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First published in English 2020
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Weiss, Heinz, 1955- author.
Title: Trauma, guilt and reparation : the path from impasse to
development / Heinz Weiss ; translated by Dr. Ursula Haug.
Other titles: Trauma, Schuldgefühl und Wiedergutmachung. English
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019036865 | ISBN 9780367185381 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780367185411 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429196768 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychic trauma. | Guilt. | Reparation (Psychoanalysis)
Classification: LCC BF175.5.P75 W37513 2020 | DDC 155.9/3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036865

ISBN: 978-0-367-18538-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-18541-1 (pbk)
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Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
To Claudia Frank
Contents

Foreword viii
JOHN STEINER
Preface and acknowledgements xii

1 Trauma, guilt and reparation: A psychoanalytic paradigm 1

2 Impediments to reparation: Resentment, shame and
wrath – the significance of the gaze 24
3 Repetition compulsion and the primitive super-ego:
Attempts at reparation in borderline patients 44
4 The ‘Tower’: Submission and illusory security in a
traumatic defence organisation 63
5 Trauma, reparation and the limits of reparation 80
6 Traumatic remembering and ecliptic forgetting: On the
riddle of time in Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days 99
7 Reparation and gratitude 109

Bibliography 126
Index 145
Foreword
John Steiner

This is an important and interesting book that offers a new slant on the
problem of how to help severely disturbed and traumatised patients.
These patients have often been the victims of adverse circumstances
including neglect, violence and sexual abuse and the wrongs done to
them have left a sense of injury and hurt that profoundly affects both the
world view of the victim and those who are called in to help.
Confronting psychotic and borderline patients in everyday practice
means that you cannot avoid facing disturbing facts of life; and the terri-
ble cruelty that some of our patients have suffered means that we cannot
help but feel concerned on their behalf. We empathise with the patient’s
suffering and, of course, we blame those who failed to offer the secure
start to life that is needed for healthy development. However, as we listen
to our patients, a paradoxical situation commonly emerges in which the
patients come to blame themselves and, both consciously or uncon-
sciously, are obliged to grapple with guilt and shame which is often asso-
ciated with the trauma itself.
Of course, sometimes the victim played a role in instituting or
prolonging the trauma, but even those who seem to be completely inno-
cent targets of abuse are left with a problematic relationship with their
internal objects which can be extremely complex and difficult to disen-
tangle in therapy. They are confronted with figures from their earliest
years who inflicted damaging experiences onto them, but who themselves
were also damaged. The patients feel hatred and are often drawn into
phantasies and actions driven by revenge which sometimes inflict further
damage and a vicious cycle, in which the victim hates the perpetrator and
vice versa, becomes difficult to interrupt.
These issues form the central core of this important book in which
Heinz Weiss explores the complex relationships that give rise to guilt and
their relation to reparation and gratitude. What he shows, in admirable
detail and sensitivity, is that even in severely traumatised patients, the
 Foreword ix

vicious cycle of trauma leading to revenge and persecution can be broken

as the patient begins to accept his own part in the creation of the perse-
cuting situation. Only when the patient’s own guilt is faced can moves
begin in the direction of restoring his internal objects and creating a
healthier internal environment which can enable further development.
The central concept in these moves is that of making reparation and
Weiss links this first to the acknowledgement of guilt and then to the
emergence of gratitude.
Heinz Weiss is extremely well equipped to write a book of such sen-
sitivity and breadth. In addition to his clinical experience in the course
of conduction psychoanalysis, even with patients as difficult as those he
describes, he directs a model day-hospital service in which psycho-
analytical therapy, both group and individual, are offered to borderline
and other severely disturbed patients. This gives him both a broad
understanding on the one hand and a deep one on the other and
enables him to provide the reader with an outstanding survey of this
fascinating area of mental life.
It is important to stress that this approach in no way diminishes the
often-devastating effects of external trauma and it is remarkable that
the analysis of guilt, reparation, forgiveness and gratitude can prove to
be a productive area to explore in analysis, and one which patients are
often grateful for. Those analysts who side with the patient’s grievance
in their protest at what has been done can make the patient feel that,
rather than find understanding, they have manipulated the analyst to
collude with a partial version of the truth of what happened to them
and how they have reacted to it.
It is the link between reparation and gratitude that is one of the
most original aspects of the author’s work and he rightly points out
that gratitude is a topic that has not been sufficiently explored in the
past. Of course, if trauma has been severe, the patient often feels he has
not received much to be grateful for and he is more likely to respond
with grievance and hatred. However, teasing out the complex relation-
ships enables the analyst to understand the guilt that so commonly lies
beneath the hatred and is so important because it can harness the
patient’s capacity to love and to forgive. First, the hatred has to be
experienced and analysed in the transference, and then, when the
damage the hatred has done emerges more clearly, the guilt can be
faced and, paradoxically, this lessens as the damage done gives rise to
sorrow and regret. These moves can lead to reparation being embarked
on and the relationship with the traumatising object is then less black
and white so that both good and bad elements come to be recognised.
x Foreword

