ABSTRACT
This chapter considers psyche and space on the basis of Hermann's oeuvre. Imre Hermann lived in Hungary and he worked there all his life, even in the years of Nazism and Communism. He played a very important role in the survival of psychoanalysis in Hungary and in preserving the legacy of the Budapest School for the coming generations. The phenomena observed in apes cannot be applied directly to humans, Hermann emphasises. Study of apes cannot substitute for the study of human behaviour. Regular research studying the human mother–infant relationship started after the Second World War. Hermann published a series of case histories of people who reacted to separation traumas by self-destruction: the tearing of their skin, nails, or hair, sometimes even causing bleeding. According to Hermann, the habit of grooming among apes is the philogenetic model of self-destructive phenomena. According to Hermann, the reflection of Euclidean space is the result of the human development process.
