You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Like many of the developmental phenomena that it considers, Greenspan's Developmentally Based Psychotherapy is a multilayered experience and expression. At its most ambitious, the book offers an attempt to integrate the concept of basic developmental lines (such as affect regulation) into a theory of therapeutic action and then into a handbook of technique applicable to both children and adults. Similarly, equally ambitiously, the book implicitly proposes a longitudinal, predictive, and somewhat linear model linking the various functional difficulties of our adult patients to patterns of behaving, interacting, and experiencing set early in development. While both goals are perhaps sufficiently grand as to border on unrealistic and impractical, Greenspan's integration nonetheless offers some very important technical and theoretical insights for clinicians working with children or adults.
Perhaps the most basic of these insights is that a thorough understanding of the developmental precursors of phenomena such as the ability to represent emotions in a verbally nuanced manner is crucial to a therapist's capacity to tailor his or her therapeutic techniques to an individual's needs. Greenspan is not espousing a particular theoretical school, but rather insists that the idea of truly “developmentally” based therapeutic intervention applies to any number of theoretical perspectives from psychodynamic to cognitive-behavioral. In other words, “developmentally based psychotherapy” is an overarching theoretical perspective uniting or cutting across many schools of therapeutic technique and action. It is based on the clinician's ability to determine the level of a patient's ego or personality development and the presence of any deficits, delays, or deviations in those constructions. Interventions are guided by an appreciation of where and how the individual functions in this clinical developmental appraisal. In this sense, Greenspan offers a very practical approach to working wi