ABSTRACT
There is growing consensus that adult psychopathology can be understood with reference to normal child development. This point of view is represented currently by a movement in psychoanalysis known as developmental lines thinking (A. Freud, 1965), structural psychoanalysis (Baker, 1990; Gedo and Goldberg, 1973) or developmental psychopathology (Sroufe and Rutter, 1984). The field represents an integration of the rapidly proliferating literature on child observational and experimental studies on one hand and a variety of psychoanalytic theories on the other, namely, object relations theory (Horner, 1979; Jacobson, 1973; Kernberg, 1968, 1976; Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975), self psychology (Bach, 1977; Kohut, 1971; Lichtenberg, 1975; Ornstein, 1974; Stolorow and Lachmann, 1980), ego psychology (Blanck and Blanck, 1974), affective development theory (Brown, 1985; Emde, 1983; Greenspan and Lourie, 1981; Sroufe, 1979b), and integrative psychoanalytic theory (Blanck and Blanck, 1974; Gedo, 1984; Gedo and Goldberg, 1973). Human development is seen as a series of phase-specific tasks, the successful mastery of which leads to the emergence of more and more complex psychic structures. Psychopathology is viewed as a failure to master expected developmental tasks or predicted structural achievements.
