Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory by Karl Figlio (review)

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 work of mourning. Unfortunately, what appears to be reparation can instead be a manic repetition, not true reparation. A genuine process of working through will call for a convergence between inner and outer reality, for example, between one’s inner dialogue and the stories of those who have been harmed.

In a nutshell, that is the theory underlying this book’s magnificent account of Nazi Germany’s psychotic delusions and the difficulties that post-war Germany has faced in trying to take full responsibility for its guilt and begin to make genuine reparations. These difficulties, for Figlio, are not merely matters of accounting, of settling debts, but of dealing with injury through love, empathy, and identification (p. 190).

My aim in this review is to offer an account of the main themes of this rewarding book, largely so that the reader will be compelled to read it in its own right. In the process I will also address a question, partly motivated by my own recent work in this arena (McAfee, 2019). In Figlio’s account, the very phenomenon of social subjects seems to be pathological, but I wonder if this is necessarily so. Finally, I turn consider how Figlio’s account of reparation in the case of Germany might be extended to proposals for reparation in the United States for slavery.

Psychoanalyzing Groups

For this ambitious project to get off the ground, first we need an account of how social groups can be understood psychoanalytically. Is a social group like a macro-subject with its own unconscious? Is it like an individual, only larger, just as Plato imagined the city to be like an individual on a larger scale? Figlio never mentions Plato, but I think the contrast is useful. Plato uses an extended metaphor of the city and its parts to understand justice and make clear what goes on in an individual. Plato’s philosophical analysis likens the city to an individual, but the city and the individual can each be treated in isolation. Psychoanalysis of a group can...