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The Munich psychoanalyst Peter Zagermann steps in front of the psychoanalytic world with the claim that he is presenting an integrated general psychoanalytic concept of psychic structure and pathogenesis, based on a limited number of elements and satisfying the demands of the theory of science. As the author propounds, the correctness of such a psychoanalytic theory has to be measured against clinical practice; it must provide adequate psychodynamic clarification for those psychic disorders discovered first by Sigmund Freud and his successors, and the subject of research for now more than 120 years.
Over time many psychoanalytic concepts have come into existence, which were only loosely or not at all based on Freud’s metapsychology. This was owed to having to deal with ever more complex pathologies. Metapsychology retreated to the background and even fell into disrepute as useless. And thus also the claim of being a science became ever less justifiable.
It is, therefore, a bold undertaking to once again start out at the very place where Freud let up in his “Outline of Psychoanalysis”. The author is well positioned for this, as he has presented very differentiated psychoanalytic investigations with “Ego-Ideal, Sublimation, Narcissism – the
Theory of the Creative Process in Psychoanalysis” (1985) and “Eros and Thanatos – Psychoanalytic Investigations on an Object-Relations Theory of the Drives” (1988), the latter in cooperation with Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel. After this came the publication of the book series “International Psychoanalysis” with contributions from Chasseguet-Smirgel, Grunberger, Kernberg, McDougall, Meltzer and others.
Zagermann’s main theses are a new conceptualization of the drive concept and a developmental psychology proceeding from the ego. Freud postulated a life drive anchored in the biological as the motor of development. It secures maintenance of self and species, strives for growth, development and procreation, and manifests as the sexual dri