This chapter will move beyond the dynamics of personality development to consider some essential aspects of the therapeutic relationship.  In particular, the transference relationships between patient and therapist and how they are critical to clinical work in all fields of medicine and form the core of psychotherapeutic activities will be discussed.

Sometime around the age of three, the child ceases to be a baby and becomes a preschool child. During the next two or three years the child passes through one of the most decisive phases of life’s journey that has been termed the oedipal transition.

Death is part of the life cycle, an inevitable outcome of life that brings closure to a life story; and, because humans from early childhood are aware of their ultimate death, it influences their development and their way of life profoundly.

The closing of the oedipal period brings a consolidation of the child’s personality. The child now first achieves a fairly firm integration as an individual. Even though personality development is far from completed at five or six and many significant influences will still accrue before a firm integration and a stable identity are achieved, we must examine the paradox and the nature and extent of the organization that has occurred.

Out of the multiplicity of factors that enter into the shaping of a life, resultant patterns of living and relating emerge.

The entrance into school is symbolic of the crucial issues of the period. Children now move into the world beyond the home and must begin to find their places in it, and in so doing their self-concepts, value systems, and cognitive capacities change.

We cannot understand human functioning without a clear appreciation of how emotions and physiology are inextricably interrelated, and how individuals’ personality development influences their body structure and can even determine what constitutes stress for them and creates strains on their physiological apparatus.

The adolescent lives with a vibrant sensitivity that carries to ecstatic heights and lowers to almost untenable depths. For some, the emotional stability achieved in childhood and the security of the family attachments contain the amplitude of the oscillations and permit a fairly steady direction; whereas others must struggle to retain a sense of unity and a modicum of ego control.

The lengthy developmental process as a dependent apprentice in living draws to a close as individuals attain an identity and the ability to live intimately with a member of the opposite sex, and contemplate forming families of their own. They have attained adult status with the completion of physical maturation, and, it is hoped, they have become sufficiently well integrated and emotionally mature to utilize the opportunities and accept the responsibilities that accompany it.