ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the important role of the primary cares and offers a brief description of the natural development of mental organisations, since the transformations that occur in therapy have to relate to this context. It describes the maturation processes in the framework of neuro-affective developmental psychology and considers particularly crucial, as the child’s emotional neural structures mature within the framework of the child’s developmental capacity or, in other words, within the child’s zone of proximal development. The chapter shows that the basis of neuroaffective developmental psychology and how this theoretical framework can produce a nuanced understanding of the non-specific factors in child psychotherapy. The child needs the adults’ recognition and guidance to develop adaptive relational strategies and social skills. In the field of neuropsychology, it is well known that certain functions develop at certain times, depending on which area of the brain has a “window of opportunity”, developmentally speaking.
