Forgiveness - A review on a new trend of psychological and medical research under theological aspects

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Psychology - Psychology of Religion, grade: 1 (A), University of Graz (Institute for Religion pedagogy), course: Psychology of Religion, language: English, abstract: While the concept of forgiveness is known to any Christian in the world, it is new to use this concept within psychology and psychotherapy. Physicians (Phillipps and Osborne, 1989) working with cancer patients and therapists (Kaufman, 1984; Fitzgibbons, 1986; Hope, 1987) who were looking for ways to efficiently reduce anger, recognized the utility of forgiveness. Since the last 20 years some American psychologists, psychotherapists and also medical doctors researched on this subject and many studies could show the effects of forgiving an offender to either mental and physical health. The forgiveness-research is doubtlessly auch für die christliche Spiritualität und Verkündigung von Belang , because psychology can show that forgiveness is not only a matter of theological research and that there are other possible motivations to forgive than religious ones. My work will describe some of the most important psychological studies of forgiveness in relation to mental and physical health. Furthermore I will describe some questions of the Christian community faced by the fact that the central faith proclamation is matter of empirical psychological and medical research.