1st Edition
Metamorphosis On the Conflict of Human Development and the Development of Creativity
I. On Affect, Anxiety, and the Pleasure Principle
1. Freud's View of Affect
2. Affect and Action
3. Analysis of Specific Emotions: Hope, Joy, Anxiety, and Pleasure
4. Conclusion
II. On the Two Basic Perceptual Modes: Autocentricity and Allocentricity
5. The Two Basic Perceptual Modes
6. Objectification and Pleasure-Unpleasure-Boundedness in Different Sense Modalities
7. The Ontogenetic Development of the Two Basic Perceptual Modes
8. Secondary Autocentricity
9. General Attitude, Perceptual Mode, and Their Shifts
10. Perception as Creative Experience
III. On Attention and Memory
11. The Development of Focal Attention and the Emergence of Reality
12. On Memory and Childhood Amnesia
Biography
Ernest G. Schachtel
“If a single book can be said to make a difference in lives, Ernest Schachtel’s great Metamorphosis can be appraised as that one. Rarely in art or science have wisdom and beauty of language come together so well in one work.”
- Jerome L. Singer, Ph.D.
“Metamorphosis offers a vision of the individual as agent in his or her own becoming, of the conflicts and anxieties surrounding the potential to emerge from embeddedness, and of the ways in which perception becomes free or compromised. Schachtel explores the nature of thinking, attention, memory, and feelings with freshness, subtlety, and originality. This book was a breakthrough in its time. It remains a psychoanalytic treasure.”
- Darlene B. Ehrenberg, Ph.D.
"Metamorphosis is, quite simply, one of the great classics of psychoanalytic literature - and the depth and beauty of its writing means that it is one of the rare pyschoanalytic books that truly deserves to be called literature."
- Donnel Stern, Ph.D., Editor, Contemporary Psychoanalysis
"Schachtel's study of ontogenesis is one of the most important books in the history of American psychoanalysis. Whether discussing the emotions or 'touch' or considering 'objectification,' he brings a creative organization to his writing that is profound and illuminating."
- Christopher Bollas, Ph.D., Author, The Mystery of Things