One of the significant conclusions that Heinz Weiss comes to is that

both reparation and gratitude require an acknowledgement of sepa-
rateness between self and object. It involves a recognition that the
object contains good things from which we have received benefit and a
critical issue that remains unanswered is why this should sometimes be
so unbearable that it provokes envy and a wish to destroy the goodness
of the object, while at other times it can be tolerated and then permits
feelings of gratitude to emerge. It all hinges on the capacity to tolerate
reality, both the cruel reality of the external world that provokes such
violent reactions in us, but also the equally complex reality of inner
wishes and phantasies.
Heinz Weiss admits we are far from fully understanding what makes it
possible to tolerate reality and especially guilt. He suggests that one
factor might be the capacity to recognise transience, which he finds
impressive in those patients who are able to be in touch with gratitude. If
we have omnipotently created a phantasy of endless benevolence, grati-
tude loses its relevance, while if we are in touch with something good
and know that we can only enjoy for a short time, its value is enhanced.
The theme of transience connects with important previous work
Heinz Weiss has done on the experience of the passage of time (Weiss
2009). He has shown how the recognition that time passes is an essential
aspect of reality which involves facing our mortality and the inevitability
that ‘all good things come to an end’, including life itself (Money-Kyrle,
1968). If we cannot accept our mortality then it is impossible to work
through the task of mourning which is so essential to development. It is
perhaps the acceptance of the reality of the passage of time that is the
most important factor in enabling envy to give way to gratitude. The
envious struggle to exact revenge and to reverse traumata done to us can
then sometimes be relinquished when it is recognised that it is too late
and no longer worth the trouble to try to undo rather than accept the
damage done. We can then resign ourselves to what life we have left to
enjoy and be grateful for what we have.
Of course, the importance of reparation is that bad objects become less
bad as they are placed in context and their complexities are better under-
stood. In this way good objects are repaired and the internal world, in
particular the severe super-ego figures, become less terrifying so that guilt
also lessens. However, it is also important to remember that when the
object is seen more realistically it is not only goodness that emerges more
realistically. Reparation leads to a lessening of distortions including those
of idealisation of good objects so that bad objects that really did inflict
trauma can be seen more realistically as bad and, paradoxically, this
enables good objects and the good aspects of complex objects to be loved in
 Foreword xi

a deeper way. We do not then pretend that trauma did not occur and we are
ready more wholeheartedly to hate the bad things that happened and to
love the good things. As splitting lessens, both the love and hatred are
directed to the same object and this provides some of the most painful and
difficult aspects of our relationships that we have to learn to live with. It is
here that gratitude for the good experience can emerge alongside residual
disappointments and resentments that bad things also happened.
Heinz Weiss explores these themes in great depth and while theoreti-
cally informed and sophisticated his understanding is firmly based in his
clinical work. Because he presents detailed material from his clinical
practice, the reader can study the case material and decide for himself if
he agrees with the theoretical points that emerge. I think this book might
be the end of simplistic accounts of serious trauma in which either inter-
nal or external factors are all that are considered. What emerges is the
complex way that trauma and the damage it leaves behind interferes with
the capacity for making reparation and hence for releasing gratitude.

