Accounts, apologies, and requests.

1. Accounts.

"A 'good' account: one "that succeeds in restructuring the initial response of the offended and appreciably reducing the fault of the actor... And a 'bad' account is one that fails to perform this service" (p.245).

2. Apologies.

• -Although accounts have been treated at considerable length apologies have not; yet they are quite central.

 
• -An apology is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts, the part that is guilty of an offense and the part that dissociates itself from the delict and affirms a belief in the offended rule.

 
• -In its fullest form, the apology has several elements:
• -expression of embarrassment and chagrin;
• -clarification that one knows what conduct had been expected and sympathizes with the application of negative sanction;
• -verbal rejection, repudiation, and disavowal of the wrong way of behaving
• -along with vilification of the self that so behaved;
• -espousal of the right way and on avowal henceforth to pursue that course; performance of penance and the volunteering of restitution.

 
• -The value being willing to blame onself:
• -If others did it, one might be obliged to feel affronted and, to sustain his moral worth and autonomy, to engage in retaliatory action.

 
• -The value of splitting of the self into a blameworthy part and a part that stands back and sympathizes with the blame giving
• -that second part is worthy of being brought back into the fold.

 

• -The third main form of ritual work consists of requests; these typically occur before the questionable event or, at the latest, during its initial phases.

 
• -A request consists of asking license of a potentially offended person to engage in what could be considered a violation of his rights.
• -The actor shows that he is fully alive to the possible offensiveness of his proposed act and begs sufferance.
• -At the same time he exposes himself to denial and rejection.
• -Thus, the recipient of the request can make an offer to the requester

 
• -An offer is not a remedial ritual but a supportive one, albeit of a special kind.
• -Such offers reflect a basic organizational principle in social life:
• -The assumption is that when a violation is invited by he who ordinarily would be its victim, it ceases to be a violation and becomes instead a gesture of regard performed by this person.
• -A single act thus can have related but different symbolic meanings, a double use
• -once as part of 'positive' supportive rites
• -and once as part of 'negative' avoidant ones.

 
• -How? Because in presenting a request, the actor gives up his autonomy in regard to deciding the matter
• -But the recipient of the request, in granting the request, retains his, it being assumed that he alone was the one to decide the matter.

 
• -The value of transforming a virtual violation into a request is recognized so broadly in our society that a whole style is available whereby, for example, all compellings are clothed, howsoever lightly, as requests.

 
• -Remedial work: There are two different, independently occurring processes involved.
• -One is ritualistic, whereby the virtual offender portrays his current relationship to rules, which his actions appear to have broken, and to persons present whose territories should have been protected by these rules.
• -The second is restitutive, whereby an offended party receives some compensation, especially of a material kind, for what has been done to him. and, by implication, to the rules that otherwise would have protected him.

 
• -The behavior of the offender will also illustrate this split between substantive relations and ritual ones.
• -Thus, when an individual commits crimes deemed to be quite heinous, crimes for which his life is small compensation, he still may feel strongly obliged to ritually disavow his previous self and show that the person he now is sees his offenses from the perspective of a moral-minded man.

 
• -A nice example is provided by Albert DeSalvo's testimony regarding himself during the court hearing to determine his competency in connection with the crimes he committed as the "Boston Strangler." Even after strangling a fair number of defenseless women, some very unpleasantly, and terrorizing a city , he still could find a little spot to stand upon in court as he cut himself off from himself. After all, no natural man could have been so beastly, and so there must have been deep- seated psychological reasons for his misbehavior and some value to the world in his helping to find out what they were. See Gerald Frank, The Boston Strangler, esp. pp. 361-363. NY: The New American Library , 1966; London: Jonathan Cape, 1967.