On Forgiveness

The early months of therapy had centered around helping the patient know and express his feelings about old resentments and hatreds which he had systematically excluded from his awareness. The patient was at first not aware of how enraged he was over the therapist's casual announcement of his forthcoming vacation. During the exploration of the patient's anger which followed, the therapist inquired, “Can you forgive me?” The usually depressed patient was nearly overcome with joy:

Entering therapy was for me like entering a dark tunnel, a tunnel filled with the blackness of hate and resentment. And the more I got into the therapy, the deeper I went into the blackness of the tunnel, the blackness of hate. It was beginning to seem as if all there was for me to feel was hate. When you asked if I could forgive you, all of a sudden there was a faint ray of light far off in the blackness. As if a long way off there might be a way out of hate… I mean being able to forgive.

The above account illustrates crucial differences in the phenomenology of hate when an individual has, and when he does not have, the possibility of forgiveness as part of his experiential repertoire. When forgiveness is not experienced as a possibility, then hate is felt as absolute, totally engulfing, immutable and projected unendingly into the future. Without forgiveness, hate means the complete and irrevocable annihilation of the loving part of the self in relation to the hated person. It is not surprising, then, that an individual who does not know forgiveness may have to exclude his hate from his awareness. To become aware of hate would mean to lose the hated person forever as someone to love. Pseudo-loving and pseudo-forgiving behavior stemming from anxiety or guilt over hating is often accompanied by depressive feelings of self-prostitution.

The possibility of forgiveness renders hate finite and temporary. With the possibility of forgiveness, hate cannot annihilate but can only temporarily anesthetize