From Actual Evil to Possible Forgiveness: Three Positions on the Axes of Self and Other

Abstract

This article focuses on three positions, from malignant to benign, located on the respective axes of object and subject in the context of forgiveness. A helpful graph is provided. The most malignant position on the axis of the object is the position of evil or indifference toward evil, paralleled, on the axis of the subject, by a position of vengefulness. The second position on the axis of the object is the position of guilt/atonement, which is paralleled, on the axis of the subject, by the position of amnesty. The third position on the axis of the object is the position of regret, which has its parallel on the subject axis in the position of forgiveness. Though presented as three clearly demarcated positions, they are present, with fluctuating dominance, in any encounter, whether concrete or imagined, between subject and object. These three positions are illustrated by means of a close reading of three memoirs.

Keywords:

• Forgiveness
• regret
• vengefulness
• amnesty
• hermetic narratives

Years ago, when my son was about four, I went to pick him up from kindergarten and found him with his back turned to his best friend and the teacher, at her wits end, between them. They had just had a fight, and the kindergarten teacher couldn’t convince either one of them to ask the other to forgive him. It was late. The other boy’s mother was furious, and it was time to lock the building. What to do? The teacher gave me a desperate look. It’s hard to ask someone’s forgiveness. What indeed were we to do? I proposed that instead of asking for forgiveness, they might offer forgiveness. Each of them could tell the other, “I forgive you.” After offering forgiveness, it might be easier to ask for it. And so it was.

What is this ability to forgive?

For years I have been witnessing the ways in which internalized objects and their real-life derivatives, or conversely, real-life objects and their internalized reverberations, travel all the way to the underworld and back in order to allow for a healing that is usually too little, too late. What occupied me while writing the present essay was the capacity for reparation, not merely in relation to concrete damage, but also as an inner point of departure.

The groundwork of forgiveness, like that of regret, is a priori, as I understand it, at least to some degree: It is present as a potential, preexisting the deed to be either regretted or forgiven. This echoes, in a way, Klein’s ideas in Envy and Gratitude (1957) concerning the ability to constitute a good object. According to Klein, this ability is not merely the outcome of the presence of a good external object that the child internalizes. It is also the very condition for turning an object into a good one, in the sense that the child needs already to have an ability to recognize and internalize good objects as such, a groundwork of goodness, a structural ability for gratitude.

In her “Mourning and its Relation to Manic Depressive States” (1940), Klein describes herself (who in the article appears as Mrs. A.) walking in the street not long after the death of her young son, when the beauty of the surrounding buildings strikes her: “Her relief at looking at pleasant houses was due to the setting in of some hope that she could recreate her son as well as her parents; life started again in herself and in the outer world” (p. 111).

A little before that she writes:

Mrs. A., who in an earlier stage of her mourning had to some extent felt that her loss was inflicted on her by revengeful parents, could now, in phantasy, experience the sympathy of these parents (dead long since), their desire to support and to help her. She felt that they also suffered a severe loss and shared her grief, as they would have done had they lived. (p. 110)

When catastrophe befalls us, it also befalls our inner objects (Roth, 2021). Mrs. A. (Klein herself) is angry at her inner parents who did not protect her from the catastrophe, but also feels guilty toward them, because this catastrophe happened to them inside her as well, reviving her guilt over all the pains they experienced in the past and are now going through because of the current loss. Her tears testify not only to her painful recognition of her loss but also to the good and strong connection with both her lost object and her inner objects—a connection of love that gives comfort in the face of pain and sorrow.

Klein’s description offers a unique portrayal of the process of reparation. She releases her internal objects from the omnipotence she attributed to them when she blamed them for her catastrophe. Now she can be in touch with the damage this catastrophe has left in those internal objects as well, who endure both the loss and their inability to save her from it.

The capacity to extract her internal objects from their omnipotence is, for her, the real reparation. Not the restoration of their omnipotence, that is, their returning to the status of her saviors, but rather the renunciation of this omnipotence and, through this renunciation, the regaining of the ability to be in touch with what they can still give her. Klein describes the moment when she realizes that, although they are not the cause of her disaster and cannot save her from it either, they mourn her loss together with her, inside her, and it is this ability to experience them as sharing her mourning that allows her to feel that she can join them in shared sorrow: “The tears that she shed were to some extent the tears that her internal parents shed, and she also wanted to comfort them as they—in her phantasy—comforted her” (p. 110).

Amihud Gilead, in his book Saving Possibilities (1999), makes a distinction between the mentally “possible” and the physically “actual.” Since the actual is also possible but not everything that is possible is also actual, the possible is a broader category than the actual and includes and encompasses it (Gilead, 1999, 2003). In my book, On the Lyricism of the Mind (Amir, 2016a), I suggested a different distinction between the mentally possible and the mentally actual, or between the “possible self” and the “actual self”—a distinction that rather than being situated in the body-mind dimension, as Gilead proposed, obtains exclusively in the domain of the psyche. I suggested considering the “actual self” as the actualized part of mental life (whether conscious or unconscious) and the “possible self” as the part that resides in the mind as an unrealized yet present psychic possibility. Between a person’s birth (the transition from possible to actual) and a person’s death (the passage from actual to possible), a whole life spans, consisting of a reciprocal and continuous motion between the possible and the actual. Whenever a contact between a person’s actual self and their possible self occurs, the possible undergoes actualization in the sense of becoming manifest as a part of that person’s mental life. However, the possible that does not become fully actualized also exists throughout in the form of inner lining, or an additional dimension, endowing the actual existence with depth and resonance.

