The term “developmental point of view” is employed variously in psychoanalytic writing. In this paper I use as a point of departure the definition by Kennedy (1971), who differentiated between the “genetic-reconstructive” and the “developmental” points of view. The former is concerned with analytic reconstruction of the patient's past on the basis of the clinical material, while the latter is concerned with internal and external influences in ongoing development (p. 390).

Psychoanalytic theory and the psychoanalytic method of therapy originated in use of the genetic-reconstructive approach with adults. Since Freud's original conceptualizations, both theory and method have been elaborated on the basis of accumulating knowledge from psychoanalytic clinical experience