Abstract

The purpose of this review is to present an innovative, interdisicplinary approach called Evolutive Psychopathology, which has been developed recently as an area boundering an other, more academically defined disciplines (development psychology, child neuropsychiatry, clinical psychology, epidemiology), all of which are concerned with the study of normal and atypical behaviour in childhood and adolescence. The originality of the approach consists in having defined various fundamental principles, such as the firm bases of theoretical and methodological organisation, around which theoretical models and specific instruments deducible from the allied disicplines can be made to converge, depending on the objectives that researchers intend to pursue. Within this framework we will deal with the vast and complex subject of child abuse as an example of a psychological phenomenon wich requires etiopathogenic models divided into different levels and composite methdologies. Special attention will be paid to the contributions of the attachment theory and is methods in the early assessment of the risk of abuse in young children.