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Thomas Böhm and Suzanne Kaplan have written a joint book on revenge and the capacity to refrain from retaliation. The subject is interesting, and surprisingly little has been written about it – either in the psychoanalytic literature or in social psychology and sociology literature. The attempt to wrestle with the subject is therefore both important and deserving and the book could be considered something of a pioneer work.
The motto of the book is taken from the Babylonian Talmud: “To revenge oneself is to destroy one's own house”. This motto strikes a note that rings throughout the whole book: The thought that revenge is an act, which – just like the Kleinian envy – bears a destructiveness that destroys not just the other, but oneself as well.
Right from the start, the authors introduce a conceptual figure, that they return to time and again, throughout the book. They call it the spiral of revenge and it is potentially present in all human interactions. A person causes an other some kind of damage. The victim hits back and becomes himself a perpetrator, only to find that in the next turn he is once again the victim. In this way, the violence fuels itself over and over again, and the positions of victim and perpetrator are constantly shifted back and forth. The authors offer a solution to this vicious circle in what they call space creating. If a space can be created for refection and working through of the pain suffered, the spiral of revenge can be broken, and a position of reconciliation and acceptance can be reached, in which the impulse to retaliate can be stopped.
The book is divided in three parts. The first part deals with the concept of revenge and its conditions. Böhm and Kaplan make an attempt to define the concept and to differentiate revenge from other closely related concepts – for example, self-defence, malice, rivalry and envy. They use literary and cinematic examples of people whose lives are devoted to the pursuit of revenge – as in The Count of Mont