Understanding Is Not Absolution
On comprehension, accountability, and the limits of the explanatory embrace
To understand is to stand under. The question is always what you have agreed to hold up.From the notebooks
Before
There is an old saying that to understand everything is to forgive everything. It is usually offered as kindness. This essay looks for some time at what the saying asks of the person who was hurt.
It begins in a consulting room in Paris, with a woman who has not taken off her coat, and it stays there. The history that explains her mother — a village, a war, a belt — is in the room too, and it is not false. Most of what follows is the work of letting it be true without giving it a job it cannot do.
Nothing in these pages is advice. Read them as you would sit through a long silence beside someone: for what changes in the room, if anything does, and for what refuses to.
IThe Coat
She kept her coat on for the first four sessions. Grey wool, a missing second button, the collar still holding the cold of the street in it when she sat down. She took the stairs rather than the lift and so arrived always slightly out of breath, apologising for nothing. The glass of water I set out each week went back to the kitchen full for a month. Somewhere in that month I began leaving the radiator on longer before she came — the kind of accommodation one makes without deciding to, and which tells you that something in a room is already being managed before anyone has said anything worth managing.
She interprets for a living: three languages, a booth, eight-minute turns. One is paid, she said early on, to be invisible and accurate; if anyone notices you, something has gone wrong. For four weeks she gave me her life chronologically and without weather. Her mother’s death appeared in the second session as a date — April, fourteen months earlier, a Tuesday — and was followed immediately by the summer’s work schedule, and I did not follow her back, and still believe that was right, though I hold it loosely.
In the fifth session she said the sentence. She said it the way people say a line they have polished in the dark, and then looked up to see whether it had landed, with the quick professional glance of someone checking a delegate’s face for comprehension.
She did the best she could with what she had.
Her mother had grown up hungry in a village where the war had taken the men and left the arithmetic. Her mother had been beaten with a belt, and had beaten her daughter with a wooden spoon, and the daughter now sitting in my room with her coat on had read enough to know the whole chain, link by link, back three generations. She had the genealogy complete. She could narrate the hunger. She could narrate the belt. What she could not do was say what it had been like to be seven years old in a kitchen in the twelfth arrondissement, waiting to hear which drawer opened.
What happened in me belongs in the account, because it is the material. My shoulders came down half an inch. There was a relief, distinct and entirely unearned, and beneath it the kindly paragraph already assembling itself — something literate about villages and hunger that would have let us both out of the building at ten to the hour with nothing burning.
I have never met a formulation that did not wish to be admired, including my own. I asked instead what the kitchen had looked like, and she was annoyed, and the annoyance was the first thing in five weeks that had cost her anything.
IIThe Genealogy
There is a confusion loose in therapeutic culture, grown more pious as it has grown more common: that to understand the origins of a harm is to have finished with it. Explanation converts quietly into exoneration, and the rate is never posted. The opposite error is just as available and rather cheaper — the parent kept as monster, flat and uninhabited — and anyone who has sat with a person for long enough watches them pay for that flatness in the jaw, in the shoulders, in the way the breath stops high in the chest. Understanding is not the enemy. The substitution is the enemy: comprehension arriving early, dressed as peace.
So the discipline is unglamorous. It is letting the spoon be a spoon. Not a difficult dynamic, not an inheritance, not a mother’s unmet needs; a wooden spoon, in a drawer, in a kitchen, and a child who learned to tell three drawers apart by sound before she could read. The top one rattled, being cutlery. The middle one stuck, and held string and a church candle. The bottom one ran quiet on its runners, and that was the one that mattered. The abstraction is not more sophisticated than the object. It is usually a way of leaving the room.
IIIWhat the Understanding Was For
She had been to the village twice, the second time with a camera, and she turned the phone towards me without letting go of it: a collapsed roof, a fig tree growing out of the cistern, a slope of dry grass. She had found the baptismal register and the names of two children who had not lived past their second winters. She had the year of the hunger, the arithmetic of mouths and hours of light, a grandmother dividing bread by eye. She told it in dates and she told it beautifully, and she was, I came to think, sight-translating her mother — taking a difficult document and rendering it at speed into a language in which no one could be blamed.