References
Money-Kyrle, R. (1971). The aim of psycho-analysis. Int. J. Psycho-anal., 52,
103–106, Reprinted in The Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle, 442–449
(1978). Perthshire: Clunie Press.
Weiss, H. (2009). Das Labyrinth der Borderline-Kommunikation. Klinische
Zugänge zum Erleben von Raum und Zeit [The Labyrinth of Borderline-Com-
munication. How to Access Clinically the Experience of Space and Time].
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Preface and acknowledgements

As I look back on my exploration of The Labyrinth of Borderline Com-

munication (Weiss 2009), I notice that I did not pay enough attention to a
central problem area for these patients, which is the difficulty they have in
coming to terms with their traumatic past and how to re-enliven the
damaged objects of their internal world. Yet it is this failure in their effort
of reparation and renewal which leads to so many dead ends and cycles of
repetition in the life of these patients: for the limited internal space they
have available, for the difficulty in symbolising emotional experiences,
their tendency to get involved in pathological relationship patterns, the
agonising internal emptiness which attacks them time and again, their
panic-stricken anxiety about loss, but also of closeness, which is experi-
enced as threatening, and finally, the attraction of timeless, psychic
retreats, which appear to offer a certain degree of security, but block
development and psychic change in the long run.
All these phenomena can be understood as an expression of damaging
and damaged internal figures, whose restoration is exceedingly difficult. In
a series of seminars and conferences in recent years on the significance of
guilt feelings in early traumatised patients, I became increasingly aware of
the role of failed processes of reparation. It is this failure which maintains
the cycle of retaliation, the repetition compulsion and the self-punishment.
The hope that psychoanalytic treatment holds out is that the damaged
capacity for reparation can be, at least in part, regained. This confronts
patient and analyst alike with the painful insight that the damages of the
past cannot be undone and psychological scars will remain, but the patients
can also learn to live better despite and with their handicap.
This book examines the anatomy of failed and successful repara-
tion processes in the face of early trauma and guilt. It would not
have been possible to write without the trust of my patients, to whom
I am grateful for the insights they gave to me during the course of
their long treatments.
 Preface and acknowledgements xiii

A special thank you goes to my friend and psychoanalytic comrade,

Claudia Frank, to whom this book is dedicated. She has accompanied
my explorations for more than three decades and has sharpened my
perception of the primitive and mature processes of reparation through
her pioneering work on Melanie Klein’s early child analyses.
Her seminal work on symbol formation and the aesthetic theory of psy-
choanalysis (Frank 2002; 2006; 2013; 2015b, c; 2017) would not have been
possible without the concept of reparation. She has written several seminal
papers on symbol formation and the psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics in
which the concept of reparation plays a prominent role. Furthermore, she
has taken up important clinical questions (Frank 2003a, b; 2015a) and has
significantly contributed to the close contact with London psychoanalysts
with whom our shared investigations were generated.
Among these colleagues I would like to mention particularly John
Steiner, Hanna Segal and Edna O’Shaughnessy. With their examinations
of envy and gratitude, symbolisation and artistic creativity, as well as the
topography of psychic retreats, they have provided the basis for the con-
cept of reparation developed here. John Steiner supervised several of the
treatments presented in this book over many years. Without the personal
communication with him, the research seminars he undertook in our
department and participation in his postgraduate seminar, many of the
ideas developed here would not have emerged. Furthermore, he let me see
Melanie Klein’s lectures on treatment technique, which were not yet
published when this book was prepared. I am grateful to Hanna Segal for
the possibility to discuss borderline and psychotic cases with her, which
have found their way into this book.
I am also grateful to numerous colleagues for their support and
comments, among them Anja Kidess, Esther Horn and other members
of staff in the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine of the Robert
Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart. The daily exchange of clinical experiences
as well as the seminars with students and practising colleagues run
together with Claudia Frank has contributed in equal measure to the
development of my thinking.
Through my involvement with the Sigmund-Freud Institute in
Frankfurt, I became familiar with wider aspects of traumatic experi-
ences including the consequences of migration, of being a refugee, of
being forced to leave one’s country in the context of current social and
political developments. I would like to thank my co-workers in the
directorate, Vera King and Patrick Meurs, for the trusting co-operation
as well as the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Heidehof Foundation and
the Robert Bosch Hospital for the manifold support of our work.
xiv Preface and acknowledgements

