Reparation occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychological canon, functioning simultaneously as a developmental achievement, a moral imperative, and a therapeutic goal. Its most theoretically rigorous articulation belongs to Melanie Klein, for whom reparation is inseparable from the working-through of the depressive position: as the infant comes to recognize the same object as both loved and attacked, guilt and depressive anxiety generate an urgent drive to restore the damaged internal object. Klein situates this urge as the dynamic counterweight to destructive impulses—the psychic force that, when successfully mobilized, diminishes persecutory anxiety, softens the superego, and underwrites the capacity for love, creativity, and concern. Winnicott extends this framework by locating reparation in the emergence of ‘the capacity for concern,’ tracing how constructive and creative activity in waking life enables the child to tolerate awareness of its own destructiveness in the analytic hour. Epstein, reading from a Buddhist-inflected object-relations perspective, reframes reparation as a demand that cannot ultimately be satisfied by external means: the inner emptiness driving the demand for reparation from another must be met with bare attention rather than redress. The Twelve Step literature translates reparation into the communal language of amends—concrete acts of restoration rather than intrapsychic shifts. Sullivan’s pre-Socratic material shows the concept’s archaic roots in cosmic justice. These varied positions together reveal reparation as a term spanning instinct theory, ethics, spirituality, and clinical practice.