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Structure and Process in Relational, Developmental Systems Theories: A Commentary on Contemporary Changes in the Understanding of Developmental Change across the Life Span

What is development? Why is there development? What causes development? When does development occur? These are the fundamental questions of developmental science. Answers to these questions have for decades filled the pages of this journal and of other scholarly works, e.g., ranging from articles and chapters in edited volumes to monographs and handbooks of child, adolescent, and life span development [Damon, 1998; Damon & Lerner, 2006; Lamb & Freund, 2010; Lerner & Steinberg, 2009; Overton, 2010a]. Raeff ’s [this issue] paper contributes importantly to the best within this literature. She discusses how orthogenetic change [Werner, 1948, 1957] constitutes a cross-time covariance structure that defines development, differentiates it from other forms of change, and enables developmental scientists to understand successive changes in mutually influential exchanges between the individual and context (represented as individual !–1 context relations) that occur within the relational, developmental system; these individual !–1 context relations constitute the basic process of human development across ontogeny [Overton, 2010b]. Following Werner [e.g., 1957], Raeff regards orthogenetic change as a general, regulative principal of development. That is, Werner [1957] noted that whenever development occurs, it goes from a state of globality to differentiation, integration, and hierarchic organization. In commenting on Raeff, I have three goals. First, I will discuss the concepts that must be understood to address the above-noted fundamental questions of develop-