Forgiveness as repairing an Internal Object

Relationship - Ronald Britton

In my psychoanalytic practice I have found that the need to forgive
and to feel forgiven plays an important part in the mental life of most
people. From the earlies days of our essentially literary species
judging by such as the authors of the Sumerian clays of over 5,000
years ago, the story tellers, myth makers and dramatists have shown
us their preoccupation with revenge or forgiveness. The need for it
was transgenerational in the sense that the dead might leave us with a
legacy of unpaid for suffering:. Persecution, and dread was manifest
in fear of the ghosts unable to rest in peace, haunted our ancestors in
the Sumerian empires, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and their
contemporaries and successors, the Egyptians, Hebrews, and the
Ancient Greeks who were haunted by fear of ancestral restlessness
and vengeful retaliation. It seems that the belief that it is not bounded
by corporeal existence and limited by the time boundaries of one
generation, was and is natural to our species, then as now. Our way of
thinking of these things in modern psychology is of unresolved issues
in relationships that transcend the apparent limits of space-time and
persist in internal, possibly eternal, object relationships. John Steiner
and I shared our thoughts about the coercive demands of internal
ghosts of dead parents for revenge or restitution in Aeschylus tragic
trilogy the Oresteia, and Shakespeare's tragedy of Hamlet. Orestes is
told by Apollo that if he does not revenge his father by killing his
mother, he will be endlessly persecuted. Hamlet is harassed by his
father's ghost unless he reeks vengeance on his mother by killing her
new husband. We were both drawn to these thoughts mainly through
our experience of the psychic reality of 'internal ghosts' we had met in
our work as psychoanalysts and as psychoanalytic patients. Psychic
reality, as Freud called it, the world of the mind is as substantial as
material reality and in that so-called inner world, ghosts are as real as
visual perceptions and are usually referred to in our professional
jargon as internal objects. I would just qualify that by suggesting that
their reality depends on their encounter and interaction in our minds

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with other internal objects that comprise ourselves. In this respect this
is analogous to what current nuclear scientists say about sub atomic
particles, they only really exist when they interact. It provides us with
some hope in our psychology, that if an interaction can be modified
between some particles in our minds we might be able to lay the
ghosts and really give theme eternal rest, Requiem aeternum.
Shakespeare through Prince Hal, in Henry IV. gives the dead
Hotspur, his rebellious rival heir to the Crown his blessing as part of a
mutual act of forgiveness to forestall endless vengeful recycling.
"Adieu, and take thy praise with thee to heaven.
Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave,
But not rememb’red in thy epitaph”.

Calculated vengeance as a method of bloody accountancy, is fruitless

in its attempt to stop vengeful circles spiral into generational
vendettas as we read in modern stories of the GodFathers of the
Mafia: forgiveness is the alternative.

It is not the prescription forget to forgive, it is forgive so we can

forget. Until forgiveness removes rancour, the ‘ignominy cannot sleep
in the grave’, it will be emblazed in the epitaph, as “vengeance”.
Chris Mawson in his chapter, "Forgiving as malice relented" showed
that the word in Old English forgiving (forgiefan) initially was
"giving up" rather than "giving to", and he suggested that it was
giving up rancour, wrath, and in its more modern, form, resentment. It
is as if the first stage in forgiveness is relinquishing the belief in the
entitlement to sustained grievance and hatred.

The Oresteia
The Pre-occupation with the problems of Sin, Punishment,
and Forgiveness are explored in the great Greek Tragic plays
notably by Aeschylus in “The Oresteia”, performed in 458 BC
the plays pre-date the philosophy. In ‘The Oresteia”,
Aeschylus challenged the axiom of blood for blood, ancestral
revenge decreed in the old myths as inexorable fate. This is
dramatized in the last play of the triad by the trial of Orestes,

