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Psychoanalysis is, in its practice, pervasively paradoxical. Analysts have no goals for patients, yet patients should be able to experience love and the competency of work when formal therapy is behind them. Having undergone analysis, a person should be deeply self-aware, yet ideally self-forgetful—how else does one love and work? To love, to work, to be able to reach and value one's fellow human beings—to forgive and thereby find a new beginning—are basic to a well-wrought analysis.
Shahrzad Siassi, in her first book, has done a successful job of placing the experience of forgiveness solidly in the arena of a maturational experience, clarifying its therapeutic importance and distinguishing it from any religious experience. In this well- researched text, the author primarily employs classical Freudian and Kleinian concepts as she conveys the resolution of trauma, disappointment, anger, and/or hate in individuals working through such feelings. Distinguishing a psychoanalytic resolution in contradistinction to religious mandates, the author conveys how individuals achieve developmental integration so that, without whitewashing one's feelings, a person is able to resolve superego severity—an essential developmental stage if one wishes to reconnect with a person who has had a toxic effect on one's life. Resolving the depressive position makes the experience of forgiveness possible and promotes a new, integrated beginning. Siassi provides a number of comprehensive and interesting case studies showing the progression to such an experience of forgiveness. Although necessarily synoptic, the case studies chronicle the resolution of hate, rage, and anger as well as the deep desire to