The lyrical dimension of the mind, which is, as I suggested, a type of integration between the actual self and the possible self, is the mechanism that enables the subject to stray from their concrete biography by means of this motion back and forth between contact with the actual and contact with the possible.

But contact with the possible is not only an internal event: it is an important component of our interaction with others as well. One fascinating manifestation of this can be seen in some children, who develop, for reasons that are partly constitutional, a sufficiently strong lyrical dimension and as a result manage, in the course of object internalization, to make contact with the object’s possible qualities rather than with its merely actual ones. In that way, for instance, the child of a sick and depressed mother might be able to register her possible love and care for him through the actual wall of maternal dysfunction. Or a child of a violent father might be able to make contact with the warmth that never found actual expression but nevertheless existed as a possibility. However, the opposite direction is also relevant: a child of a gentle and tender father may perceive the father’s possible aggressiveness, just as a child of a warm and caring mother may feel her possible melancholic tendency beyond her actual excellent functioning.

The presence of this imaginative, “lyrical” dimension, so I assumed, enables us to be in touch with what is beyond the actual constraints of our objects, allowing us to transcend not only their actual biography but also our own. Our capacity to tolerate both the other’s shortcomings and faults, as well as our own, is related, at least to some extent, to the capacity to be in touch with a “possible” unbroken layer, in both self and other, which allows a transcendence of the concrete present and movement toward a more comprehensive perception of both self and object.

When contact with this layer is not possible, what occurs is a collapse into the concrete realm of the actual object or the actual self. Contact with the object’s unbroken possible is then replaced by the image of the omnipotent object. The difference, however small it may appear, between the unbroken possible object and the omnipotent object is critical: making contact with the possible layer already involves the work of mourning over what has never become actual, and this mourning also includes an experience of the object mourning what it did not manage to actualize or give. Contact with the object’s omnipotent image, by contrast, implies a refusal of the work of mourning: in the case of such a refusal, the object is perceived as having chosen to deprive the child from what is theirs by right and keep it to itself. The object then is perceived as envious and triggers a similar envy. Contact with the object’s possible layer is therefore also what enables forgiveness, because it is associated with the assumption that the object could regret what it was unable to be or give. Adherence to the object’s omnipotence, by contrast, because it assumes the object’s refusal to regret, involves the subject’s refusal to forgive. There is, in other words, a profound connection between the subject’s ability to see the object as capable of regret and the subject’s ability to perceive it as deserving forgiveness.

Three Positions on the Axes of Self and Other

I would like to offer a kind of mapping, referring to the relation between the subject’s perceiving of the object as capable of regret and the subject’s capacity for forgiveness. This mapping marks three positions, from malignant to benign, located on the respective axes of object and subject, as is illustrated here:

The most malignant position on the axis of the object is the position of evil or indifference toward evil. In this position, the object—in the subject’s perception—wishes to inflict pain or alternatively is indifferent to the other’s pain. The object in this position is experienced as able to feel neither guilt nor regret. On the axis of the subject, this position is paralleled by a position of vengefulness, which seeks to repeat the original injustice, as Hannah Arendt (1992 [1958]) has suggested, only with reversed roles. When the subject thinks of the object as having evil intentions toward him or her or as being indifferent to the evil that befalls them, the subject will develop a fantasy of vengeance in which he or she aims to inflict on the other what the other (or its representations) has inflicted on them.

The second position on the axis of the object is the position of guilt/atonement: feelings of guilt that lead to attempts at atonement. I have previously discussed acts of atonement, especially in regard to collective victimizers (Amir, 2017, 2019a; Amir & Hacohen, 2020). Gestures of compensation and appeasement where one nation has committed an injustice against another have been on record throughout history. One instance was when Germany committed itself to make reparation payments to Holocaust survivors worldwide. Another instance was the Peace and Reconciliation Committees set up by South Africa’s postapartheid government, aiming to compensate and rehabilitate those who suffered under the regime. I put these two very different examples side by side to bring out the difference between atonement and regret (the object’s third position, which I will describe shortly). While the disguised aim of atonement, as I perceive it, is to cleanse the abuser and to erase or undo the act of injustice, regret connotes a recognition of the injustice and its implication for the other, which is only then followed by an effort to repair. While atonement constitutes an act that seeks to undo what happened by means of compensation, regret opens a new space. This distinction between acts of atonement and gestures of regret may cast light on some Holocaust survivors’ refusal to accept German restitution payments, which they experienced as a type of erasure of the injustice rather than a recognition of its meaning and implications. The Peace and Reconciliation Committees, by contrast, were seen by those who took part in the process as aiming to recognize, rather than erase, the injustice.

