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Until relatively recently, it has been easy to assume that the experimental methods favoured by psychology have precluded developmental studies of such subjective phenomena as emotion. Over the last ten to fifteen years or so, developmental psychologists have increasingly given more attention to emotional processes and their relation to other aspects of development, turning experimental expertise to great advantage. Over the same time period, psychotherapists have shown greater interest in the work of developmental psychologists, to gain greater insight into so-called ‘normal’ development. This, for example, is to enrich our understanding of the tasks to be faced by very disturbed children, and is part of a general imperative to build better models of the mind and its objects. These are fed by emotional relationships and our engagements with them.
This book represents a synthesis of work in developmental psychology carried out by the author and his colleagues, which had its inception in follow-up studies on attachment begun in the 1970s. Broadly speaking, it puts forward the thesis that emotional life in early childhood is organized in two inter-related senses.
Firstly, emotions, such as pleasure, fear, anger, shame, affection and guilt, form part of integrating developing systems which emerge according to hierarchical principles. Second, emotional experience itself depends on the development of the regulation of tension, or arousal, produced by external or internal stimulation. This principle is linked to the first via the postulate that, while some degree of tension is necessary in order to function efficiently, whether or not an emotion can or does occur depends on the infant's capacity to generate tension and to tolerate it. The degree