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The developmentalist perspective as I employ it takes the traditional genetic point of view (finding causal linkages between past and present) and amplifies it through a focus on the possibilities for subjective experience and psychic organization present at each stage of development. As applied to the task of discovering the overt and hidden meanings in Dr. Silverman's clinical example, the developmentalist perspective asks a number of questions. What problematic patterns of experiencing and interacting persist, and how are these to be explained? When psychologically significant events occur in the course of treatment, are there “model scenes” from critical developmental phases that match and give conceptual coherence to these events? Assuming the analyst to be a concerned, sensitive, empathic therapist, how does his plasticity allow the analysand to induce him into a role having conscious and unconscious significance to the analysand from her prior experience?
Two problematic patterns stand out in Miss K.'s pretreatment history and in the hours recorded in the transcript: her angry, persecutory-like orientation and her uncomfortable inability to come to terms with her femininity. While these two problems are in all probability interrelated, each could exist without the other, so it is reasonable to regard their roots as possibly separate. Both problems underwent a curious change in the course of the analysis — they