On the axis of the subject, the parallel of the position of guilt/atonement is the position of amnesty, which is located between the position of vengeance and the position of forgiveness. While this position does not repeat the original violation, like the position of vengefulness, it does not escape the symmetry of inversed power relations either. On the contrary: the gesture of amnesty is squarely situated within power relations. The one who grants amnesty occupies a position of power in relation to the other and so remains locked in the existing power relations, if not by way of malignant inversion of power (like in the position of vengeance), then by way of reaction-formation. In this intermediate state, the one who grants amnesty takes hold over the other through this very act, exempting that other from punishment—but not from guilt (Amir, 2022).

The third and final position on the axis of the object is the position of regret, which has its parallel on the subject axis in the position of forgiveness. These two positions, regret and forgiveness, share, much more than the two other pairs, a dimension of mutuality. We can think of the object who is capable of regret as enabling, by dint of that regret, the subject’s transformation into someone who can forgive. But at the same time, and not less importantly, we can think of the subject’s ability to forgive as what makes it possible for the object to feel regret. Regret, thus, is the outcome of forgiveness no less than what prompts it.

Though these three positions seem clearly demarcated, in most cases there is a dynamic movement between them, and so we may assume that they are present, with fluctuating dominance, in any encounter, whether concrete or imagined, between a subject and an object.

Between No Regret and No Forgiveness: “Something Disguised as Love”

In her memoir Something Disguised as Love (2021; Hebrew), Galia Oz unfolds a succession of abuses to which her father, the Israeli writer Amos Oz, subjected her throughout her childhood. The memoir takes the shape of an indictment composed, in addition to her own testimony, of quotations from the psychological literature (functioning as “expert opinions”), things reported by childhood friends, and accessory evidence deriving more or less directly from letters her father wrote to her.

The memoir’s main addressee is not the father but the witnesses, or jurors, who are summoned, throughout the book’s chapters, to pass sentence on him. This is the memoir’s strength but also its weakness. Rather than entering a conversation with its audience, it demands that they pass judgment. Over and beyond not holding out any possibility of amnesty, it seems to constitute a public execution.

In terms of two-dimensional versus three-dimensional perceptions of the object, one might say that the more layered and multivocal the representation of an object, the less exposed it is to reduction, thus evoking a more ambivalent and stratified response. Respectively, the more the object’s three-dimensionality flattens, approaching two-dimensionality, our judgment, too, becomes flattened. The memoir’s flattening of the father is not accidental. This is an intentional act, even if not necessarily conscious, one that serves to guide the reader’s thought toward one particular place. As Oz writes near the end of the memoir: “This is a test for the readers too, especially those who doubt” (p. 135).¹ In addition to its flattening of the father, the text does the same to its readers, removing any possibility for them to think differently from what the writer requires them to think. The result is a “blocked” narrative (Amir, 2016b), where the grave in which the narrator feels she was buried alive transforms into a hermetic text that obscures any possible living dialogue or thought.

“Each outburst enfolded an entire morality-spectacle,” she writes, “starting with the crime (mess, rudeness, and sometimes nothing whatsoever), followed by holy rage and resounding punishment, and finally expulsion” (p. 29). It is hard not to observe how the text itself enacts this entire spectacle all over again, while achieving a perfect role reversal: enumeration of the father’s crimes, rage (holy, or at least accompanied with an aura of absolute justice), removal, banishment, and, finally, now that the memoir is published, resounding punishment.

“This mental abuse, which is everywhere, resembles a huge octopus sending its tentacles in all directions” (p. 30), writes Oz. Her memoir, too, sends its tentacles everywhere, outflanking the reader wherever possible. Whenever readerly doubt might slip in, the text inserts evidence, quotes experts, and shifts into generalizations and the plural. Since the father is never perceived as being capable of regret, even when he makes gestures an outsider might understand as such, pardon or clemency are out of the question, let alone forgiveness.

When a different picture emerges for a moment, it is immediately placed within walls that prevent it from “leaking,” in the minds of the readers as well as in the mind of the writer, into the other pictures:

From early childhood I frame one picture marked by peace and quiet: a rainy, stormy night. I am a toddler in rubber wellies and my father and I are on our way to the children’s home, chatting under the umbrella while above our heads enormous casuarina trees shake their branches like in a whirlwind. (p. 33)

The need to isolate and “frame” this picture as a singular one is typical of the blocked narrative exemplified so clearly by this text: the slightest leakage of one memory into another, of good into bad, puts the entire structure at risk of crashing. This is because it relies entirely on exclusion, on separation between one element and another, on a polarization that rules out any possibility of the integration of different qualities.

