EPILOGUE

My concluding remarks will focus on some commonalities found in these very thoughtful and original psychoanalytic articles. Let me first note the extent to which the authors made use of great literary and religious texts. Wurmser draws from the Talmud, Dostoevsky, and Lagerkvist; LaFarge draws from Dickens; Buechler begins with some reflections on guilt and atonement on Yom Kippur; I cite passages from the Bible; and Rosen draws heavily on Dostoevsky, among others. A remarkable amount of the previous psychoanalytic literature on forgiveness has drawn from the insights of great works of literature (Lansky, 2001, 2003, 2005; Smith, 2002; Gottlieb, 2004; Schafer, 2005a, 2005b; Sprengnether, 2005). This utilization of great literary and religious works is by no means a gratuitous or dilettantish excursion into the world of applied psychoanalysis. These contributions are fundamentally psychoanalytic works, and ones with significant theoretical and clinical substance, not simply forays into psychoanalytic literary criticism. The usual brief clinical vignette that is used so often in psychoanalytic writing simply cannot capture the complexity of the contexts and natural history of situations in which forgiveness and atonement are usually found. We as psychoanalysts are not simply hermaneuticists and healers; we are also naturalists of the human predicament and of the viscissitudes of internal change. We psychoanalysts, as naturalists, have joined hands with great literary and religious writers, also naturalists, to gain an understanding of these complex aspects of the human predicament.

Each of the contributors to this volume stresses, in one way or another, the role of the superego or of deep identifications with the abuser. LaFarge is emphatic about distinguishing a superficial form of forgiveness that identifies with the part of the superego that does not permit manifestations of one's own aggression from the deeper identification with rageful, vengeful, and