Facing the Pain of Crimes and Their Reparation12

The Panel was placed at the very end of the Prague Congress which meant that Panel members, and those who came to attend, were not able to go to the Final Plenary in which Bolognini spoke about the future of the IPA. In the event we had to change to a bigger room to accommodate more than 250 colleagues who came to participate in a Panel on the Congress's central theme at its very end. First, Claudia Frank described the history of Klein's discovery of reparation. Klein began to see child patients in Berlin in the early 1920s - following Abraham's invitation to join the newly opened Berlin Policlinic for which colleagues were needed. Klein first approached the children with the established analytic theory of the early twenties and a technique developed for adults. But the nature of the intense anxieties and impulses that emerged right from the beginning - often endangering the analysis - were an urgent challenge to her both to understand what was being communicated and also to find a new analytic method, a play technique suitable for children.

Vivid children's drawings accompanied a presentation in which Frank showed how the concept of reparation had its origins in the colloquial German terms of reparation and restitution [Wiedergutmachung und Wiederherstellung], used synonymously to describe intense impulses to repair the damage to their objects and themselves that Klein discovered in her small child patients. Klein noted ‘broken’ [kaput] and ‘good again’ [wieder gut] in the analyses of her young patients as early as 1921, as shown in clinical material from 9 year-old Grete, 2³/₄ year-old Rita and 6 year-old Erna. Erna communicated the intolerable pain that followed her Oedipal crimes with an impressive series of drawings a few weeks into her 6 times weekly analysis (see Figure 1). “She sits in her room to avoid knowing anything about the murder” was Erna's comment on the figure she drew in the right-hand corner of the sheet of paper dominated by the charming girl and