ABSTRACT
Numerous paths come together In this book. Drawing from a wide range of sources, we ambitiously aim to address multiple audiences: research psychologists, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists, but also developmentalists from across other disciplines. From the most general perspective, we wish to highlight the crucial importance of developmental work to psychotherapy and psychopathology. We offer an account of psychotherapy that seeks to integrate our scientific knowledge of psychological development with our experience as clinicians, working with children and adults. We believe that the interests of our patients are best served by a constant effort on the part both of individual therapists and of the profession collectively to bring about such an integration. The value of this kind of integration is by no means immediately accepted (see Green 2000; Wolff 1996), nor should it be. The psychotherapist offers clinical help, mainly though language, to people looking for help not (just) from medication, but from someone who is willing to have their minds in mind. It cannot be assumed that scientific progress in adjacent disciplines will benefit psychotherapeutic practice. For example, we can well imagine that progress in Hullian or Skinnerian learning-theory research in the 1940s and 1950s would have been of little help to psychodynamic therapists at that time. Learning theory benefited quite a different 2kind of psychological therapy, less concerned with meaning and the person than with behavior and the environment.
