Efforts to understand the etiology of adult mental disorders by studying children hasproduced unanticipated changes in our understanding of pathology, individual development, andthe role of social context. Among these are the blurring of the division between mental illnessand mental health, the need to attend to patterns of adaptation rather than personality traits, andthe powerful influences of the social world on individual development. Current developmentalviews place deviancy in the dynamic relation between individuals and their contexts. At anotherlevel, when we view the history of developmental psychopathology, dialectical developmentalprocesses are evident as we trace how patterns of adaptation of researchers, expressed intheoretical models and empirical paradigms, increasingly have come to match the complexitiesof human mental health and illness.