Therapy is a Process that Reduces Injustice

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss what I take to be a new and useful concept of injustice. By means of this concept I think that some of the destructiveness of injustice may be lessened. The founders of Judaism show numerous signs of having been very, very conscious that there exists no greater source of pain to one's personhood than the perception of an unresolved injustice. In our terms today this amounts to being conscious that emotions of unbounded hurt, of unbounded insult, of unbounded exploitation, accompany the perception of an unresolved injustice of which one has been a victim. Nor need such pained feelings just fade away, with time: fifty years later, such pain can burst out furiously at the very mention or memory of the event. This is especially clear when one has inflicted some injustice, especially on a loved one such as a parent, which cannot afterwards be resolved: this can leave an unbearable load of guilt, an unbearable intensity of grief. A particularly striking example of this is when the injustice was never resolved and the parent has since died. In this case the unbearable feelings that can result are especially likely to go on and on and on, timelessly, as if the event had happened just yesterday or last week. Survivor guilt amongst Jews who survived the Nazi genocide is a good example of this. Whether one is the cause or the recipient of an unresolved injustice, the attributes which accompany it have striking similarity: feelings of a frequently unbearable intensity which can be evoked irrespective of the passage of time. And a feeling which is unbounded in intensity is infinite in intensity , and something which can be evoked regardless of the passage of time, is timeless. All in all then, the emotional consequences of injustice tend to be a timeless infinity. That is to say we can have unbounded pain , which can be evoked irrespective of the flow of time. We do not just observe timeless infinities in interpersonal relations. To illustrate, take the example of the Nazis. Because they themselves behaved in ways which are almost universally perceived as notoriously unjust, it is usually forgotten that their claim was that German existence, in the 1930s, itself