Developmental schedules refer to temporal factors of pubertal processes as they might bear on ego development. The longitudinal research reviewed here from the 30-year archives of the Guidance Study of the Institute of Human Development pertains to the effects of varying lengths of the prepubertal and pubertal period on the short-term and enduring integration of drive states initiated at puberty. The personality correlates of varying lengths of these periods serve as vehicle for establishing properties of these stages as well as of the transition between them. The different ways the sexes respond to the early onset of puberty, as reported here, may provide an important microcosm for understanding normative sex differences in the general regulation of drive states.

A model of pubertal growth based on psychoanalytic ego psychology is applied to the study of early and late maturation in males. From this model the personality development of early and late maturers in the Guidance Study is examined prior to, at, and following their onset of puberty. Consistent with previous longitudinal research, the dimensions of motility and expressiveness appear to be specifically connected to patterns of physical maturation. Findings suggest that the length of the latency period regulates one's preparation for the pubertal somatic changes and may decisively influence postpubertal impulse-controlling mechanisms of the personality.

Twenty aspects of personality assessed via the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough & Bradley, 1996) from age 33 to 75 were examined in a sample of 279 individuals. Oakland Growth Study and Berkeley Guidance Study members completed the CPI a maximum of 4 times. We used longitudinal hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to ask the following: Which personality characteristics change and which do not? Five CPI scales showed uniform lack of change, 2 showed heterogeneous change giving an averaged lack of change, 4 showed linear increases with age, 2 showed linear decreases with age, 4 showed gender or sample differences in linear change, 1 showed a quadratic peak, and 2 showed a quadratic nadir. The utility of HLM becomes apparent in portraying the complexity of personality change and stability.

Psychological health in young adulthood was predicted from personality evaluations throughout development in a longitudinal sample of 31 men and 33 women. Clusters of behaviorally denned ratings of over 30 personality characteristics, spanning the age range 5-16 yr., were derived separately for each sex. Adult health was denned by the correlation of a composite Q-sort description of each S (based on the adult assessment material), with a standard Q sort based on a hypothetical psychologically healthy adult. 4 developmental periods were used; only 1 (ages 11, 12, and 13) had significant multiple correlations with adult health. This held true for both sexes although the specific predictors differed for men and women.

Survivors withhold disclosure of suffering when their terror is unwitnessed and when their expectation of disbelief or disregard obfuscates the reality of persecution. Knowledge itself then becomes traumatized, losing the power to inform and mobilize action. Survivors become habituated to suffering in a manner that subverts meaning, dampens vitality as well as pain, and arrests empathic connectedness. The dearth of transferential cues in such depleted existences leaves analysts in doubt as to whether they have been unintrusive or unavailable to these patients. Restoring survivors' sense of being witnessed requires interpretive actions that acknowledge the suffering that survivors have lost the will and means to make known or even represent. Such interventions draw on analysts' own projective identifications and use of the self, counterposing the will to live against the resignation to unwitnessed terror.