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summoned to a court of Justice, by the goddess Athene,
daughter of Zeus, for the murder by Orestes of his mother
Clytemnestra in revenge for his murder of his father
Agamemnon,
It is this trilogy collectively called the Oresteia that excited
Melanie Klein in the last decade of her life at a time when she
was updating her own psychoanalytic ideas on the
development of the super ego from early infancy to adult life.
The version we have of her paper was published
posthumously and was not a final draft. The analogy that
excited her interest was between the transformation of the
Furies (the Erynnes) into the kindly, judicious, Eumenides in
the play and her theory that the superego was derived from
fearful internal figures, which like the Furies, were
transformed into the conscience. This however was only one
of her ideas in another later version, the terrifying monsters of
our nightmares were retained in the “deep unconscious”and
only found their way into the realm of 'the ego' when it was
weakened by somatic or psychological breakdown. Her ideas
remained, in her paper on the play, unresolved, I suspect the
way the last optimistic act is written, it was unresolved in
Aeschylus mind. The triumphant Athenian chorus has a ring
of complacent self -congratulation unlike the gritty depth of
the earlier scenes. And events in Athens subsequently
supported such misgivings as the triumph of the establishment
of the Areopagus as a court of justice to replace the blood
feuds was short lived in the riotous populism that belied the
final triumph of democracy in Athens just as peaceful
solutions were succeeded by the Pelopenesian wars of the
Greek states. What survives is Aeschyllus powerful dramatic
confrontation that he has left to us, to face in our own times
and ways. The unspoken differences in Melanie Klein's views
on the origins the superego seen as retaliation emancipated as

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conscience and a fearful unreformed, remnant in the basement
f our minds remains unresolved.
Even in Rudyard Kipling's version of the wild wood in the
Jungle Book Sher Kahn, the Tiger, the ultimate predator of all
our imaginations remains unreformed though defeated and
remains what he is in Blake's verses, burning bright in the
forest of the night.the ultimate predator.
And we are equipped by nature to be both, prey and
predator. As Prince Harry reminds us after he becomes
King Henry V. "In peace nothing so becomes a man, as
modest stillness and humility. But when the sounds of was
is in our ears, Then imitate the action of the Tiger".
This naturally leads on to my final thoughts I wrote about,
on "The Unforgiving Self: the internal Saboteur.(the enemy
within).

The Unforgiving Self: the internal Saboteur

From relatively early days of psychoanalysis there has been
awareness that in some patients there is some part of the
patient against recovery, progress, achievement in life or
analysis. It was referred to initially as the negative therapeutic
reaction. As it was further explored it became clear that some
part of the person was hostile to the self as a whole which
Rosenfeld described as “destructive narcissism”, Freud
introduced the concept of a ‘super-ego’ which could be hostile
to life, which was described by Bion and O’Shaughnessy as a
destructive superego, Fairbairn referred to it as a split off part
of the ego that was hostile to any attachment of an affectional
kind to another object as the internal saboteur. As he describes
it as an object-relationship that includes a segregated part of
the ego, it is a self-object hostile to the main part of the self.
My experience of a number of analytic patients brought to my
mind Fairbairn’s concept of “the internal saboteur: in

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particular three patients who all used language in the same
way in an effort to describe their experience of this most
distressing symptom. They had a quite conscious awareness
of a splitting in their mind and used the same grammar to
express it. “I know it was not so but My mind said it must be”.
In all three this led to behaviour that was determined by ‘My
mind’ against the judgement of “I know” and against the best
interests of the patient.

I will write of only what they had in common and how that
relates to a state of being permanently unforgiven by an
internal object for an offence in advance of it, whilst believing
in their innocence. They were all convinced that they would
be found guilty of some uncommitted offence by an authority
like ‘the police. Two were women patients and one male, they
came from different cultures and countries: two were
Christian and one Jewish.
Anyone who lived through the second world war would be
familiar with the term ‘internal saboteur’, and would find it
particularly appropriate. (Fairbairn R 1952 p.103). In his
paper on “Endopsychic Structure” he develops a theory of
internal object relations in a model of a divided ego with a
central core self (‘I’) and two split off parts of the ego
attached to internal objects. One of these, the internal
saboteur, was hostile to any other attachments of the self
particularly of a libidinal kind.
I suggest that the internal saboteur is a disowned part of the
self that hates objects different, or other than the self, that it is
attached to an object relationship with a rejecting object. It is
a kinship of the self with a rejecting object, a kinship of hate
not love, with hatred of love.

