ABSTRACT
The fifth chapter attempts to bring the person and the field into a lifespan model of development. 1 The unconscious is seen as ‘timeless,’ or lacking in temporal distinctions, yet nested in a lifespan history and so reflective, contrary to Freud’s (1915) view, of passed time. The issues of infantile fixation/arrest are reframed, by and large, as issues for the life cycle (Stern, 1985; Mitchell, 1988). The person does not regress to them, but reengages them in new iterations within each subsequent phase (Wachtel, 2003, 2008). The entry into each new phase opens new fields with unique limits and growth potentials. The struggle, moreover, is rarely uniform. It typically involves shifts between modes (Erikson, 1950) and positions (Klein, 1946; Waddell, 1998) within the relational matrix.
