This book focuses on the crucial importance of developmental work to psychotherapy and psychopathology. It offers an account of psychotherapy to integrate scientific knowledge of psychological development and represents psychological states in the minds of infants, children, adolescents, and adults.

Introduction -- Theoretical Perspectives -- Attachment and Reflective Function: Their Role in Self-Organization -- Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Affects and Affect Regulation -- The Behavior Geneticist's Challenge to a Psychosocial Model of the Development of Mentalization -- Developmental Perspectives -- The Social Biofeedback Theory of Affect-Mirroring: The Development of Emotional Self-Awareness and Self-Control in Infancy -- The Development of an Understanding of Self and Agency -- "Playing with Reality": Developmental Research and a Psychoanalytic Model for the Development of Subjectivity -- Marked Affect-Mirroring and the Development of Affect-Regulative Use of Pretend Play -- Developmental Issues in Normal Adolescence and Adolescent Breakdown -- Clinical Perspectives -- The Roots of Borderline Personality Disorder in Disorganized Attachment -- Psychic Reality in Borderline States -- Mentalized Affectivity in the Clinical Setting -- Epilogue