The Developmental Approach Of John Gedo

Our interest in the work of John Gedo originated in the early 1970s with the manuscript of his first book, Models of the Mind (1973), coauthored with Arnold Goldberg. We had the opportunity to review and comment upon this effort before its publication, and were impressed even then with its wide sweep of integrative capacity, finding the underlying developmental orientation most enlightening. Since Models of the Mind, Gedo has gone on independently to expand this developmental framework, elaborating on its clinical implications as well as the clinical opportunities it affords the practitioner. Gedo's second book, entitled felicitously Beyond Interpretation (1979a), explains and illustrates the meaning in the therapeutic situation of the concepts of pacification, unification, and optimal disillusionment, concepts originally introduced by Gedo and Goldberg together. With this book, Gedo firmly places himself in the camp of those analysts who are set upon expanding the definition of psychoanalysis to include more than just the meliorative effects of interpretation, as well as upon extending the clinical net of psychoanalysis to include more than just the population that suffers from