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IN THE ENDLESS CONTROVERSY about the relative influence of nature and nurture on the character of man, Freud took the most complex of positions, that of giving equal weight to constitutional factors and to the effects of the environment. Psychoanalytic psychology has taken innate psychobiological dispositions into account in its drive theories (Freud, 1905), (1920), but Freud's emphasis on the importance of childhood experience for personal destiny did not at first find a systematic place within his theories. With the conceptualization of the structural theory in the 1920's, it could implicitly find its proper niche as a codeterminant of ego and superego development. At the level of metapsychology, it was articulated as a major assumption of psychoanalysis by Hartmann (1939) in the concept of an "average expectable environment."
In the past generation, environmental influences have increasingly come to be characterized, with some degree of reductionism when compared to Hartmann's broad definition, in terms of transactions between the child and the significant persons of his milieu. These transactions are simultaneously seen from two complementary standpoints: from that of an external observer, they constitute concrete events on