Traumatic memories have the tendency to barricade and isolate themselves from all other memories. As a result, living aspects of the self cannot flow toward them or form an associative link with them. Because of the fear that the new memories may become “infected” with the traumatic ones (and also vice versa—the fear that the traumatic memories will be mixed with everyday materials), the psyche may end up creating a hermetic wall that prevents access to the traumatic memories. In that way, they continue to dwell within the mind as facts, but it is extremely difficult to create a vivid movement to or from them and to transform them by means of such a movement from solid to flexible psychic matter (Amir, 2016b). This isolation puts the traumatic narrative into a kind of psychic formalin jar that preserves it as a coherent sequence at the cost of retaining its static and frozen state. A “pseudo-access” to the traumatic contents thus takes shape: on the one hand, as we see here, the testimonial narrative is kept tight and convincing. On the other hand, this convincing narrative has a double role: it simultaneously preserves the story while withholding any transformative access to it. This also explains the refusal of any attempt to inquire, to observe from a different angle, or to question the absoluteness of memory. This refusal casts the reader in the role of a captive audience convened for the purpose of passively validating the narrative, a muted audience, of which the narrative effectively demands that it erase itself as a subject and become, instead, an object in the service of the story (Amir, 2016b).

This is the core connection between the hermetic narrative and the mechanism of identification with the aggressor (Ferenczi, 1933). In fact, it can be understood as a variant of the primary traumatic event itself: the victim, who was forced, at least in her experience, to surrender her subjectivity and become a hostage in the service of her father’s needs, becomes herself the one who, by means of her testimonial narrative, now forces her listeners or readers to surrender as thinking subjects, turning them into passive extras in a spectacle in which they otherwise take no part.

Still, Oz’s narrative includes a few moments of a different quality as well. One such moment begins as follows:

What is it about this scene, a quiet, free morning in a tidy home where making noise is forbidden, Cantata number 106 playing in the background at a low volume—that even now makes me feel despondent, so many years after that home stopped to exist? Why does this clean picture hound me? (p. 34)

I myself wondered, while reading, why it was here that my eyes teared up. It was not the description of the father’s deploring of any music other than the type he preferred; neither was it the picture of the daughter’s small hand reaching out quickly for the gramophone’s arm to avoid scratching the record. The memoir is full of far more grating images than this one. The effect of this moment is related to its formulation, which, for a brief moment, moved from statement to question. This question opened a door in me as well, allowing me, as its addressee, to soften for a moment in the face of this tightly frozen narrative and enter the picture, rather than watch it merely from outside.

At some point, Galia Oz introduces the notion of “gaslighting,”² which she defines as “a manipulation which is aimed to unsettle a person by means of the constant questioning of his testimony, his judgment, his sense of reality, and even his sanity” (p. 59). This phenomenon is particularly interesting here. There is no question about the existence of this mechanism, which operates especially often in the case of abusive families, but also in various political settings. But in the present instance, it is fascinating to observe how the same notion may also apply to the memoir itself, which, like blocked narratives in general, creates its own conditions of truth, thereby making it impossible to question them.

In a letter in which “he confesses his guilt,” the father writes: “‘You were slapped a few times. You were sent out of the house a few times. You were cold-shouldered,’” but, she adds, “He removes himself by using an impersonal construction. Who sent me away and turned their backs? […] The confession undermined itself, cunningly denied itself” (p. 62).

Here the reason for the inability to absolve, let alone forgive, becomes clear. The father’s admission is perceived as shrewdly undermining itself. Not only is it not experienced as the outcome of regret, but it is felt like a cynical manipulation, typical of perpetrators’ language (Amir, 2017), in which their actions are worded in the third person instead of the first person in order to disguise their responsibility for them. The same happens in the following passage:

You’re always right, he wrote, maybe a little too right. Only once in thirty or forty years did you ask me to forgive you. I tried to read this sentence and avoid resisting, be open to the possibility that I too had to repair some historic injustice I committed against him. I was willing to ask for his forgiveness, but nowhere were there any details of the sins for which I was responsible. And then, at another point in his letter, I realized the nature of my original sin: You loved me more than daughters should love their father (in these very words, exactly). (p. 63)

When I described earlier the inability to release the object from its omnipotence, I had in mind precisely what these lines convey. In addressing his daughter with these words, the father seems to be saying something about the omnipotent proportions to which she, out of her childish need, inflated him, and that it is these huge proportions that now make her unable to forgive him.³ The issue of this omnipotence returns when an excellent anonymous review of one of Galia Oz’s children’s books turns out to have been written by her father. Here, as well, he presents himself (and is perceived by her) as omnipotent: someone who not only is able to bring off this “fraud” but also can take pleasure in the frustration it causes:

He clearly delighted in my frustration, the plot he wove against me, the superiority he derived from leaving me in the dark. […] This was not done in innocence but as an obsessive attempt to get a grip, once more, on what he thought was his and had escaped him. (pp. 67-68)

In 2018, she recounts, he phoned her for the last time:

During that conversation, I wasn’t aware that this was the last time we were talking. I was impatient and tense. The sound of my father’s voice scared me. If only he would have let go of the ambiguity, if only he had just managed to utter one expression of goodwill, said one thing that was sincere. I expected him to say he loved us, that he missed us after all this time, and so on. None of that happened. […] I am trying to find a way to come to my father’s defense, span a bridge over the abyss which time and his death have opened up between us. Maybe he did try to admit his mistake but didn’t manage it because of his fear of humiliating himself. But no, he was a tough dealer who showed no sign of empathy. […] He neither expressed regret nor promised to repair. (p. 96)

