ABSTRACT
This chapter points out the crucial importance of relations for the development of emotional, personal, and social capacities and describes how attunement processes in this early period come to light in the therapist–client relationship later in life. The human motivation to establish emotional attachments is innate, and the change in the psychotherapeutic relationship takes place through microscopic moments of meeting, which lead to equally microscopic changes in the neural circuits. The therapy process gives the child novel experiences; they do not repair the past, but build a new inner representation that can be integrated in the nervous system. Therapy is about establishing attachment and relationships, but also about building mentalization capacity. The goal of the therapy process is to establish the mutual emotional attunement between child and parents, and to achieve this, the therapist has to act as "the magical stranger" who is present for a while to help set the process in motion.
