be put to death, but this would violate the laws of Christian mercy. Moreover, the desire to be rid of ‘the jew’ cannot be accomplished without destroying the foundations of Christianity’s legitimacy, a dilemma that leads to what Heschel has termed “theological bulimia” (p. 393).

4. Pointed out to me by John Steiner

5. Note that the effect of Derrida’s (2001) deconstruction of the term forgiveness into a paradox or ‘aporia,’ as he calls it, is to preserve, if only in theory, the concept of pure forgiveness, which begins at the point of the unforgivable: “there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable & It can only be possible in doing the impossible” (pp. 32–3) “& it must remain a madness of the impossible” (p. 39).

6. When we use abstract concepts in this way without considering that they denote complex conflictual phenomena we are led to a very different form of analytic listening. For example, after listening to an earlier version of this paper, a member of the audience, who prized the concept of empathy, argued that to consider empathy a complex phenomenon with defensive components was to be ‘hypochondriacal.’ It is an interesting charge that, to be consistent, would have to be leveled at conflict theory more generally.