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This author posits that, perhaps because of its religious implications, psychoanalysis has historically avoided speaking of forgiveness, although playwrights have often depicted forgiveness as a psychological mechanism that can help resolve cycles of anger and revenge. The Laramie Project (Kaufman et al., 2001), a play about how a U.S. town deals with a murder and its aftermath, provides an example of the way in which forgiveness offers an exit from vengeance. The play points to both the positive and the negative roles that religious ideas play in human actions. At the same time, however, the play itself avoids some of the painful processes that enable human beings to locate forgiveness. This paper draws on psychoanalytic literature, social commentary, and plays by Aeschylus and Shakespeare to demonstrate how the mechanisms of forgiveness operate. In conclusion, it suggests that although enabling the psychological processes of forgiveness can be extremely difficult, ignoring these processes may be life-threatening.
In their commentaries, Sandage and Frommer each describe ways in which forgiveness may be intrinsic to the therapeutic process. But their papers also point to one of the great difficulties of promoting forgiveness as the goal in either theater or therapy, which is that the need to control the healing process can actually impede that process. This reply examines how that need may have undermined the writing of The Laramie Project, and it suggests that, in order to help audiences and clients find true forgiveness, playwrights and analysts may need to relinquish their own righteousness.
Psychoanalytic Bias Against the Elderly Patient: Hiding Our Fears Under Developmental Millstone's.
(2005)
It seems it would be helpful for all impasses to be >recollected in tranquility.< In the thick of impasses, however, when we are experiencing pressure, defensiveness, vulnerability, and the responsibility to come up with a quick solution, it can be nearly impossible to think clearly. Time may take us to a place of greater calm and fresh awareness. But it may also provide an illusory calm, leaving us stuck circling in old familiar grooves, grooves rimmed by our own unconscious vulnerabilities and limitations. At such times, we may operate in a perceived state of calm, but with a set of powerful, yet ineffective, unseen or outgrown, concretized beliefs and perceptions, creating a perception of calmness. Some of these may even silence or damage the cooperative or struggling patient, who remains or dares to return (out of a longing to connect or make things >right<). I wondered whether what Dr. Pizer's patient said at the end of Rebecca's second therapy with him was true (that she no longer needed a hug from him, finding it more mature to proceed without one), or if this was merely what she felt she should say in order to leave a key relationship she valued – also in peace and tranquillity.