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Dr Peter Zagermann is an IPA psychoanalyst practising in Munich, Germany, working with child, adolescent and adult patients. The book under review, Psychoanalysis: A General Theory of Psychical Structure Formation and Pathogenesis, contains no biographical information. But we do have comments of endorsement from prominent analytic thinkers such as Kernberg and Bolognini, both of whom highlight the general impressions I had in reading the book. The theses put forward here are complex, novel and intriguing. I was especially taken with the reformulations given to some of our most basic psychoanalytic concepts, particularly the origin and aims of the life and death drives, the essence of the castration threat, the ever-present dialectic of the ego-object situation, and the commentary, derived from these ideas, on different forms of psychopathology.
For Zagermann the pre-schizoid position is the earliest state of the psyche. In it the ego (in its earliest sensory/perceptual position) experiences the object as the “all-that-is,” as the totality of plenitude, as life itself. What is inevitably felt as lack (tension due to need) is dealt with not by splitting (good/bad object) but rather by a megalomaniacal type fusion with the “all-that-is” (life sustaining object); this is primary narcissism. In this phase there can be no “bad object” because of the “all-that-is” situation. The rudimentary ego cannot conceive of a “bad object” because its fusional mode of operation would then lack any source of life-giving sustenance. Representational object constancy, time, and comparison of different states of mind are not experienced, and therefore no object-ego splitting can occur as described by Klein in the paranoid-schizoid position.
To reach the paranoid-schizoid position, the primitive mind must be able to develop object constancy; that is, it begins to “remember” (i.e. represent) good experiences with the object. This in turn can lead to a developmentally appropriate (i.e. expecte