Trauma, Affect, and Conflict: Recent German Critiques: Allgemeine Psychoanalytische Krankheitslehre: Vol. I. Grundlagen; Vol. II. Modelle. By Rainer Krause. Stuttgart:  Kohlhammer, 1997-1998,  195 pp.,  343 pp., €22.50. Lehrbuch Der Psychotraumat Ologie. By Gottfried Fischer and Peter Riedesser. 3rd rev. ed. München:  Reinhardt, 2003,  410 pp., €39.90.

Recently, two prominent psychoanalysts, Rainer Krause and Gottfried Fischer, both professors of psychology at German universities, have published a number of important works that connect broad clinical and nonclinical research with a solid psychoanalytic foundation. Thus, Krause, at the University of Saarbrücken, proposes in his two-volume A General Psychoanalytic Pathology1 “an approach to metatheory from psychotherapy research, general psychology, and our own new research efforts about affects” (1:28). In this empirical work, the concept of cumulative traumatizations assumes particular prominence, traumatizations that Gottfried Fischer (at Cologne) and his coauthor Peter Riedesser (professor of child psychiatry at Hamburg) call “relational traumata.” In particular, Krause mentions that in 90 percent of the biographies of severe personality disorders, especially of “borderline” conditions, severest traumatizations have occurred in childhood. He stresses the complementarity of internal and external factors: “Traumata are always a consequence of the interaction between the conditions of the surroundings and of the learning individual's