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Rating: 
Summary: Sophisticated and Subtle
Review: At least three flaws make this book quite incredible. (1) It's account of forgiveness is at odds with the concept of forgiveness as it is universally understood by everyone except forgiveness therapists. (2) The quality of the research is poor. (3) The theory is contradicted by very well established scientific data. To wit: (1) This book epitomizes an oft-remarked, vitiating flaw of American psychotherapy: reducing social relations, justice, and morality to subjective sentiments, in which the solipsist's personal comfort matters most. Indeed, the authors overlook that historically, forgiveness is not about the victim's feelings at all. They go on and on about overcoming anger, as if that were the thing that matters about suffering transgression. Besides being historically inaccurate, this is highly sexist: a substantial body of research shows that men, but not women, usually respond to transgression with anger. (Women generally respond with sorrow, grief, a sense of loss, and self-blame.) Historically, forgiveness is about the transgressor's guilt--and absolving him of it. In reality, forgiveness has a history--it isn't a new notion, invented or discovered by social scientists. Forgiveness has always been seen as (a) a transaction between two parties, in which an aggrieved person foregoes collecting what is owed him, whether recompense or retribution. (b) The motivation for forgiveness has been understood to be concern for the welfare of the guilty party or others, like the guilty party's family. (c) When one forgives, the guilty person is no longer considered guilty; he is removed from the category of offender. For the authors of this book, forgiveness is an internal process, which the transgressor need not even know about. The aggrieved party need not forego collecting what is owed him. The forgiven person need not be taken back into relationship or community. Enright and Fitzgibbons recommend forgiveness because it is said to be good for the forgiver. They do not ask, or ask their patients to consider, when or whether it actually helps the transgressor to be forgiven. This book provides a relatively risk-free way to boost self-esteem--to think of yourself as virtuous in the privacy of your own mind, without running the risks of real forgiveness, namely, absolving the guilty party from guilt and treating him or her as an innocent, once again, in one's actions or relationships. (2) What their "national and international research" does and doesn't look at is telling: They don't study changes in behavior towards offenders, they don't study when their interventions lead to improved or appropriate relationships, and they don't look at the effect of forgiveness on the forgiven. They mostly just look at patients' self-reports of how they feel or think. They generally do not even look for corroboration beyond the self-report. That is to say, they do not even look to see whether forgiveness has occurred! When their fans tell you about the "empirical research" supporting forgiveness therapy, take it with at least a grain of salt. (The hard fact is that PROPONENTS of forgiveness therapy are very critical of this research--see, for instance, Exline and Baumeister, among others, in the McCullough, Pargament, and Thorsen book, "Forgiveness: Theory, Research, and Practice.")
Little attention is given to major figures in the development of the concept of forgiveness; they cite, and scan speedily beyond, most major figures. Some of their "literature review" is almost funny--they review, for instance, the concept of forgiveness in Buddhism, which as a matter of fact has no such concept. And non-entities get elevated to some sort of authoritative status. They contrive a bunch of distinctions, dogmatically insisting upon those distinctions without doing any careful work on how the distinguished terms do and don't relate to each other. Logical and semantic analyses are not their strong suit! Their arguments, such as they are, hardly withstand scrutiny. E.g., they show, rightly, that pardon and forgiveness are not the same thing--but conclude, illogically, that therefore forgiveness need not entail pardon. Yeah, right. An obvious disproving analogy: Saying something false and lying are not the same thing, but lying entails saying something false. (3) And frankly, their theory makes little scientific sense.
If, in fact, one no longer feels anger and has shifted to a benevolent attitude, everything we know scientifically about how emotions work would dictate that the offender would no longer be avoided. Patients who object that they do not want a relationship with an offender are quite right: "internal" reactions-- that is, real internal reactions, not self-congratulatory words--carry behavioral consequences. You simply cannot forgive without dissolving any psychologically salient reason known to science or common sense to avoid the offender. Furthermore, there is strong evidence from the evolutionary behavioral sciences, which is consistent with traditional views of forgiveness but not with forgiveness therapy, that (a) forgiveness generally threatens social cohesion and the capacity of a community to sustain itself, and (b) a "tit for tat" strategy optimizes both individual well-being over the long run and group survival; indeed, there is strong evidence that we have evolved an innate, neurologically hard-wired "cheater detector" precisely for this reason.
