It is the purpose of the present book to suggest a model of the psychic structure and the processes going on between its strata, as far as they may be relevant for an interpretation of psychotherapeutic interventions. The author believes that psychotherapy requires more than reducing autotropic or allotropic disturbances of behavior to traumatic experiences in a more or less distant past, although such reductions may be helpful in certain cases. It is a well known fact that adherents to the most divergent depth-psychological or behavioristic schools-of-thought are able to claim successful treatment. The literature abounds with such success stories; but they do not necessarily prove the correctness of the underlying theories. Pragmatic criteria are not enough to justify a theory, even if the inner consistency of its basic concepts may seem convincing. This applies, of course, to the here-proposed model as well. The ideas formulated in this book have accompanied the author over a period of 50 years.
