Book Review: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Forgiveness and Mental Health. Edited by Ronald Britton and Aleksandra Novakovic. New York:  Routledge, 2024,  222 pp., $35.96 paperback.

The book Psychoanalytic Approaches to Forgiveness and Mental Health, a collection of individual essays from various authors of the contemporary Kleinian tradition and edited by Ronald Britton and Alexandra Novakovic, is an approach to forgiveness as a state of mind of one's internal object relationship and its relationship to the world. The authors are writing from their own clinical practice with their interest in culture, literature, and philosophy, to invite thinking about forgiveness and its relationship to other defining concepts such as revenge, envy, and reparation. The essays are written with the utmost sensitivity to when the experience of forgiveness is an everyday “clearing the road” (p. 184) process, to when forgiveness is hard to come by, or when it fails. While the essays are all different, they form an integrated tapestry for approaching forgiveness as a softening around the angular, or otherwise impenetrable, edges of psychic reality that lead to mental health.

The authors write about understanding unconscious phantasies of denkfiguren, unconscious figures of thought and feelings, around the experience of suffering and the experience with someone who inflicts suffering. Elaborating on the experience of forgiveness using the whole personality includes becoming aware of deadly unconscious phantasy that interferes with the process of repairing the object relationship

within oneself and one's relationship with the world in consonant or even dissonant ways. Alexandra Novakovic, for example, suggests that finding what's been lost and giving it back to the other, transformed into something good as an act of generosity, is forgiving. All of the au