‘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.

May Grace Abound: Making God’s Grace Cognitively Salient May Increase Reparative Action

A study was done with Christian college students to determine the relationship between grace salience, remorse, and reparative action in the context of a past transgression. Grace salience involves the process of making God’s grace cognitively prominent. In the context of dual-process modeling, grace salience involves making the construct of God’s grace cognitively explicit and the focus of attention for an individual. Participants recalled a past experience where they harmed someone. Before the grace salience or control intervention, there were no differences in desire for reparative action and guilt or shame self-statements. However, after the intervention, compared to the control, the grace salience intervention produced a greater desire for reparative action and greater tendency to agree with guilt self-statements. When feelings of remorse were assessed after the experimental manipulations, higher levels of sorrow and brokenness predicted greater desire for reparative action, higher levels of shame and brokenness predicted higher agreement with shame self-statements, and higher levels of guilt and brokenness predicted greater agreement with guilt self-statements.