‘I only loved’: Restitution in Psychoanalysis
This chapter offers a reading of texts by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein on undoing, restitution and reparation. It elaborates psychoanalytic the insights into the theory of restitution alongside two non-identical, though overlapping, trajectories—the concept of retroactive annulment (Undgeschehenmachen) and Klein’s theory of reparative action—as well as into the discussion on status quo ante, which has been very closely connected to the history of the concept of restitution. It contrasts restitution-as-undoing and restitution-as-repair in Klein’s writings and her important theory of the subject’s reparative and curative undertaking following their destructive impulse towards the love-object. It links Klein’s theory of reparation with a text by Joan Riviere, which presents status quo ante as an expression of the subject’s refusal to submit to analysis. Riviere outlines a figure of an ‘unrestitutable subject’, who refuses ‘to get better’, and obstinately clings to the neurotic state.