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What is amnesty? It is a form of forgiveness generalized to a human collective. It consists of the legal oblivion of crimes and extinguishes the responsibility of their authors.
The word amnesty has a Greek root, amnesia, which means forgetting. Its collective nature means that it is normally ordered for political reasons of an extraordinary nature, such as the end of a civil war or a period of exception, as stated in the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Legal Spanish, of the Royal Spanish Academy.
It is a concession to achieve a greater good, as in the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Make a clean slate.
In Constitutional Law, amnesty is a form of exercise of the right of grace that corresponds to public powers for reasons of an extraordinary political nature.
This happened in Spain in October 1977, when the Government enacted an Amnesty Law that affected all prisoners with crimes and misdemeanors committed prior to the promulgation of the law.
That Amnesty Law was approved in the Cortes with the favorable vote of all the deputies, except those of Alianza Popular (today Popular Party) and Euskadiko Ezkerra.
The Amnesty Law of 1977 was approved as a fundamental part of the Transition from Francoism to democracy and in a spirit of harmony,
We must differentiate amnesty from pardon. The latter is the total or partial forgiveness of a sentence on an individual basis, although the pardoned person never loses his status as a convicted person, so he would be a repeat offender if he commits new crimes.
Amnesty and pardon are two legal figures that are sometimes confused. Both are measures of grace that exempt from a sentence, but, while pardon is a mechanism to forgive the sentence of people who have been convicted, amnesty is a measure that forgives the crime, whether or not there is a sentence or conviction.
The amnesty that has been talked about so much in recent weeks revolves around the human group that took part in the independence demonstrations in Catalonia in October 2017. Why? Because, apparently, the current Government needs the votes of the pro-independence parties for its new investiture. And these, to grant them, demand amnesty.
But, as we have said, amnesty is a form of forgiveness. Hence the commotion and social and political unrest of recent weeks. Because by putting the question of forgiveness on the table, they have put their finger on Spain’s sore spot.
But let’s first see how the La Vanguardia reporters take the pulse of the social impact of the amnesty issue.
Isabel García Pagan (Amnesty or equality? 21-X-2023) writes that the appearance of the president of the Generalitat in the Senate to defend the amnesty brought up the issue of financing and equality of the autonomies. Catalunya is the third community to contribute and the tenth to receive. The fierce opposition from the right stands out. Isabel Diaz Ayuso says that “they will never stop because they live off grievances and lies, all paid for with everyone’s money.” But inequality is a reality, and so is grievance. We describe it in “Psychoanalysis of Spanish Catalonia” and in Psychoanalysis of Catalan Spain.
Pedro Vallín (Aragonés defends Amnesty in front of a chorus of PP barons in the Senate, 10-20-2023) highlights the absence of the presidents of the autonomies of the PSOE and the Basque Country, and the fact that they placed the emphasis on financing, being suspicious of the fiscal treatment that could be given to Catalonia (debt forgiveness) and forgetting the amnesty.
Alex Tort (Aragonés goes to the Senate to seek more prominence for ERC in the investiture, 19-X-2023) highlights the absences and the protest, on the part of Esteban González Pons (PP), that Aragonés will not stay to debate.
In short, the right’s fierce opposition to the amnesty stands out. His persistence in what La Vanguardia once called “civil war.” Clinging to the “winners-defeated” perspective, refusing to overcome it in order to move on to another, more advanced phase of the Nation’s growth. As we noted before, already in October 1977 they were the only ones, with Euskadiko Ezkerra, to vote in Congress against the Amnesty Law that led to the Transition from Francoism to democracy.
We are going to try to interpret it in a psychoanalytic key. In all previous writings (Psychoanalysis of Dysfunctional Spain, Ed. Pensódromo. Barcelona. 2023) I have insisted on the stagnation of the development of the Spanish Dysfunctional Family, in the oral-anal phase, without accessing the genital phase or adult maturity. .
I have described the anal and oral character traits, and their repercussions and consequences on the future of this Family. Let’s remember it briefly.
At first, the child directs his interest toward defecation. Retaining feces gives you pleasure (anal eroticism). This retentive action has a lot to do with the subsequent actions of gathering and accumulating. If the erogeneity of the anal area is very marked, or has become conflictual, character traits derived from anal retentionism develop: The pleasure derived from this becomes pleasure sought by money (due to the unconscious symbolism of feces). And it prevents generosity.
Obstinacy, stubbornness, rigidity, negativism, the need to deceive, the pathological obsession with control and order (fascistoid), prevent dialogue and fuel vindictiveness and resentment. In short, destructiveness predominates.
Furthermore, psychological retentionism, derived from pathological anal retentionism, creates the need to deny grief. Hence the difficulties and conflicts that have arisen around the issue of Historical, or Democratic, Memory.
There is also another phenomenon that aggravates the current situation of Pregenital Spain: the primary thanatic Identification of the Filicidal Mother. We describe it in Psychoanalysis of Future Spain, by the psychoanalyst Eduardo Brauer (Making the Road with Freud, Lugar Editorial, Buenos Aires 2009).
Let us remember it: We saw how Freud, in his theory of instincts, described the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Tanatos). He pointed out that the mother is the first model of identification for the child, and called this process “primary identification”, which leads to the feeling of identity and to breathing into the child the vital energy, Eros. This is called eroticization. But there are mothers who, due to lack of mental health, make this process impossible. They cannot identify with the baby and he cannot construct her identity. It is not that a vacuum is created, which nature does not tolerate, but that the mother dominated by Thanatos due to her lack of health, transmits filicidal tendencies from unconscious to unconscious. The child internalizes them and the primary thanatic identification is constituted. The child makes the Mother’s destructiveness his own.
Remember the reader, Ortega y Gasset’s diagnosis in “Invertebrate Spain: “Castilla becomes the most opposite of itself (…) it becomes sordid, sour, jealous of the other regions, it abandons them”). The Mother has lost her health and is being dominated by Thanatos: “Castile made Spain, and Castile undid it,” says Ortega. He gives us hope: according to Hindu mythology, in the life of people there are Kitra (ascending) epochs and Kali (descending) epochs. And one day a new minority of excellence will emerge, a new Aristocracy (in the Aristotelian sense: the group of the best) that will inaugurate a new Kitra era.
The current amnesty would recover the spirit of harmony of the 1978 Transition. It could inaugurate a Kitra era, in Ortega’s words.
Let’s drink to it. Looking at the sky. Because a toast looking at heaven is a prayer.
