Respondent

While we sit and take this in, I am not sure I should be saying anything at all. A moment's silence or something probably seems more appropriate. Anyway, thank you very much. I couldn't see how you were going to select from your book because it is such a vast subject, and such a painful one.

I just wanted to start with your last reading about the whole issue of forgiveness. I have to say I am not a forensic expert, I am not a forensic psychiatrist or psychologist. I am a clinician who thinks about these issues, really only as a clinician, so I am sure there are people in the audience who have things to say that possibly are more relevant than I have. But I wanted to think a little bit about John Major's statement that we must condemn a little more and understand a little less, because it reminded me very much of a very interesting paper by Neville Symington that was in the International Review of Psycho-Analysis, I think in the late seventies. He was talking about responses evoked in analysts by working with the psychopathic patient. I think these responses are aroused in us when we hear about a psychopathic crime, even if the murderers weren't actually full psychopaths, or psychopaths at all, and were in fact just small children. These responses that he identifies are: condemnation, collusion and denial. And he thinks that these are perfectly appropriate reactions but they are very unhelpful in the treatment, and that the analyst has to work on his countertransference responses to transform these into very different responses which have something to do with really having the courage to look evil in the eye - which doesn't mean that the perpetrator himself is necessarily evil.

I think what I want to say is that there isn't any short cut to this forgiveness that we are talking about, either in the abused, in the abuser, or in the witness, or maybe even in the nation; and that some of the outrage and shock and dreadfully superficial condemnation - that you are so agains