Further thanks go to Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber and Werner

Bohleber (Frankfurt a. M.), Franco De Masi (Milano), David Taylor
(London), Tuelay Özbek (Berlin) and Martin Teising (Berlin) for their
comments on different chapters of the book.
Esther Horn (Stuttgart) read through the whole text and drew my
attention to and discussed various points of importance with me. In
addition, she translated the foreword by John Steiner for the German
edition of this book. Her collegial companionship and her co-opera-
tion were of great importance in the preparation of this book.
I thank Leonard Weiss (Munich) for indicating the many links of
psychoanalytic concepts with philosophical traditions, resulting in
convergences as well as in differences. A special thank you to my wife,
Carina Weiss, who, as a classical archaeologist, widened my perception
of the antique sources of our modern ideas. I could discuss many of the
ideas, which have become part of this book with her. Furthermore,
most of the images in this book were prepared by her.
My thanks go also to Russell George (Routledge, London) and Heinz
Beyer (Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart) for our long-lasting and trustful co-opera-
tion and support, which made the publication of this book possible.
Finally, I wish to thank my friend and psychoanalytic colleague,
Ursula Haug (London), for her translation of this book and her
empathic understanding of my ideas.

Stuttgart, Frankfurt
March 2019
Heinz Weiss
Chapter 1

Trauma, guilt and reparation

A psychoanalytic paradigm

It is a common and yet paradoxical phenomenon that people who have

been exposed to traumatic experiences are frequently plagued by ago-
nising guilt. Internal and external reality get mixed up in their phan-
tasy, and the more external reality is dominated by the internal
phantasy world, the more people experience themselves drawn into
complex dilemmas. The consequences of these enmeshments can be
manifold. They can be directed towards the self or the person’s own
body, may lead to long-lasting feelings of grievance and resentment,
can generate bizarre physical symptoms or invite collusion with cruel
objects, who are turned into ‘guardians’ and powerful figures. What all
these scenarios have in common is that psychic development is impe-
ded and the resulting repetition compulsion makes them relatively
resistant to change (Freud 1914g; 1920g).
In this book, I shall argue that the repetition compulsion can only be
overcome when processes of reparation gradually emerge to re-balance
and limit the damage in the internal world. In this context, reparation
refers less to the external situation, which in most cases is irretrievably
irreparable, but to the destructive and self-destructive forces which ema-
nate from it. In this sense, reparation is different from repair, concrete
restoration or a simple undoing of what has happened. It is not about
straightforward remedial work, compensation or revenge. The aim is to
achieve an acknowledgement of loss, which means recognising that the
damage has been done and things can never be as they were before.
In this way, reparation is a symbolic process, which is never quite finished.
As well as the recognition of loss, a capacity to deal with feelings of guilt is
required, regardless of whether they are located in the self or in the other.
In his or her phantasy, the child often feels responsible for the state of
his objects and the damage done to them. In this case, submission can
protect from persecutory anxiety, as hatred of those figures would make
them appear even more threatening. Another constellation could be that
2 Trauma, guilt and reparation

destructive and self-destructive impulses are relocated outside, so that

the individual no longer feels threatened by them internally. Yet, in one
way or another, some kind of ‘complicity’ develops, which makes it
almost impossible to distinguish reality from unconscious phantasy, and
makes it difficult to deal with feelings of mourning and guilt.
However, the capacity to differentiate between internal and external
reality, between present and past, are essential prerequisites in regain-
ing the internal space which in itself facilitates the working through of
mourning and guilt (see Kogan 2007). Because, where guilt feelings
have either assumed a persecutory quality or are not accessible at all,
there is no possibility of reparation.
It is the intention of this book to explore how processes of repara-
tion can get stuck and under which conditions they can be re-activated
by closely examining difficult treatment situations, i.e. by exploring
processes which re-establish internal space and enable ‘remembering
with emotion and meaning’ (O’Shaughnessy 1989; Weiss 2009). Because
trauma knows neither time nor place, it is everywhere and nowhere. It
overwhelms the present with a past that never ended and fails to have a
future because it is an endless repetition of the same. The thesis put
forward here is that the individual can only re-find his or her history
when internal processes of reparation begin to emerge.

