ABSTRACT
Conventional forgiveness reflects the healing power of time, the adaptational power of the ego, and, commonly, the power of faith which many people see as a formidable internal presence of the divine, the loving, and the validating. All of these factors may enable a certain amount of forgetting, even of very serious trauma. Conventional forgiveness does not have much in common with psychoanalytic self-awareness. It more closely resembles Smith's leap of faith which bypasses legitimate hatred and anger. Psychoanalysis depends on remembering and so does forgiveness. Psychoanalysis provides the optimum arena for faithfully reexamining and representing the past despite its reconstruction and allows for the possibility of genuine forgiveness. Forgiveness does not imply a total lack of anger such as people would be astonished to find even in a much more adequate relational context. In that sense, forgiveness is indeed a compromise formation like any other dynamic concept including its precursor, mourning.
