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Doctor Scharfman's clearly drawn sketch of the historical development of child and adolescent analysis highlights the overarching reach of the developmental viewpoint. This last component of our set of metapsychological constructs was not much talked about in my training years of the late 1940s. Yet, gradually, it has become generally accepted in mainsteam North American psychoanalysis. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of those whose contributions Dr. Scharfman has summarized, this particular view now has a compelling influence on how we think about early psychic growth, and its proponents have been able to claim the relevance of the developmental viewpoint for all phases of the life cycle.
As Dr. Abrams later detailed for us, the developmental viewpoint combines, in a subtle and encompassing way, the interplay of the drives with their inherently biological basis; the ego with its endowment of physical equipment; and object relations with referents to both the intrapsychic world of self and object representations and to the exterior world of relating to others.
With the three legs of drive, ego, and object relations development