There’s a momentary attempt here, from her side, to build a bridge: to see him or conceive of him as capable of feeling sorry even if he is unable to express it. But the effort collapses in view of her experience of him as calculated and manipulative:

He never showed a sign of being troubled by his conscience, he only demonstrated the distress of someone who has been forced to defend himself against the powers of darkness. He was wretched because of what I forced him to inflict on me. (p. 105)

Here we get to what I see as the crux of this memoir:

The friends I am talking about [friends who like her were slapped or otherwise abused in their childhood —DA] are able to love their violent parents due to a certain quality these parents had and which, in the absence of a common Hebrew expression, I would call compassion […]. Compassion, in this loose definition, is the very essence of parental feeling. […] It is something that enfolds a child at every single moment, a transparent layer yet very concrete, which constrains but also ensures a kind of decency, even in the harshest of homes. (pp.113-114)

Galia Oz sees her father, not only as someone who does evil, but also as being complacent about it. His sin is twofold: if only, like other violent fathers, he would regret what he did or acknowledge its severity, even while justifying doing these things for educational reasons, for example, she could have felt compassion and maybe even forgive. But the hostility she describes, the hostility she experienced, is a “transparent hostility.” As a result of (and as a defense against) this transparency, Galia Oz’s narrative takes on a double function: in the face of the transparent hostility, it erects a hermetic, high-security barricade that encircles what lacks in outline, paints the colorless, and transforms what has slipped out of view into something that fills the field of vision entirely. This is its power. But this fortification also has the effect of locking the very act of writing and thinking within its boundaries. The result is that the text fails to create dynamic or vital movement. It is, rather, a carefully planned track whose start and end have been determined in advance and that constitutes execution of judgment rather than any process of revealing.

Amnesty as Inverse Power Relations: “Letter to the Father”

“Letter to the Father” (1953) is a letter Franz Kafka wrote to his father that never reached its destination. Kafka presents in this personal text an entire spectrum of father-son relations in order to map the ways in which his father oppressed and suppressed his son’s capacity to make his stand or even fully become himself.

The letter opens with the reason for its writing:

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because the explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. (p. 3)

This opening already sets the tone for what is about to follow: The father’s question, at least as the son remembers it, is not “why are you afraid of me?” but rather “why do you maintain that you are afraid of me?” (ibid). The question already weakens its addressee: maybe you don’t really have a reason to be afraid of me but just convince yourself, or me, that you are?

The letter then goes into a detailed description of the various dimensions of the father’s omnipotence, beginning with a comparison between the father’s body and the son’s (“There was I, skinny, weakly, slight; you strong, tall, broad. Even inside the hut I felt a miserable specimen, and what’s more, not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things”; p. 7) and continuing with the father’s way of violently imposing his views (“You had worked your way so far up by your own energies alone, and as a result you had unbounded confidence in your opinion. […] Your opinion was correct, every other was mad […] and finally nobody was left except yourself”; p. 8) and with the manner in which he disapproved, outright, and without having made their acquaintance, anyone in whom the son showed the slightest interest (“It was enough that I should take a little interest in a person […]—for you, without any consideration for my feelings or respect for my judgement, to move in with abuse, defamation, and denigration”; p. 9).

The father’s very size or proportions make him, in the eyes of his son, unforgivable. The primary violence (Aulagnier, 2001) resulting from the physical differences in size and power, even without turning into actual violence, excludes the child from the father as well as from himself.

Along the pages of this long letter, the son sums up his father’s sins against him, including acts he interprets as violent even though they were meant generously, and moments when the father seemingly turned to him to help. The father, as the son perceives him, thinks only of himself, and even when he seems to turn to the boy, he in fact turns his back on him or takes the opportunity to humiliate him. So, for instance, when the young man tells his parents about his sexual experiences, taking the opportunity to let them know that because they left him “uninstructed,” he exposed himself to great dangers, the father’s response is to tell the son that he can help him “go into these things without danger” (p. 32)—which may appear a caring and open-minded response if only the son wasn’t so preoccupied with issues of power:

What you advised me to do was in your opinion and even more in my opinion at that time, the filthiest thing possible. That you wanted to see to it that I should not bring any of the physical filth home with me was unimportant, for you were only protecting yourself, your house. The important thing was rather that you yourself remained outside your own advice, a married man, a pure man, above such things; […] Thus you became still purer, rose still higher. The thought that you might have given yourself similar advice before your marriage was to me utterly unthinkable. So there was hardly any smudge of earthy filth on you at all. And it was you who pushed me down into this filth—just as though I were predestined to it with a few frank words. And so, if the world only consisted of me and you (a notion I was much inclined to have), then this purity of the world came to an end with you and, by virtue of your advice, the filth began with me. (ibid)

