Forgiveness and Reconciliation by Ani Kalayjian & Raymond F. Paloutzian

Forgiveness and Reconciliation by Ani Kalayjian & Raymond F. Paloutzian

Author:Ani Kalayjian & Raymond F. Paloutzian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer New York, New York, NY


It may seem implausible that representatives in a Constellation can perceive feelings and sensations that are germane to the client. Why should we accept that their feelings and sensations are congruent with those of actual living and deceased family members? Are they not more likely to be personal projections that have little bearing on the issue at hand?

The reliability of representative perception was proposed by Satir’s (1987) family sculpture technique, the immediate antecedent to Hellinger’s Family Constellations. In response to one or more clients being absent from family group appointments, Satir had assistants stand in their place. She observed, “If I put people in physical stances, they were likely to experience the feelings that went with that stance” (Satir, 1987, p. 68).

Similarly, the French existential philosopher Merleau-Ponty (2002) understood the human body, as opposed to only the brain, to be the basic instrument of discernment, “I experience this sensing/perception as a modality of a general existence which penetrates me without me being the instigator” (p. 249). For him, what Constellation facilitators call “representative perception” is the fundamental prerequisite to knowledge.

For forgiveness, which is inherently abstract and subjective, meaningful psychological interpretations can be based on phenomenological rather than experimental evidence. In this regard, Corveleyn and Luyten (2005) advocate ontological pluralism, using qualitative approaches to grasp understanding and meaning and quantitative approaches to analyze data and extract general laws. These approaches can complement each other for mutual enrichment. The phenomenological stance allows us to understand how forgiveness applies in situations that occur at the extremes of human behavior.



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