Chairman's Introduction

If you do a quick trawl through the indexes of Freud, Klein, Ernest Jones, Bion, etc, you will find not a single entry for forgiveness. So it is not a word that has been given the splash of paint that Winnicott once said turns an ordinary word into a psychoanalytic technical term. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis has taken a detailed interest in many of the concepts to which forgiveness centrally relates, for example, trauma, grievance, resentment, vengefulness, hatred, guilt and shame. If I may venture to guess at the attitude of my colleagues, I think they would likely agree that forgiveness is a very important notion, but would hesitate to use the word for fear of seeming to underestimate its complexity and difficulty.

In religious traditions, by contrast, particularly in Christianity, forgiveness is spoken of a great deal. The central prayer of Christianity says: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us, as if ‘we’, if we are ordinary decent people, are forever and without too much trouble forgiving the people who offend us. For those brought up with this traditional religious language, it can come as quite a shock to encounter the bitter, relentless tenacity of deep-seated grievance, the single-minded hatred and sense of irreparable loss that fuels passionate vengefulness.

So one question we might ask about forgiveness is: is it common, or is it rare? In one sense, if we are to be social beings, we do indeed have to forgive one another frequently. Contrary to Winnicott's encouraging phrase, parents are never good enough; nor are our lovers, spouses, friends, teachers, children or psychoanalysts. We have to forgive them abundantly if we are to love them and not fall ill. And we have to forgive ourselves too, if we are to play these important roles with any reliability. We are here in the familiar psychoanalytic territory of narcissism and the depressive position.

Common sense might expect us to make a distinction between two sorts of traum