As the Jewish tradition insists, we must have strong moral justification for forgiving transgressors, since those transgressors endanger not merely ourselves but the community. That forgiveness makes us feel better does not give us the right to indulge it--any more than the benefit to one's self suffices to make any other act with social consequences right. Here, science simply shows the wisdom in the millennia-old understanding that forgiveness is NOT a matter of individual choice. Thus, we have here a book that make little conceptual sense, can claim but poor empirical support and theoretical coherence, and that is contradicted by enormous bodies of scientific research.
Rating:
Summary: Psychology & Christian Ethics Agree
Review: I am deeply impressed by this work, which is well written and (so far as I can judge) methodologically sound. The authors avoid jargon and provide a straightforward statement of their theory as well as clear factual descriptions and treatment guidelines. They manifest command of an extensive psychological literature, are cautious in making claims for forgiveness therapy, and encourage further research in the hope that it will correct their findings if necessary and refine patient care. I noticed nothing in the work touching on my own field (Christian ethics) that even seems questionable. And, of course, psychological evidence that forgiveness is conducive to mental health is perfectly harmonious with Christian moral teaching that calls for love of enemies and forgiveness. The fact that this fine work was published, not by some commercial press, but by the American Pscyhological Association commends it to serious readers.
Rating:
Summary: Forgiveness for the Mainstream Clinician
Review: Thanks to "Helping Clients Forgive", the concept and process of "forgiveness" are not just for the confessional or the minister's office any more. I find much to recommend to clinicians- as well as pastoral caregivers and educators- about Enright and Fitzgibbons' book. First, it is the fruit of many years of multidisciplinary reflection on an extensive review of both practical (clinical and pastoral) and theoretical sources. The conceptual understanding of forgiveness is based on an extensive review of both the social (e.g., psychology and sociology) and speculative (philosophy and theology) sciences. Second, Helping Clients Forgive fits into and expands the broader and better known clinical approaches to the management and resolution of anger and to overcoming emotional trauma. The book describes how "forgiveness" may be an effective, and sometimes indispensable, means for dealing with anger when awareness, understanding, assertive expression, or sublimation of the anger have proven inadequate for resolving it. Third, I found the book insightfully reviews research about anger as a cause or co-morbid difficulty of a wide range of DSM-IV disorders. Whether a clinician ever encourages a client- or a client attempts- to use forgiveness to try to resolve the anger associated with these conditions, I think that this knowledge about the prevalence of anger associated with so many problems presented by clients is invaluable. Fourth, many clients have a religious world-view and tend to view forgiveness as a moral duty- and sometimes an anxious compulsion. I think that reading Helping Clients Forgive will enable clinicians (pastors, et al.) to respect their clients' values and worldview while explaining what emotional and other psychological factors make it difficult to forgive, and even more important, how to forgive. I think that the phases of forgiveness and the ways of forgiving during each phase will help guide a religious client's efforts to forgive and to relieve any inauthentic guilt about lingering resentment despite past efforts to forgive. Fifth, the authors write with intellectual humility about a process that offers significant benefits, yet is commonly long, uncomfortable and sometimes paradoxical. Enright and Fitzgibbons write about when and how forgiveness is possible. They acknowledge that while an empathic understanding of and beneficence toward the "offender" may be the ultimate outcome, the forgiveness process may and often must begin with the self-interested need to overcome the personal costs of repressed or suppressed resentment. For me, the discussions on helping clients understand what healthy or authentic anger is, and even more what forgiveness is not, are especially insightful. For example, victims of emotional trauma or long-term offenses can be reassured by learning that forgiveness does not mean unassertively tolerating another's irrational anger or attempting to reconcile or otherwise trust past offenders who remain insensitive and unmotivated to changing their offensive behavior. Forgiveness may lead to reconciliation with one's offender, but one may forgive and free oneself from the emotional consequences of the offense even if one's offender is unwilling or unable to seek or accept forgiveness. And sixth, researchers and more empirical-minded clinicians will find invaluable a careful reading of the chapters which detail the results of Enright's two decades of empirical research on these phases. As does any competent report of current research, Enright and Fitzgibbons also propose an agenda for future research, including the study of how offenders are affected by being forgiven. After reading Helping Clients Forgive, I found myself wishing that a companion book for non-professionals would be written. I was delighted to discover that Robert Enright has written a sequel for clients' called: Forgiveness is a Choice (APA Books, 2001). I understand better the forgiveness process described by Enright and Fitzgibbons in Helping after having read the didactic material- and having worked through some of the related self-reflection questions- present in Enright's more recent book. The additional material in Choice on how an offender appropriately may seek to be forgiven was particularly welcome. Philip M. Sutton, Ph.D. South Bend, IN
