Response to Discussants

I SHALL BE BRIEF IN MY RESPONSE focussing only on those aspects of the two discussants' remarks that address my talk primarily. The two discussants could not be farther apart in their points of view—Dr. Shapiro arguing for a far more central role of a developmental perspective than either Anne-Marie Sandler or I gave to it, and Dr. Greenberg arguing that the whole endeavor is basically wrongheaded because it is based on the presumption that analytic knowledge will not stand on its own.

First to two points in Dr. Shapiro's discussion. He is perplexed, and rightly so, by the statement of mine that he quotes: "A developmental perspective is not particularly necessary for adult clinical work, " and he asks me to clarify what I meant. I say "perplexed and rightly so" because he dropped from his quotation the rest of what I said, which was: "of course I take for granted that we all have some conception of development and that we are interested in the particular development of the individual with whom we are working at any moment." I mean this statement to subsume many of the kinds of things he said about the significance of a developmental framework. I assume we take that for