The ambitious nature of the present volume is suggested by its title. Dr Greenspan provides a model of ego development informed both by clinical observations and by research findings from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and developmental psychology. He outlines a model of ego development, broadly defined, in which the active organization of experience is present from very early in life and in which characteristic organizational levels and adaptive and maladaptive organizations can be identified. This model of ego development owes a particular debt to object-relations theory as well as to basic child development research. In this developmental structuralist view, normative ego development is seen as progressing through characteristic, successive phases.

During the phase of homeostasis (birth to three months) the infant must simultaneously take an interest in the world and begin to self-regulate. During