I dwell on this paragraph because here, maybe more than anywhere else in this indictment, the son’s blind spot in relation to himself is most striking. The accusation is clear: under the cover of giving his son good advice, the father installs the hierarchy between them according to which he, the father, places himself above anything filthy (here in the form of sexuality), while instead pushing his son right into it. The son sets aside the fact that it was he who informed his parents of the risks he had apparently taken and blamed them for not instructing him back then, and in addition, he assumes (or maybe projects) that the father, before his marriage, never indulged in things he now urges his son to partake in. It seems that no matter what advice the father would have offered his son, it would have been understood in the same way. Had the father, for example, reprimanded him for engaging in these sexual practices, it would have been understood as affirming the hierarchy just as much as when he responded how he actually had, in a relatively open-minded, nonjudgmental way.

This leads to what in many ways could be taken as the text’s crux:

Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living only in those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. And, in keeping with the conception I have of your magnitude, these are not many and not very comforting regions […]. (pp. 41-42)

The son is unable to live except for in the regions that are not covered by the father’s body—but even those sparse regions are covered with the father’s shadow, something that makes them uninhabitable for the son. This, by the way, is what the son himself says further on when commenting on his father’s advice:

Here perhaps both our guiltlessness becomes most evident. A gives B a piece of advice that is frank, in keeping with his attitude to life, not very lovely but still, even today perfectly usual in the city, a piece of advice that might prevent damage to health. This piece of advice is for B morally not very invigorating—but why should he not be able to work his way out of it, and repair the damage in the course of the years? Besides, he does not even have to take the advice; and there is no reason why the advice itself should cause B’s whole future world to come tumbling down. And yet something of this kind does happen, but only for the very reason that A is you and B is myself. (pp. 32-33)

This letter, then, is not written from just one perspective. It is scattered with evidence of another position, one that, in terms of the present essay, we might call the position of amnesty. Here, for instance, is evidence of this position: “And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not to forget that I never, and even for a single moment believe any guilt to be on your side. The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having” (p. 5).

While the son does not forgive his father at these moments, he is willing to absolve him. In this imaginary act of granting his father amnesty, the son simultaneously enacts the roles of prosecutor, witness, judge, and executor. In doing so he does not release himself from the power relations between himself and his father but rather inverts them so that he now absolves his father from his superior position as a judge. This reversal culminates at the end of the letter, where the son replies to himself in his father’s name and goes one step further by also replying to his father’s imagined reply. The confusion the son creates when addressing himself in the father’s voice, then replying to the imagined version of the father and even going along to argue with some of the arguments put forth (by himself), points exactly at what is so necessary in order for forgiveness to be possible: at least some separation between father and son, some ability to conceive of the father as a subject in his own right who exists beyond his alleged overshadowing of his son, and equally the perception of the son (by himself) as a subject in his own right who exists over and beyond the shadow of his father.

The son responds to himself on behalf of the father, staging a play in which the father allegedly speaks as a subject, with a voice of his own. But in fact, this subject does not really speak in the voice of the father but in the voice of the son imagining the voice of the father. The son’s voicing (or ventriloquizing) of the father is in fact a silencing of the latter and an inversion of the perceived power relations: now the father is the one who is silenced, while the son both addresses himself in the father’s voice and answers in his own, removing the father from the entire conversation exactly by means of arrogating the power to give him a voice. What we witness here is the way in which in granting amnesty, as opposed to forgiveness, the power relations, fundamentally unquestioned, are simply inverted. While forgiveness offers room to the other, granting amnesty is an act of eliding the other exactly under the guise of offering him or her a space.

Forgiveness as Refusing a Pact with the Devil: “Satan Says”

Sharon Olds’ poem “Satan Says” (2017)⁴ does not mention forgiveness even once.

Its negotiation is with Satan:

I am locked in a little cedar box

with a picture of shepherds pasted onto

the central panel between carvings.

The box stands on curved legs.

It has a gold, heart-shaped lock

and no key. I am trying to write my

way out of the closed box

redolent of cedar. Satan

comes to me in the locked box

and says, I’ll get you out. Say

My father is a shit. I say

my father is a shit and Satan

laughs and says, It’s opening.

Say your mother is a pimp.

My mother is a pimp. Something

opens and breaks when I say that.

My spine uncurls in the cedar box

like the pink back of the ballerina pin

with a ruby eye, resting beside me on

satin in the cedar box.

The way out is through Satan’s language, that is, through her joining of his language. This is the code that opens the lock. And indeed, every time she repeats after him, something opens a little, but not only opens. Something also breaks. The verb “break” appears twice in this poem. The first time is in the following lines: “Something opens and breaks when I say that.” The second time appears in the next lines:

Say shit, say death, say fuck the father,

Satan says, down my ear.

The pain of the locked past buzzes

in the child’s box on her bureau, under

the terrible round pond eye

etched around with roses, where

self-loathing gazed at sorrow.

Shit. Death. Fuck the father.

Something opens. Satan says

Don’t you feel a lot better?

Light seems to break on the delicate

edelweiss pin, carved in two

colors of wood.

