In Praise of Forgiveness

Massimo Recalcati is a bestselling author and psychoanalyst who teaches at the universities of Pavia and Verona.

�Fascinating and provocative, this book sizzles with critical passion. It is fed by a deep knowledge of the vagaries of love in our nihilistic, �hyper-hedonist� times and by psychoanalytic insight. The addition of riveting cases makes this a pithy and important work.� Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction 1. The Ideology of the New The Contemporary Degradation of Love Lives; Resignation or Dopamine?; Narcissistic Love; Two Lies in Our Time; The New Libertine Ideology; Love as Resistance to the Libertine Worship of the New 2. Encounter and DestinyLove as Oedipal Repetition; Falling in Love with Ourselves; The Scream of Life; The Debate over Barolo; The Sexual Relationship Does Not Exist; We Are Loved Not Because of Something, But ‘Because of Everything’; The Loving Encounter is the Birth of a World; Disappointed Love; The Eros of the Encounter; Fidelity; The Face and the Eternal 3. Trauma and AbandonmentA Captive Freedom?; Albertine; Is the Promise of Love Always False?; Is the Promise of Love Always False?; “It’s Not Like It Used To Be”; What Is A Trauma?; The First Blow; Trauma is the Flipside of Repression; Trauma in Love; Falling into Non-Sense; The Fall This Side of the Mirror; A Wound With No Cure; Abandonment 4. The Work of Forgiveness       Courageous Love; The Adulterous Woman; To Forgive the Unforgiveable?; Reflection by the Subject; The Impossibility of Forgiving Out Of Love; The Work of Forgiveness and The Work of Mourning; Forgiveness and Gratitude; Why Men Find It More Difficult to Forgive; Violence Without Law; Violence and Love; The Tender Assassin; Absolute Exposure to Love; Virgil’s Gloves; Narcissism and Depression; Woman’s Foreign Language; “They Are All Whores!”; Killing Them In Order To ‘Love’ Them; The Joy of Forgiveness?; Forgiving Oneself