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This chapter presents a sampling of process notes and research summaries from the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). The process notes were the result of sessions between the young girl Evelyn and the investigator-cum-therapist Samuel Ritvo. The samples are intended to give readers the opportunity to make their own interpretations of the materials and about Evelyn's emergence into personhood.

This chapter examines the evidence—the so-called process notes—of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS) from the viewpoints of both history and psychology. More specifically, it examines the idiosyncrasy, genius, and blind spots in the conception and execution of the YLS. The study was informed by Freudian psychoanalysis and strongly influenced by Anna Freud's work with children. The chapter also compares the YLS's process notes with material generated by other longitudinal studies not so directly linked to psychoanalysis. Finally, it considers the focus of the process notes: the young girl Evelyn and the investigator-cum-therapist Samuel Ritvo, along with her siblings and parents.

This chapter examines how siblings and families influence a child's development by taking the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a girl, “Nancy Miles,” as a manageable sample of the data from the Yale Child Study Center's Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). It offers an interpretation of the process notes resulting from the sessions between Nancy and her therapist. Furthermore, it considers how Nancy's temperamental givens—such as her internal proclivity for passivity and withdrawal in the world outside her family—interacts with external frictions in the process of internalization. It also discusses the role of trauma in child development. Finally, it looks at the therapist's manner of capturing the play narrative involving Nancy.

This chapter examines in detail the process notes of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). The process notes, amounting to thousands of pages, were the result of sessions between the young girl Evelyn and Samuel Ritvo. The chapter focuses on Evelyn's awakening interest in how her status as a female related to the male-dominated social hierarchy that she encountered at each stage of her development. Evelyn's transcripts are an unusually rich source of information about child development at the time the YLS was undertaken. Ritvo and members of the Yale Child Study Center made contemporaneous observations of Evelyn's therapy from 1954 to 1963.

This chapter examines in further detail the process notes of the Yale Child Study Center's Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). It looks at more of Evelyn's interactions with Samuel Ritvo, whose “A Dynamic Biography” sums up his sixty-year career as psychoanalytic clinician, educator, and researcher, and includes his work in the YLS. “A Dynamic Biography” is based on direct observations made in the course of Evelyn's psychoanalytic treatment from ages three to eleven, and from follow-up interviews and correspondences during her adolescence, adulthood, and middle age (ages fifteen, thirty-four, fifty-three, and fifty-five).