And so, we understand that there is a price to pay for opening this box. Something will break. It is virtually impossible to open without breaking something irreparably.

Here appears her first gesture of resistance to the covenant with Satan:

I love him too,

you know, I say to Satan dark

in the locked box. I love them but

I’m trying to say what happened to us

in the lost past. Of course, he says

and smiles, of course. Now say: torture.

I see, through blackness soaked in cedar,

the edge of a large hinge open.

I would like to linger, for a moment, on the word “too,” which in my reading makes the very transformation in this poem. The speaker does not erase the past, nor does she annihilate the child’s buzzing memories. And yet, by using the word “too” she deviates from the flat dichotomy of love-hate. It is possible to hate and love the same person, even at the same time.

Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s

cunt, says Satan, I’ll get you out.

The angle of the hinge widens

until I see the outlines of

the time before I was, when they were

locked in the bed. When I say

the magic words, Cock, Cunt,

Satan softly says, Come out.

But the air around the opening

is heavy and thick as hot smoke.

Come in, he says, and I feel his voice

breathing from the opening.

The exit is through Satan’s mouth.

Come in my mouth, he says, you’re there

already, and the huge hinge

begins to close.

Oh no, I loved

them, too, I brace

my body tight

in the cedar house.

The covenant with Satan makes it possible to get out only in one way, through his mouth, that is, through the one idiom he offers. But in the first lines of this poem the speaker says: “I am trying to write my/way out of the closed box.” She tries to “write her way out,” that is, to find, through her own words, a path out of the place in which she is imprisoned. However, to come in Satan’s mouth is not to write her way out but rather to write his way in. What seems a possibly orgasmic rescue is nothing but a repeat, with inversed roles, of what locked her in the cedar box in the first place. And to that she refuses by saying

Oh no, I loved

them, too

What happens at this point of refusal? The speaker counters the language Satan offers—a language that by repetition of the words aims to repeat the torture—with a different language: “I loved them/too.” In the face of the radical polarization held out by Satan, the “too” she extends resurrects the three-dimensional image of relations in all its complexity. These three-dimensionality and complexity are, as the rest of the poem shows, the spell that expels Satan:

Satan sucks himself out the keyhole.

I’m left locked in the box, he seals

the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.

It’s your coffin now, Satan says.

I hardly hear;

I am warming my cold

hands at the dancer’s

ruby eye—

the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.

As far as Satan is concerned, she buries herself alive at this very moment. If she is not ready to “only hate,” she has no way out. But for her, the gained knowledge of love has a much greater power to free her than the old knowledge of hatred. Against Satan’s tongue, which seals the heart-shaped lock with its wax, leaving her inside, there is another fire, perhaps another tongue, which might melt the wax and open the box in a different way, “suddenly discovered,” unthought-of before. And so, there is a lyrical reversal here that transcends the rules that the poem sets, violating the covenant with Satan’s language in favor of the covenant with a language of her own. Instead of coming “in his mouth,” on his terms, she comes in her own mouth, with her own words, on her own terms.

Unlike Galia Oz and Kafka in their letters to their fathers, Olds neither seeks revenge nor pretends to grant amnesty. Her journey is a journey inward, not one that leads her toward an actual other. Her goal, unlike that of the two others, is not situated externally (confession, recognition) but aims to attain another inner state. It is a voyage of forgiveness exactly because rather than turning away from the thing that must be forgiven, it allows her to turn to it in her own language.

The Departure Point of Forgiveness

In an essay “On Forgiveness,” dedicated to the relations between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Michal Ben-Naftali writes:

Arendt believes that only forgiveness, which has the effect of reversing what has been done in the past, can redeem the public space from the irreversible nature of our actions, freeing us from their consequences instead of leaving us trapped in them. Only forgiveness can allow us to start anew for a common future. Forgiveness is therefore contrary to revenge, which for Arendt means a re-execution of the original offense—an act that does not put an end to the first act but leaves all parties bound within it. […]. Revenge is a natural and automatic response to an offense. You can expect it. You can even calculate it. Forgiveness, however, is unpredictable. It is not conditioned by what aroused it, and it has the power to unshackle both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. […] Arendt’s forgiveness is a demonstration of freedom. The freedom to choose who you want to be. The freedom to transcend. (2019, pp. 129-130)

Unconditional forgiveness of this kind, which transcends the conditions that led to its very occurrence, is not an act that hallows the perpetrator’s behavior; rather, it puts itself over and beyond it.

In his book The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida (1996) claims that true forgiveness consists in forgiving the unforgivable. Were forgiveness granted only to the forgivable, then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. In other words, an act that is forgivable does not require forgiveness. Forgiveness is always radical forgiveness. It is only required or becomes meaningful where forgiveness is impossible. It is neither an economic event of give-and-take nor does it require any specific conditions (for instance, the violator asking forgiveness) in order to be achieved. Forgiveness is the opposite of all this: it is outside the language of negotiation and hence unnegotiable.

