HOW MIGHT the developmental views presented here affect clinical practice? In particular, how might a therapist and a patient reconstruct a therapeutically effective narrative about the past? Two major features of this viewpoint have broad clinical implications. First, the traditional clinical-developmental issues such as orality, dependence, autonomy, and trust, have been disengaged from any one specific point or phase of origin in developmental time. These issues are seen here as developmental lines—that is, issues for life, not phases of life. They do not undergo a sensitive period, a presumed phase of ascendancy and predominance when relatively irreversible “fixations” could occur. It therefore can not be known in advance, on theoretical grounds, at what point in life a particular traditional clinical-developmental issue will receive its pathogenic origin.