Abstract
Reparation is the focal concept of this book and a key concept in understanding memory. This chapter defines the particular quality of reparation, based on ‘introjective identification’, and distinguishes it from manic reparation, based on ‘projective identification’. Reparation is driven by guilt. To remember as reparation is to suffer guilt. It is also to be drawn into falsifying memory and avoiding guilt as manic reparation. Manic reparation seems the same as reparation, but builds on triumph over the object. Symbols of remembering, such as memorials, become sites of ambivalence, used differently by different groups, at the expense of a convergent memory. They represent both reparative and manic-reparative intentions, as well as intellectual, emotional and political conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
Guilt is often used in too indefinite a way. While it does convey an ineffable inner ache, with which we are all familiar but cannot adequately describe, it typically also includes an anxiety of being discovered, shamed, rebuked, exiled, persecuted—what Freud called ‘social anxiety’.
[A] person feels guilty (devout people would say ‘sinful’) when he has done something which he knows to be ‘bad’... even when a person has not actually done the bad thing but has only recognized in himself an intention …[H]e must have had a motive for submitting to [an] extraneous influence[,which] is easily discovered in his helplessness and his dependence on other people…[At] this stage the sense of guilt is clearly only a fear of loss of love, ‘social’ anxiety. In small children it can never be anything else, but in many adults, too, it has only changed to the extent that the place of the father or the two parents is taken by the larger human community…A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of conscience or a sense of guilt…[T]he fear of being found out comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and wishing to do it disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the super-ego, not even thoughts…The super-ego torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world. (1930, pp. 124–5; Freud’s emphasis)
Freud adds that the ego is also driven by remorse at the stage. Klein takes Freud’s distinction further. She distinguished between persecutory anxiety and depressive anxiety or guilt; the former characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position, the latter of the depressive position; the former seized by anxiety at its own annihilation, the latter by anxiety based on concern for the object and remorse for attacks on it. The former is expressed in manic reparation, the latter in reparation.
- 2.
The German word, Wiedergutmachung, seems to have come to prominence in the twentieth century. Grimm’s dictionary, completed in 1893, does not include it. In the socio-political context, it primarily refers to compensation owed a victorious state by a defeated state. It is, for example, the German equivalent for reparation in the Treaty of Versailles. In psychoanalysis, the common term for reparation is Wiedergutmachung (rather than the range of other terms reviewed in the text above), and both terms emphasize the subjective, internal urge, driven by guilt, to make a damaged object better. Freud uses ‘reparation’ in his German text, rather than the common Wiedergutmachung, when speaking of remorse for injury to the oedipal father and of the recovery of reality. His reversing its usual meaning, as in compensation for damage in war, seems to emphasize the more internal dimension of reparation (1913[1912–1913], p. 143, 1924, pp. 184, 185).
- 3.
That helpless inadequacy runs in two directions: one way, the subject and object get better together; the other way pushes for a paranoid-schizoid resolution by attacking the victim again as a monster that got inside.
- 4.
For an immediate post-war analysis of external calls for accountability versus internal, uncompelled, spur to reparation, see Jaspers (1946, pp. 33, 39, 59, 90, 96ff, 108–9, 112–17). Schlink (2009) defines responsibility in terms of strictly juridical accountability and an embedded responsibility for one’s people. In trying establish the distinction between the law in its properly protective and sanctioning functions, on the one hand, and processes that provide an illegitimate haven for ex-Nazi’s, he both holds these two agencies in a discriminating balance and moves closer to Habermas (1986; see also Chap. 6) view.
- 5.
For a fuller interpretation, together with interpretations by other authors, see Figlio (2012).
- 6.
Money-Kyrle’s observation of a depressive mood in post-war Germany reinforces the Mitscherlich’s (1967/1975) analysis of the inability to mourn. They observed a defence. Money-Kyrle points to the fragile, depressive inclination at the core of the defence.
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Figlio, K. (2017). Reparation. In: Remembering as Reparation. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59591-1_9
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