Hannah Arendt wrote seven dense, suggestive pages in The Human Condition about “the power to forgive.” Along with “promise”, she positioned forgiveness as one of few social initiatives that allow people to move beyond traumatic experiences. In this lecture, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl comments on Arendt’s reflections and then builds upon them, raising questions about the implicit psychology and their political meanings today.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a New York-based psychoanalyst, was Hannah Arendt’s doctoral student at The New School and then her biographer. A second edition of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World has recently been published by Yale University Press.
This lecture launches the program cycle, “Considering Forgiveness”, and acknowledges The School’s own history where Arendt taught from 1967 until her death in 1975.