You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Books by psychoanalysts meant to reach a broader reading public usually have titles that promise insight into subjects like love, power, fantasy and feelings. While written by individuals with knowledge of psychoanalytic theory, they usually avoid forays into theory by removing psychoanalytic jargon and technical language. In her book, Forgiveness in Intimate Relationships, Shahrzad Siassi has taken a subject that
sounds like it will be treated as an examination of a general phenomenon for the educated reader, a more or less popular “trade book.” While this may be what readers will expect they will instead find a thoroughly psychoanalytic examination of forgiveness that is based upon the author's psychoanalytic perspective, a perspective that brilliantly synthesizes a number of psychoanalytic theories. Her writing is clear and convincing as she builds a picture of how in her psychoanalytic work she has come to conclude that in a successful psychoanalysis forgiveness leads to the needed re-establishment of internalized objects particularly when the historical conditions of relatedness prior to a disappointment or narcissistic injury have been met.
The structure of this book invites the reader to join the author as she clarifies what she means by forgiveness and how integral it is to vision of a successful treatment. To do this she begins by extricating forgiveness in the psychoanalytic sense from any religious or spiritual meaning. Her central idea is that forgiveness that is consciously sought by the forgiver is something quite different than forgiveness that emerges in the course of a psychoanalytic treatment. As she illustrates in her clinical examples the conditions for psychoanalytically arrived at forgiveness are quite specific and require that they emerge from the patient after and around the stabilization in analysis that results from the relationship with the analyst. In her view the patient who has suffered the loss of a relationship, as in alienation of a