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The original Freudian concept of a biologically based latency period is reexamined in the light of recent research findings from nonpsychoanalytic disciplines. Emphasis is placed on the "remarkable fact" that the age seven plus or minus one is a milestone of discontinuity of development. Material from fields
"adjacent" to analysis suggests no one-to-one parallel between behavior and mind and body. But converging and compatible linkages are increasingly evident. Striking correspondence between anatomic and physiologic changes and cognitive shifts is cited. A partial list of the material consulted by the authors includes studies in neural growth, frontal lobe changes, perceptual-postural changes, cognitive changes (with special attention to Piaget's work). Thinking as a major mode of adaptation deserves greater attention, especially in relation to motor discharge and energy "binding." Operational thought and the newly established capacity for mediational (between impulse and action) thinking bring about new internal organization and the possibility of replacement of outer controls by inner controls. The assumption that species-specific neuronal substrates underlie the development of mental structures is not incompatible with or antagonistic to the dynamic core of psychoanalytic thinking.