Theory II

The term robust developmental perspective captures an inclusive and integrative approach that draws on a wide variety of sources and discourses to core problems in psychoanalysis: the relations between past and present, change and continuity, repetition and novelty, the social and the individual, separateness and relatedness, the physiological and the psychological, and so on. Key elements include looking at actual children; developmental stage theories conceptualized in terms of integrative transformation over time; an interest in normal development and progressive movement, rather than on pathogenesis alone; focal attention to the tensions between continuity and change; understanding complexity and integration as part of developmental process; nonlinear dynamic systems thinking; and interdisciplinarity. These perspectives are applied to clinical work, in a multimodal and open-minded approach to psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.