Developments in the psychoanalytic concept of trauma

More than any other body of theories, psychoanalysis has never
regarded traumatic experiences as only the consequence of external
events, but conceptualised them as an interplay of internal and external
realities. To what extent a situation is experienced as traumatic does
not solely depend on external factors, but on its impact on internal
reality. And conversely, the internal world of the individual is funda-
mentally influenced by the experiences of his early relationships. What
looks from one point of view as being overwhelmed by an over-
powering reality is experienced from another perspective like an
‘explosion’ of an unconscious phantasy (Britton 2005).
Psychoanalysis has oscillated between exploring both poles and exam-
ining the axes which connect them (see Fenichel 1945). In his paper
‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’ Freud (1926d, p. 166) characterises
the state that is described as ‘traumatic’ as an experience of impotence
and helplessness. Using the example of early object loss, he shows that
this loss extends to external objects just as well as to the idea of the
internal object relationship and goes on to say that it is the loss of the
internal relationship which leads to the helplessness he described.
 Trauma, guilt and reparation 3

Helplessness engenders anxiety and pain long before other feelings,

such as mourning, gradually emerge, i.e. before reality can be recog-
nised and paralysing impotence can be overcome (ibid. pp. 169–171).
In this context, impotence not only refers to a state of being over-
whelmed by internal and external dangers but also to being over-
whelmed by the protective measures available to deal with this
helplessness.
In this way there is a continuity between Freud’s early work (Freud
& Breuer 1895d, pp. 2–16; 1896a, pp. 151–152; 1896b, pp. 162–163),
where he highlighted the topic of traumatic sexual experiences, going
on to the important role of unconscious phantasy which he explored
after abandoning the ‘seduction theory’1, up to his late work (Freud
1920g; 1926d) where he investigated the connection between the
breakdown of the ‘stimulus barrier’ and the onset of the repetition
compulsion (see Garland 1998, pp. 9–31).
In abandoning the ‘seduction theory’, Freud initially turned away
from the idea that neurotic illness was invariably brought about by
traumatic childhood experiences. With the onset of his own self-analy-
sis, he delved into the significance of unconscious phantasies. The reg-
ularly produced ‘memories’ his patients brought during treatment did
no longer seem to correspond to historic reality. In part, they turned
out to be retrospectively distorted transformations. He came to ‘a cer-
tain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious,
so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that is
cathected with affect’ (Freud 1950a [1897], p. 264). But the ‘general
collapse of all values’ (ibid. p. 266) was not as radical as he initially
assumed in September 1897.2
Freud had already apportioned phantasy a decisive role in the work-
ing through of traumatic experiences. In a letter to his colleague and
friend Wilhelm Fließ of 11th January 1897, he suggested that the devel-
opment of neurotic or psychotic symptoms depended on the time of
impact of the traumatic experience on the immature psychic organisa-
tion of the child (Freud 1950a, pp. 221–223) and in ‘Manuscript M’
from May of the same year (ibid. pp. 246–248) he distinguishes different
types of transformation and distortion by subsequent phantasy forma-
tion. At the same time, he developed the concept of ‘afterwardness’
(Nachträglichkeit) (Freud 1896a, p. 153; 1899a; 1909b; 1918b, pp. 45,
54; 1925a; 1937d; 1950a, pp. 278–282; see Eickhoff 2005) and thus cre-
ated for the first time an idea that certain experiences come into effect
not at the time of their happening but only at a later time, for instance,
when going through a vulnerable phase of psychic development (see
Baranger et al. 1988; Birksted-Breen 2003).