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IN A RECENT PAPER, ARLOW (1981) POINTED TO THE MULTI-plicity of pathogenic conflicts in childhood and their ultimate fate in terms of adult neurosis. In particular, he emphasized the ubiquity, during the formative years of childhood, of foci and loci of future disturbance, and he rejected näive and over-inclusive views of pathogenesis. This firm recommitment to a view unpalatable to founders of psychoanalytic fashion, whether ephemeral or not, was particularly welcome and prompted Anna Freud (1983) to discuss, from the standpoint of childhood development, problems of pathogenesis in an unusually broad, if condensed, review. Her paper brings together much of her thinking on problems of nosology: thinking which is central to her work of the past two decades.
If, for the most part, Arlow wrote from the standpoint of adult neurosis, Anna Freud felt obliged to consider other forms of pathological disturbance, such as developmental disharmonies, as these are encountered in children. It may be useful