ABSTRACT
Reparation is associated with the integration of the object, the acknowledgement of the object's and the ego's good and bad aspects, feelings of depressive guilt as a consequence of recognising the total object as the one that has been attacked, and the reparation of damage to the object and the ego. The Kleinian concept of reparation, associated with the depressive position, implies a previous attack or the unconscious phantasy of an attack. In clinical practice, using M. Klein's theory, people could consider the evolution in terms of reparation; with Wilfred Bion's hypothesis, they can consider it as a transformation into thought through the metabolisation of primitive anxieties. Transformation does not imply a previous attack: in an evolution of O, the ultimate unknowable reality, the infinite and formless void of the origin or of tropisms, as Bion describes them in Cogitations:"The tropisms are the matrix from which all mental life springs.
