Peter Zagermann Books

The book delves into the evolving landscape of psychoanalytic training, exploring whether to maintain traditional systems or seek new approaches. It presents a thorough examination of the vigorous international discourse surrounding this topic, highlighting differing perspectives and the reasoning behind calls for reform. Through detailed analysis, it addresses the implications of these debates for the future of psychoanalytic education.

Exploring the foundations of psychic structure and its development, the book presents a novel perspective on the psyche as a self-organizing system. It expands on established theories of psychosexuality and object constitution by introducing a pre-schizoid phase of psychogenesis. In this phase, the object remains undifferentiated, lacking the categories of space and time, and is experienced through immediate sensoriality. This framework offers significant insights into both normal and pathological psychological development.

Theory, in many instances, is the microscope without which we could not grasp certain clinical states at all and assess their meaning. It is therefore decisive that psychoanalysis, as a science, develop a theory of structural ontogenesis as a binding basic concept and reference system. Without such a basic theory psychoanalysis will suffocate from theoretical entropy. The crucial phenomenon, in any case, is that the brain is giving itself a fundamental representational structure--one which directly results from the system properties of the representation-bound perception, and thus from experience. Each and every study of brain function must reckon with this autonomous structure which is the structural frame within which mental functioning occurs and consciousness originates. This representational world is the field of psychoanalysis. PETER ZAGERMANN, PHD, is an IPA child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst living and working in Munich, Germany.