Yorke focuses on the array of developmental disorders in childhood. He illustrates the variety of pathogenic conflicts in three children who experienced very early and quite similar disturbances in their relationships with their mothers. Developmental deviation in one child, developmental disharmony within the developing ego in a second child, and ego inhibition in the third, resulted from these similar causes. Yorke urges investigators to differentiate among preconflictual states of mind, expectable developmental conflicts, modes of conflict resolution, inadequate synthesis of conflict, and neurotic and adaptive synthesis. He also suggests that structural regression, developmental line reversion, and developmental deviation, disharmony, and arrest be distinguished when hypotheses are formed.