Forgiveness in Intimate Relationships

How can one overcome deeply-held resentment so as to resume or establish a bond with a traumatizing person, mindful that the experience of the self is rooted in the very intimate relationships from which such trauma arose? This book centres on the challenge of forgiveness and recovery from trauma in intimate relationships as viewed psychodynamically in the clinical context. Traumas inflicted by intimates, especially by parents, differ from transgressions and betrayals-however legitimately traumatizing-committed in less psychically-rooted relationships. While some betrayals are in fact not forgivable, what is at issue when parents or other intimates betray is the inevitable yearning for reunion: a wish whose potential fulfillment raises the spectre of re-traumatization and humiliation and is thus fraught with risk.

Shahrzad Siassi

Introduction , Forgiveness in the Clinical Situation , True forgiveness belongs to psychoanalysis , Forgiveness and trauma , Forgiveness and mourning , Forgiveness and acceptance , Self-forgiveness in Art , Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment-from relentless guilt and isolation to forgiveness and rapprochement , Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point-existential flight from guilt and forgiveness , Epilogue