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The diversity of theories regarding children's development is commensurate with the enormity of the task of seeking ordering designs for explaining behavioral and psychic ontogeny in infants, children, and adults. The purpose of this paper is to look at these developmental theories as epigenetic stages themselves. I shall suggest that the next stage in the epigenesis of theories of development is to see variability and disorder on a continuum with order and stability, as a constant dialectic that moves development along, whether at the level of the cell or at the level of fantasy. I shall explore four questions that are implicitly about development as an ordering process and about theories of development as methods for bringing order to what is an inherently messy, even chaotic. The first two questions—what does it mean to take a developmental perspective, and what does any theory of development need to
Arnold Gesell Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology in the Yale Child Study Center; Faculty in the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis
A shorter version of this paper presented to the New York Psychoanalytic Association on November 9, 1999 on the occasion of the 1999 Heinz Hartmann Award and to the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Society on November 17, 1999.
The author gratefully acknowledges the very productive discussions with and careful reading and suggestions for this manuscript offered by my New Haven colleagues, Drs. David Carlson, Donald Cohen, Wayne Downey, James Leckman, and Paul Schwaber, and also by Drs. Leroy Byerly and Theodore Fallon of Philadelphia.
explain—set the stage for the consideration of some different perspectives for thinking about development. These other perspectives, borrowed from general systems theory, focus on the interplay of order-stability and variability-instability in psychological development. The third question, asks what does a more detailed consideration of the variability or noise in development add to our current developmental perspectives? Exploring dynamic systems and self-ordering processes will lead to several fields not explicitly clinical, psychological, or even psychoanalytic, but I shall circle back to apply these ideas to psychoanalytic, perspectives on development, change, and adaptation in the fourth and concluding question. What can these cross-disciplinary attitudes offer to the psychoanalytic developmental perspective, whether in the form of our theories or our work with patients?