I would like to take the idea of forgiving the unforgivable as a point of departure, but also challenge it, or suggest expanding it, with the notion of a spectrum of forgiveness. On this spectrum, there also exists forgiveness for what can be forgiven, even if not without difficulty. This kind of forgiveness is situated on the axis I described before, higher than amnesty, because it is an act of liberation, of freedom, for the one who forgives just as much as for the one who is forgiven, and because it institutes, as suggested earlier, a reciprocity, a bidirectionality, with regret.

The forgiveness for the unforgivable is of a different order and requires a different positionality. It is not a specific act but a broader attitude, one I would call a departure point of forgiveness. From this perspective, forgiveness is not a response to something that has already happened, but a preexisting possibility.

Derrida claims it is a mistake to think that forgiveness, which is already attributed to a vertical movement, is always sought from the bottom up or is always given from the top down. But the departure point of forgiveness, as I see it, doesn’t only reverse directions but erases the hierarchical movement in itself: it removes power from the giver and weakness from the taker, thereby entirely undoing the “economic” relations of giving and taking, turning forgiveness from being a transitive action to an intransitive state.

A key text illustrating this point of departure is the diary of Etty Hillesum, a twenty-seven-year-old woman, written in Amsterdam between 1941 and 1943.

I knew at once: I shall have to pray for this German soldier. Out of all those uniforms one has been given a face now. There will be other faces, too, in which we shall be able to read something we understand: that German soldiers suffer as well. There are no frontiers between suffering people, and we must pray for them all. (p. 156)

This is just one of many instances of Hillesum’s attitude throughout the pages of her diary. The position she presents refuses the power relations of victim and victimizer to which she is prompted by rejecting what Ferenczi (1933) called “the terror of the sufferers,” which victims’ suffering imposes on their surroundings. Her refusal of the victim position is not based on the denial of suffering but rather feeds from a transformation of the victim-victimizer dichotomy into a notion of human responsibility in which those located in both sides equally participate.

The departure point of forgiveness ties together forgiveness and responsibility. The ability to forgive is a way of taking responsibility for self and other or, rather, for the human and the humane, which both self and other, victimizer and victim, embody in different variations, even if from opposing sides. This type of responsibility can be blurred both by the position of the helpless victim and that of the guilty victimizer.

Hillesum’s diary is full of illustrations of this responsibility:

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then He must be dug out again. (p. 44)

Or elsewhere: “And God is not accountable to us for the senseless harm we cause one another. We are accountable to him!” (p. 150).

Merav Roth (2020) writes:

Hillesum does not manically exclude herself from the human fate. Her strength lies in her courage not to split and project onto people, and to avoid the urge to create a world of external bad objects and internal good ones. Instead, she has a profound understanding that in each person, including herself, good and bad reside, and that the choice of the good is by no means obvious, but is an option in every conceivable situation. (p. 543)

Does this amount to saying that there is nothing that cannot be forgiven? Clearly not. Nor does it imply that it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to attain this point of departure of forgiveness in the face of the unforgivable, whatever it may be.

The array that stretches between the forgivable and the unforgivable is a personal one, and in addition to being personal, it may be conceived of as a line along which one may move, taking different positions over the course of life (or the course of therapy), even in relation to the same event or object. I believe that there is value in movement on the spectrum in all its directions, as long as it is a living and dynamic movement: a person can also move from a place of a priori forgiveness to a place of anger that was not previously experienced and later return to forgive from a richer and more layered point of view. We have the option, in other words, to take a more complex position than between a dichotomous forgiveness versus nonforgiveness. And this ability to create a continuum on which we shift among different positions at different points in time in itself releases us from the fixity of nonforgiveness with a welcome stirring of life.

At least in my view, forgiveness is our most profound way of taking responsibility for ourselves and for others, and this means that, however difficult this is to recognize, we have a certain responsibility for the suffering the other has caused us as well. This must not be understood as the masochism of turning the other cheek; nor is it some confirmation of what is known as “victim guilt.” The point here is rather that because we are all part of humanity, no one has immunity: neither from being on the receiving end of evil nor from being its agent (Amir, 2022). “Suffering has always been with us, does it really matter in what form it comes?” writes Hillesum (p. 152). The forgivable, for her, is not a singular action or person but humanity as such, over and beyond its singular manifestations in individuals and their actions. In terms of the departure point of forgiveness, we forgive not because the other’s deeds deserve forgiveness. We forgive because the ability to forgive is the only antibody with which the human spirit can counter the unforgivable itself.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Dana Amir

Dana Amir, PhD, is a Clinical Psychologist, Supervising and Training Analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, poet and literature researcher, head of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis at the University of Haifa, author of four psychoanalytic nonfiction books, and winner of five international psychoanalytic awards.

Notes

¹ This and the following quotations were translated from the Hebrew original by Mirjam Meerschwam Hadar. There is currently no published English version.

² A term deriving from George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight.

³ Not to mention that this particular father was already inflated because of his huge success and fame.

⁴ Sharon Olds, “Satan Says” from Satan Says. Copyright © 1980 by Sharon Olds. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Source: Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980).