Am J Psychiatry 1981; 138:725-735
Copyright © 1981 by American Psychiatric Association
Developmental structuralist approach to the classification of adaptive and pathologic personality organizations: infancy and early childhood
S Greenspan and RS Lourie
Traditional classification of psychopathology is based on either symptom
clusters or etiology. The authors suggest the use of a developmental
structuralist approach, which focuses on an organism's manner of organizing
and differentiating its experience of the world (structures) at each
developmental level. The authors describe their postulated development
stages of infancy and early childhood and discuss the implications of their
approach for understanding adaptive and maladaptive infant functioning,
environmental patterns, and principles of preventive intervention. In
addition to diagnosis and preventive or therapeutic planning, this approach
may be valuable for longitudinal studies and assessing developmental
progression and/or outcome because continuity can be observed in terms of
developmental level of adaptability rather than specific behaviors and
because its provides a set of "baseline" functions to assess clinically
relevant aspects of development.