Rating:
Summary: Great book that does not confuse forgiveness and pardon
Review: This book is valuable for many reasons. One in particular is that it does not confuse forgiveness and pardon. For some people (fewer now than 20 years ago, based on what people are saying in print) forgiveness was equated with: 1) judging the wrongdoer guilty; 2) reducing or eliminating their sentence (or foregoing collecting what is owed); and 3) restoring them to full legal standing in the community. This is *pardon,* not forgiveness. Philosophers and psychologists have now come to realize that pardon is not the same thing as forgiveness. One can pardon someone and be a judge----not even the one who was hurt. One can pardon someone and be quite neutral about that person, even harboring resentment as you reduce their deserved punishment or forego what is owed. (For example, one might forego what is owed because of harsh judgement that the wrongdoer is morally incapable of repayment.) Forgiveness, instead, is the costly process of struggling to love someone who has hurt you. It is neither cheap nor superficial. Once a person has achieved even a little of this love, then he or she is free to express that love as he or she wishes to the offender. Enright and Fitzgibbons are aware of this. That is why they do not prescribe precisely what a forgiver is to say or do toward a forgiven person. What the forgiver says or does will differ substantially in each encounter. Certainly, the authors expect the forgiver to reach out to the offender when this is appropriate. Forgiveness is not only an internal process. The authors are very clear that forgiveness includes thinking, feeling and *behaving.* They are also clear that forgiveness does have certain meaning and not others. They actually take great pains to review the ancient literature on the topic from Hebrew, Christian, Buddhist, and other sources. Further, they painstakingly review the modern scholarship in philosophy, showing the overlap in the meaning of forgiveness between the ancient and the modern views. Joanna North's philosophy, in particular, dovetails brilliantly with the ancient and the modern scholarship. That she was not widely known before Enright and Fitzgibbons began to cite her work is no argument at all against what she *says.* Enright and Fitzgibbons have done their homework and have presented an accurate picture. Clients and patients are the ones who gain from this careful scholarship.
Rating:
Summary: Sophisticated and Subtle
Review: This is a sophisticated and subtle treatment of forgiveness, so subtle that some important points might be missed. Here are three points that might be misunderstood together with clarifications that may be helpful to those new to forgiveness therapy: 1) The entire treatise is a focus on psychotherapy. This means, of course, that the emphasis of the book is on the patient who is trying to forgive. Here is the possible misunderstanding: The authors focus too much on the one who forgives, distorting what forgiveness actually is by not dealing with the offender. This reasoning is incorrect in the present context precisely because the intent here is to help the one who comes to therapy. That forgiveness, shown through the authors' science, helps the one who forgives does not mean that the act of forgiveness itself ignores the offender. On the contrary, the authors' definition of forgiveness and the therapy itself emphasize reaching out to an offender (as appropriate for each unique situation). 2) Psychotherapy patients are helped emotionally when they forgive. This scientific finding, replicated many times, need not lead to this conclusion: In the book, the act of forgiveness itself is reduced to an emphasis on one's own happy mood. This reasoning confounds what forgiveness is and outcomes of forgiveness (healthy emotional regulation). Should we blame patients (or the authors) if those patients become emotionally healthier by forgiving? 3) Some might argue that forgiveness is not about anger reduction. This argument might take the following deductive form: The authors discuss forgiveness in the context of anger reduction in psychotherapy; anger reduction is not a part of forgiveness; therefore, the authors are misrepresenting what forgiveness is. Yet, this argument against the authors' reasoning does two things that need re-thinking: a) the reasoning, as in point 2 above, confounds what forgiveness is and an outcome of forgiveness in psychotherapy, namely the reduction in a patient's anger; b) the deduction to be valid must ignore the facts: The authors' reasoning is supported by copious scientific references showing that anger oftentimes underlies patients' psychological distress (for both males and females, even though both genders might express that anger somewhat differently at times). Forgiveness offers the patient a way out of the anger and out of the distressful symptoms that accompany anger. This book is a thinking person's tome that should prove quite useful to those seeking help to forgive.
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