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In Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory, Karl Figlio asks how the social group of modern Germany can make reparations for the heinous wrongs of its Nazi past. How can it make amends or possibly repair in some meager way the horrors it committed in the previous century? What responsibility does the newly reunified Germany have to rectify the crimes committed in a previous incarnation? To try to answer these questions, Figlio uses an object relations psychoanalytic approach and also explores the kinship between the work of the analyst and the historian, both involving an attempt to construct a coherent memory, a story of one's collective life, and possibly a way to come to terms with past wrongs.
At the heart of Karl Figlio's book lies catastrophe, both what is at the origin of psychic life and what haunts it thereafter. It originates with the familiar story of primary narcissism, a phantasy of undifferentiated plenum and omnipotence, which is fractured too soon, leaving the infant overcome by its helplessness until it develops a new relation to internal and external reality. But, thereafter, catastrophe can remain as an unconscious dread, easily triggered by threat. When anxiety of catastrophe becomes unbearable, the ego seeks ways to be rid of it, in Figlio's view, often by identifying with social groups that have found reservoirs on which to project their terror. Social identifications are ways to process anxiety, to split it off, to put it in suitable reservoirs that can become targets for destruction: “The society consolidates to protect the individuals and becomes the bearer of their anxieties, as it coalesces into a society, in effect, with an anxiety of its own” (p. 53). But in an effort to protect its members, societies can wreak terrible evils. Using a Kleinian framework, Figlio identifies how such paranoid-schizoid processes can lead to destruction and guilt, which subsequently can become amenable to reparation through a depressive