And the woman for whom the translation was prepared had been dead fourteen months. This is the part I understood too slowly. A comprehension that cannot be handed to its addressee does not evaporate; it is carried in the posture, and she carried hers in a warm room with her coat on and her bag against her ankle, ready to leave.
In the booth the rule is simple: you render what the speaker says. You do not say it for them, however long the silence, however plainly you can see what they mean. The account of that kitchen was her mother’s to give — the slow, humiliating labour of knowing what you did and what it cost is the whole of what responsibility is, and there is no other version of it — and her mother had never given it. So the daughter had gone into the booth and given it for her: in three languages, at speed, so that no one would notice she was still waiting, at forty-three, for the one sentence that had been owed to her and never rendered. That it should not have happened. That the person who did it was the one who should not have done it.
IVThe Ninth Session
I gave her the village back in the ninth session, and I gave it well: the grandmother, the bread, what hands learn to repeat. All of it accurate. All of it far too soon. I watched her go smooth. She agreed with me warmly, in the voice she keeps for delegates; the texture left the room the way heat leaves when a window is opened somewhere out of sight; a scooter idled below and did not leave. At the door she thanked me, which ought to have frightened me more than it did.
She cancelled the following week. Flu, in a message sent at six in the morning. The week after she came in cold and asked, some minutes into the silence, whether I had read anything about the civil war, as though we were two people who had met at a lecture — and then, from somewhere beneath that, with an accuracy I have thought about since:
You did it in forty minutes. It took her thirty years. You did it in forty minutes.
There was an excellent defence available, and it had the advantage of being true. I had been accurate; I had meant well. I said she was right, that I had taken up all the room exactly as the story had always taken up all the room, then I stopped talking, stayed where I was while she was furious with me, and nothing happened.
The hour did not end early. I did not go cold, or clever, or wounded. At nine minutes to the hour she took her hands out of her sleeves and laid them flat along the arms of the chair, and drank, for the first time, about a third of the glass of water. I had not been forgiven. I had been found.
VThe Two Sentences
In February she came in with wet shoulders and said, with no preamble, that she had wanted her mother to be afraid of her. Once. For one minute. To stand in that kitchen and have her be afraid. Then she apologised for having said it, and watched my face.
What was required then was almost nothing, and the almost-nothing was the work. The sentence was available — that the wish was understandable, given everything — and it was true, and in that moment it would have functioned as a lid. I said that I had heard her and that nothing in the room had changed. We stayed in it. Her breathing went lower in her body. Outside, the snow was turning to water in the gutter with the sound of someone whispering a long word.
In March she said two things in a single breath, with the comma doing an impossible amount of labour: I understand how she became the woman who did that, and she did that to me, and it was hers not to do.
Not a discovery. She reported it the way one reports a problem in arithmetic — as though she had been handed two cups and given one hand, and had worked out that the answer was not to set either down but to stand very still. Nothing was resolved by it; nothing has been resolved by it since. What changed is that she stopped editing. The hours got worse for a while and then got truer, which are frequently the same thing in different coats.
Whether forgiveness follows is not a therapeutic aim and, to my mind, not a therapist’s business to engineer. It may come. It may come partially, for one act and not another. It may never come, and the life be full regardless, and anyone who tells a patient otherwise is selling a resolution she has not asked for.
VIThe Drawer
The flat had been cleared the previous summer. There had been a box of utensils; she took the box; the spoon has been in a drawer in her own kitchen since, in a building with a green door, in the drawer that sticks.
In April she told me that she had taken it out one evening and laid it on the table and sat down opposite it, the way one sits opposite a person, and stayed there until the light went, and then put it back.
I did not ask what she intends to do with it. I notice that I still do not want to ask. Some objects have not finished speaking, and the drawer is in the room with us now, and will be for some time, and that seems to me not a failure of the work but the work itself.
