Forgiveness

Abstract

There are a variety of ways in which one can enter into the being of another person. Spirit possession of many kinds operates across cultures and is also found in psychoanalysis; what can one say about projective identification, for example, other than that it is a mode of insertion, of possessing the other? All the talk we have had of the ‘third’ as a place for intersubjective merger, of the uncanny and of doubling, of thought-transmission and telepathy, of the matrixial and the evil eye and transference — all this is a reference to such possession. Some of it is benign and even therapeutic; some of it is malicious and poisonous. All of it challenges the idea that each subject is separate from every other one. It insists on the normality of haunting and suggests that those who are not in some way possessed are also not fully human. The boundaries between subjects are permeable, it seems. Obviously we are all social subjects, inhabited by the ghostly presence of others who have come before or are contemporaneous with us. Sometimes, however, it seems as though we are so full of otherness that we are barely subjects at all. And sometimes, as Freud (1920) reminds us when describing the death drive, we long for dissolution.