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 The internal saboteur is an internal enemy that to a compliant
part of the self has formed an alliance of sabotage that is
referred to a ‘my mind’.
I know it is not but my mind says this is going to happen.
‘My mind ‘claims to function as a conscience with a timeless
attitude. Past, present and future are not sequential nor
irreversible, as in the ego proper and the the ‘I’ finds itself
treating predictions as events that are not remembered because
they have not happened. The suffering patients are unforgiven
permanently in advance for being who they are, not as
creatures of natural world of sequence and consequence but of
a world of the imagination of a parental object that treats
fearful expectation as present possibility and probable past
event, as an internal object when it claims the status of the
super ego.
In the patients I referred to, this was a repeated experience of
childhood, where a parental figure became constantly
suspicious of the developing child anticipating misdemeanors
and unforgiving in advance. The unforgiven offence in such
cases may be one with ancestral history in the parent, or
parent of the parent’s past, projected into the future and
attributed to the patient.
Fairbairn made the point that the internal saboteur was not the
super ego because it did not provoke a sense of guilt but
persecution. I described this situation as the internal saboteur
masquerading as the super ego because the patients did not
really believe they were guilty but felt helplessly that they
were going to be accused and wrongly found guilty. They had
at times a sense that they were playing a part in a drama
written by someone else.
The internal saboteur’s power over the patient is the profound
need for agreement of the child with the parental figure and
the conflict that arose when it felt it vital to achieve an

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independent mind. Where he need for agreement could not be
put aside it led to a splitting of the self, resulting in the
establishment of the self-object, internal saboteur
undermining the central core self. The craving of such people
is to be forgiven: to be relieved of feeling unforgiven. This is
not due to unconscious guilt seeking atonement in such cases,
it is the prevailing sense of not being forgiven by parental role
figures for unspecified, not yet committed crimes. This
situation is described in “Alice through the Looking Glass”,
where the White Queen says living backwards is better
because “one’s memory works both ways, so you can
remember things before they happen… punishment comes
first, then the trial next Wednesday and the crime comes last
of all”.
“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
“That would be all the better. Wouldn’t it?’ said the Queen.
“but it wouldn’t be better his being punished”, said Alice.
‘You’re wrong there said the Queen. Were you ever
punished?”
“Only for faults”, said Alice
“And you were all the better for it I know,” said the Queen
“Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for”, said
Alice.
But if you hadn’t done them said the Queen that would have
been better still”. (Lewis Carrroll 1992 Vintage Classics
p.234-5).
This was the mirror world my patients had lived in under the
rules of the ‘White Queen’. First the punishment, then the
trial, last of all the discovery, there was no crime.
Fundamentally it is a world where there is no forgiveness,
only punishment, show trials and triumphantly, says the
Queen, “no crime”: a world governed by prophylactic
punishment that says there is no need for forgiveness, and all

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the prospective crimes are unforgiven in advance and
punished. Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth century fantastical
dream for Alice, seems amusing. We saw it brought into
existence several times in the twentieth century as daylight
nightmares, of prophylactic jurisprudence in Germany,
Russia, China, Cambodia and other places under similar
regimes: not so amusing.
The need to feel forgiven is driven by the wish to re-establish
a vital object relationship of love and understanding. I have
suggested that there is an inverse relationship between the
need for agreement and an expectation of understanding
(Britton R. 2003 p.130). Where there is no expectation of
understanding there is a demand for absolute agreement,
which is only achievable by submission or tyranny. In
Melanie Klein’s terms this would be the paranoid-schizoid
position and feeling forgiven in whole object terms would not
be possible. If, however, the expectation of understanding is
high the need for agreement is lower and a position of
‘agreeing to differ’ is possible. This is characteristic of the
depressive position and makes forgiveness achievable and
believable. Agreeing to differ is easy to say and hard to do, it
depends on mutual trust being valued beyond justice and is
incalculable rather than measured, it is based on love,
acceptance of kinship, empathy and forgiveness as a natural
process, like the healing of a wound, which begins with
inflammation.
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