Settlage was stimulated to think about the interrelation of therapeutic and developmental processes by his work with several children who appeared to have made favorable change while resisting his attempts to establish a traditional therapeutic process. He postulates that this favorable change, which included the gradual ability to enter into a therapeutic relationship, was caused by a developmental process stimulated by the relationship with him. He reviews his ideas about the developmental process, psychic structures, and the history of the close relationship between therapeutic and developmental processes, pointing to many authors' contributions to the concept of psychoanalysis as a developmental process. Defining developmental process as "the function and structure forming mental process that is conceived to derive from the parent/child interaction," he points out that it is similar to the therapeutic situation with its different gradients of structural and functional capability