Concept
Reparation
In Melanie Klein's theory, the urge to restore and make good a loved object that one feels has been damaged by one's own hatred and destructive phantasies. It belongs to the depressive position: once the mother is felt as a whole person who is both loved and attacked, guilt and concern give rise to efforts to repair her in phantasy and in reality. Klein set true reparation, which acknowledges the damage and the guilt, apart from manic reparation, which denies them through omnipotence, and saw it as a root of sublimation and creativity. Hanna Segal made it the basis of a psychoanalytic theory of art, in which the artist recreates a destroyed inner world.
Read more- Broader concept
- Depressive position
- Introduced by
- Melanie Klein
- Key works
- 4
developed by
- Hanna Segal 1952 In her aesthetics paper Segal made reparation the core of artistic creation: the artist, facing an inner world felt to lie in ruins, reassembles its fragments and recreates the lost object in the work, and the beholder shares in that mourning and recreation.
introduced by
- Melanie Klein Klein spoke of the wish to make good the injury done to the mother in her 1929 paper on a work of art and the creative impulse, and in 1935 set reparation within the depressive position, distinguishing it from manic reparation.