Embedding: Co-Regulation Within Therapeutic Process: Lessons from Development: Response to “Co-Regulated Interactions: Implications for Psychotherapy …,” paper by Stanley Greenspan

Considerations Regarding Greenspan's Past Contributions

APANORAMIC VIEW OF STANLEY GREENSPAN'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis captures work of exceptional breadth, depth, and remarkable utility to clinicians treating individuals of all ages. Over years of dedicated observation and synthesis, a notable continuity flows through his work. He joined others in attempting to expand the usefulness of Anna Freud's metapsychological profile (Greenspan, Hatleberg, and Cullander, 1976) by both narrowing its scope, updating its developmental constructs, and incorporating interview-based scales of personality functioning. Ingredients of the functional emotional growth he stresses in later contributions are evident here. From an initial

integration of Piagetian and psychoanalytic developmental theories (Greenspan, 1979), in which he conceptualized the emotional underpinnings of cognition, and from his tri-tiered view of learning—linking bodily experience, consequence (cause/effect), and representational processes (Greenspan, 1982)—Greenspan sustained his focus on psychoanalytic psychotherapy from a developmentalist's perspective. Within his framework, therapeutic progress requires the patient to have the capacity for assimilation and integration. The reworking of affective and cognitive meanings on a complex, representational level requires the processing of prerepresentational somatic experience as well. Greenspan appreciates the need for synchrony and a fit between therapist and patient, and he has shared ideas about how the therapist and therapeutic process need to correspond to the patient's developmental level at any given phase of the treatment.

For Greenspan (1989), ego development became framed against the backdrop of six stages of experiential organization.1 As such, Greenspan not only offered a significant developmental model, but also clearly elevated discussion among psychoanalysts about the integration of constitutional factors (includi