ABSTRACT
I suggested in Chapter 1 that certain cognitive/emotional skills might be necessary to the capacity to understand an explanatory interpretation such as ‘You are angry with me today because of the pending break from treatment and the way it invokes your very strong feelings about separation’ or ‘Your sudden feeling of outrage about the way that teacher treated a boy at school may be connected with some feelings of irritation and injustice concerning what I just said about the way you tend to . . .’ I suggested that Bruner’s (1968) study of the development of a capacity for two-tracked thinking may be a useful way of conceptualizing one set of elements in these skills. However, Bruner entirely omits the possibility of emotional components in the development from one-tracked to two-tracked thinking.
