Introduction

Abstract

This chapter discusses the book’s aim, dialectical approach, implications, and organization. The book aims to answer the question: “What does it mean to be or become a psychosocially mature person?” It describes the dialectical approach as a process whereby lived, affect-and-value-laden polar meanings are transformed, through deep insight, into complementary and integrative meta-meanings. Thus, for example, living a life of either independence or dependence is transformed into living a life of both independence and dependence. It points out that the project provides a map of maturation that serves as a guide for personal transformation and professional therapeutic practice. Utilizing psychoanalytic and humanistic-existential-phenomenological sources that are incipiently dialectical, it explains how the thirty essential, overlapping markers, which form the whole syndrome of psychosocial maturation, were derived and then distilled into ten thematic clusters.