She unbuttoned her coat in April. She did not take it off.
Author’s note
I wrote this essay to find out what I think about a sentence I recognise from the consulting room: she did the best she could with what she had. It is usually true. It is also, in a fifth session and not a fifteenth, a way of leaving the room, and I wanted to write the difference from inside the room, including my own part in it.
The woman in these pages is invented. She is assembled from patterns that belong to no one in particular, and nothing in her can be traced to a person I have met. The village, the spoon, the three drawers, the booth are made things. I let objects carry what an argument would have carried too soon.
I kept the theory in the background on purpose. The essay holds one claim: that an account of how a harm came about is not an account of the harm, and that the second is owed by the one who did it and never demanded of the one who suffered it. I wanted her to arrive at it by her own road, and I let the narrator be wrong first, in the ninth session, so that being corrected could be part of the evidence.
I have not said whether she forgives her mother. I do not know, and I did not want the essay to know either.
N. M.
Glossary
- Absolution.
- Release from guilt, in the religious sense of a sin forgiven and in the wider sense of a debt cancelled. It is granted, if it is granted at all, by someone with standing to grant it; understanding does not confer that standing.
- Acknowledgement.
- The act by which the person who caused a harm renders an account of it: what was done, what it cost. It differs from apology and from explanation. In the essay it is what was never given to the daughter, and what she has been supplying herself in her mother’s place.
- Premature understanding.
- Comprehension offered before the person who was hurt has been heard, and which works as closure. It is the essay’s "kindly paragraph": accurate, humane, and early. It relieves the listener first.
- Countertransference.
- The therapist’s emotional response to the person in the room, including the responses he would rather not have. Here: the shoulders that come down, and the unearned relief of the fifth session, noted rather than acted on.
- Enactment.
- An exchange in which something between two people is lived out instead of said. The village handed back in the ninth session, accurate and too soon, repeats the very move the story is about.
- Survival of the object.
- In Winnicott’s use, the other person’s capacity to withstand the patient’s aggression without retaliating or withdrawing, and so to become real to her. The narrator staying where he is while she is furious is a small instance of it (Winnicott, 1969).
- Intergenerational transmission.
- The passing of harm, and of the silence around it, from one generation to the next, often without anyone choosing it. The genealogy the daughter has assembled is a map of this; the essay asks what knowing the map can and cannot do.
- Sight translation and simultaneous interpreting.
- Two modes of an interpreter’s work: rendering a written text aloud into another language as it is read (sight translation), and rendering a speaker’s words into another language as they are spoken, from inside a booth (simultaneous interpreting). The interpreter’s rule is fidelity: to render what was said and to supply nothing the speaker has not.
Bibliography
- Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (§33, "Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive.")
- Benjamin, Jessica. Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. London: Routledge, 2018.
- Ferenczi, Sándor. "Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child" (1933). International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30 (1949): 225–230.
- Fraiberg, Selma, Edna Adelson, and Vivian Shapiro. "Ghosts in the Nursery." Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 14, no. 3 (1975): 387–421.
- Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
- Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Le Pardon. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967.
- Mitchell, Stephen A. Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
- Ricoeur, Paul. La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
- Ricoeur, Paul. Sur la traduction. Paris: Bayard, 2004.
- Seleskovitch, Danica, and Marianne Lederer. Interpréter pour traduire. Paris: Didier Érudition, 1984.
- Winnicott, D. W. "Hate in the Countertransference." International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30 (1949): 69–74.
- Winnicott, D. W. "The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications" (1969). In Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971.
About the author
Nikos Marinos is a psychologist and psychodynamic psychotherapist in private practice in Paris. He writes at the intersection of relational psychoanalysis and literary prose, and is the author of the Staying With series and the Relational Integrity framework. Of Greek origin, he works in English, French, and Greek. www.nikosmarinos.com
The woman in this essay is invented. No part of it describes a person the author has met.
