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In this paper, the authors present a reading of Loewald’s developmental and clinical thinking from a relational-developmental perspective, illustrating their ideas through the case of an 11-year-old boy presenting with quasi-psychotic symptoms. The paper explores Loewald’s developmental narrative as entailing an implicit view of the self as a relational matrix comprised of both time and space; an open, ever-expanding relational system within a shared psychic field, wherein time is a central psychic activity. The authors trace Loewaldian development as a movement toward greater organization of two inherently interlinked layers of experience, the primordial oceanic oneness (merger) and differentiated reality (separateness), each related to its own form of fundamental anxiety: engulfment and castration, respectively. Through the clinical material, these layers of experience are also discussed in relation to Loewald’s notion of language. The elements of Loewald’s developmental theory are discussed as preceding and inspiring subsequent relational thinking. Loewald, they contend, situates therapeutic action within the metaphor of theater. Drawing on his emphasis on the analyst’s role as a “director,” and his key concept of linking as well as his formulation of the functions of “transference” (being-with) and “differential” (being-ahead-of), the authors also reconceptualize two crucial theatrical roles performed in the analytic field: “merging actor” and “dramaturg.” These two critical, mutually-informing roles are demonstrated through the clinical material.