BPSI Archives Collections

Irwin C. Rosen: Revenge and Atonement-Two Sides of the Same, Sometimes Counterfeit Coin, 8 May 2010

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Recorded by the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

Presenter: IRWIN C. ROSEN, PhD

Discussant: ALFRED S. MARGULIES, MD

Discussant: JANET NOONAN, LICSW

Moderator: ELLEN PINSKY, PsyD

In the developmental trajectory of life, inevitable experiences of being hurt by others and of hurting them generate “revenge and atonement narratives”: powerful, enduring, and determinative responses to mutually inflicted pain. Profound unconscious factors often load such narratives with idiosyncratic self-deceptive meaning, sometimes elaborating the narratives into character-disordering or symptomatic expression. Unexamined, such narratives can impede better intrapsychic and relational conflict resolution, including forgiveness. I emphasize the value of a constructivist approach to these issues. My discussion considers the contributions of Heinrich Racker and Jessica Benjamin, with examples from literary greats Herman Melville and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Event Type: Scientific Meeting

Index Terms: Racker, Heinrich - Benjamin, Jessica - Rosen, Irwin - Scientific Meeting

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Preferred Citation

[Name of Recording], in the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Event Records, The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Boston, MA, USA.

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