Looking into the World with Transformed Eyes: The Case of Forgiveness

Abstract

In this paper I will elaborate on the topic of forgiveness seen from a Personal Construct Psychology point of view. I will define it as the choice and the act to subsume one's own and the other's point of view with a superordinate and comprehensive relational construction of “person”. I will argue that this can be the consequence of the construction both of the forgiver's and of the forgiven's construction processes by a person who experienced guilt, anger, and sometimes shame and hostility transitions. Drawing particularly upon the account of a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Eva Kor, I will underline the transformative power of this process for the forgiver.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers for their precious contribution to this paper: their comments helped me to deepen my comprehension of the process of forgiveness and to globally improve this text.

Notes

1 SS, an abbreviation of Schutzstaffel (German: “Protective Echelon”), were the black-uniformed elite corps and self-described “political soldiers” of the Nazi Party. Founded by Adolf Hitler in April 1925 as a small personal bodyguard, the SS grew with the success of the Nazi movement and, gathering immense police and military powers, became virtually a state within a state (Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/SS).

2 Auschwitz, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau, was Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp and extermination camp. It was located near the industrial town of Oświęcim in southern Poland. As the most lethal of the Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz has become the emblematic site of the “final solution”, a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz; 90 percent of them were Jews (Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Auschwitz).

3 Josef Mengele, byname Todesengel (German: “Angel of Death”), was one of the Nazi doctors at Auschwitz extermination camp (1943–45). He selected prisoners for execution in the gas chambers and conducted medical experiments on inmates in pseudoscientific racial studies (Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josef-Mengele).

4 Rudolph Hoess was appointed commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp on May 1, 1940 and he was in command for three and a half years. He was executed for his crimes in 1947 and while in prison awaiting trial he wrote an account of his life (Hoess, 2000).

5 “On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik emailed a compendium entitled, “2083: a declaration of European Independence”, to more than 1,000 addresses before bombing government buildings in Oslo and attacking a Labor Party youth camp, killing 77 people” (Winter & Tschudi, 2015, p. 139).

6 “The power of forgiveness” in English.

7 Transition is a term Kelly uses to make reference to the person's construction of the changes in his or her system of constructs (Kelly, 1991).

8 Kelly defines hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favour of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure” (Kelly, 1991, vol. I, p. 375).

9 Guilt is defined by Kelly as the “perception of one’s apparent dislodgement from one’s core role structure” (Kelly, 1991, vol. I, p. 370).

10 It is possible to hypothesize, in theory, that a similar invalidation could precipitate the person into a shame transition - as defined by McCoy (1977): “an awareness of the dislodgement of self from another's construing of your role” (p. 113). In Max’s story this emotion, and a focus on the other's construction of himself as a father, are not present. However, shame can be present in other injuries, such as betrayal in a couple relationship, if the victim is aware of a change in the other's construction of him/herself.

11 “When, following a series of alternating uses of incompatible systems, a person broadens his perceptual field in order to reorganize it on a more comprehensive level, the adjustment may be called ‘dilation’” (Kelly, 1991, Vol. I, p. 352).

12 This can be seen as the experience of humiliation, defined by Lindner (2006) as the “enforced lowering of any person or group by a process of subjugation that damages their dignity” (p. xiv). Following Tschudi (2016), “in Kellian terminology this is equivalent to non-social relations where a person treats others as “behaving mechanisms” or objects, and not as persons” (p. 479).

13 “Aggressiveness is the active elaboration of one’s perceptual field. […] There are some persons who are distinguished by their greater tendency to set up choice points in their lives and then to make their elaborative choices. They are always precipitating themselves and others into situations which require decision and action. We call them aggressive” (Kelly, 1991, vol. I, p. 374, italics in the original).

14 In Kelly's definition constriction is a process that “occurs when a person narrows his perceptual field in order to minimize apparent incompatibilities” (Kelly, 1991, Vol. I, p. 391).

15 Holocaust is a 1978 American  television miniseries which tells the story of the Holocaust from the perspectives of the fictional Weiss family of German Jews and that of a rising member of the SS, who gradually becomes a merciless war criminal. Holocaust highlighted numerous important events which occurred up to and during World War II, such as Kristallnacht, the creation of Jewish ghettos, and later, the use of gas chambers (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077025).

16 Hating or staying angry can be the contrast poles of forgiving in Eva's construction (Kor, n.d. https://candlesholocaustmuseum.org/eva-kor/forgiveness/forgiveness-definition.html). I hypothesize that, before the forgiveness granted to Münch, hate was Eva’s way to maintain the construction of Nazis only as cruel perpetrators and of Jews only as victims.

17 These are constructions I inferred from Eva's narrations.

18 We may construe this validation experience by means of the self-confidence transition advanced by McCoy as the “awareness of goodness of fit of the self in one's role structure” (1977, p. 112).

19 In the Sociality Corollary Kelly states: “To the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person” (Kelly, 1991, Vol. I, p. 66). In other words, we can have a “constructive relationship” (Kelly, 1991, Vol. I, p. 66) with someone if we understand his or her outlook.

20 The power of the encounter between victim and perpetrator in promoting a review of one's own construction of the other that is able to transcend anger and conflict is the basis of the conferencing activity in Restorative Justice paths (Christie, 1977; Llewellyn & Howse, 1998). As illustrated also by Tschudi (2016) the possibility of listening to the other's reasons allows one to get in touch with his or her humanity: “conferencing […] leads us to recognize the contrast to distancing, i.e. bringing offenders and victims closer to each other, and thus enabling an exploration of our joint humanity” (p. 484, italics in the text). While illustrating the role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone, Winter et al. (2016) state: “hearing the 'real' stories of former soldiers helped listeners think about them differently” (p. 203).

21 After their return in Romania Eva and Miriam lived with a surviving aunt and her family, but at that time the communist party was in power and once again they were controlled, persecuted and discriminated on the grounds of being Jews. Even in the USA she had been harassed: “they painted swastikas on our home and put white crosses in the yard” (Kor & Rojany Buccieri, 2011, p. 129).

22 A construct which leaves its elements open to construction in all other respects may be called a propositional construct (Kelly, 1991, Vol.I, p.108).

23 Subsuming a construct means construing it by means of another construct that in this way is superordinate to the first one (Kelly, 1991).

24 In structuralization we arrange the person's behaviors directly under our own system. When we construct the other's construction processes, instead, we try to look at the world and at him or her through his or her eyes (Kelly, 1991).

25 Jean Améry was born in Austria as Hans Maier in 1912. He was a Jew and after the Anschluss he fled to Brussels and joined the resistance. He was caught, tortured and sent to a number of concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Monovitz, where he was one of Primo Levi's barrack-mates. After the liberation he came back to Brussels and changed his name. He wrote about his experience as a Nazi victim and survivor, about aging and suicide. In 1978 he took his own life in a hotel room in Salzburg (Améry, 1980; Brudholm, 2006).

26 On Améry's choice to use the French term ressentiment see Brudholm (2006).

27 A role relationship is a relationship in which at least one person tries to act accordingly to his or her understanding of the construction processes of the other (Kelly, 1991).