The Challenges of Psychoanalytic Developmental Theory

As we look back over the history of psychoanalysis and ahead to the future, we might agree that no theoretical area has seen more controversy, or presented more challenges, than psychoanalytic developmental theory. The challenge of understanding the mind and feelings of a child and the ways this understanding might provide a lens through which to view the mind of the adult has led psychoanalysts to propose numerous theories of conscious and unconscious mental functioning. As experience and reflection reveal the explicatory failures and other shortcomings of these theories, they are modified or replaced and the cycle starts again.

What follows is a commentary on the evolution of psychoanalytic developmental theory, interwoven with the whole of psychoanalytic theory, and on the challenges it currently faces—and poses. This will not be an historical overview or critical exegesis. Instead, I have chosen to use the vicissitudes of the theories of affect and affect regulation as a way of approaching the broader issues. I have chosen this strategy because of the centrality of feeling states to psychic life, interpersonal interaction, the clinical situation, and the developmental process, and because competence in affect regulation influences the balance between impulse and action, strengthens the capacity to tolerate frustration, ambiguity, and ambivalence, and contributes to complexity in object relations and social interaction. I have chosen it also because of a contemporary clinical urgency to find effective means of prevention and treatment for children unable to regulate affect, and because the quest to understand the nature of affect has led to the evolution of several models of the mind. Using very broad strokes, I will try to paint a picture of past and current psychoanalytic views of affect (for a comprehensive summary of affect theory, see Stein 1991) and will then briefly survey research from related fields that challenges