This chapter provides an overview of current thinking regarding the supporting theory of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Rather than going through theoretical constructs in historical order of when each theory was proposed, they are presented as a composite of past and present thinking that the authors have found to be clinically relevant. It commences by describing theories on the early development of the infant and the creation of the internal world and object relations. The chapter them moves on to the issue of accommodating to the world as it is experienced by the infant, outlining circumstances leading to adaptive and less adaptive development. The chapter then outlines ‘core theory’ which covers more traditional psychodynamic concepts such as conflict, resistance, and defence mechanisms with an emphasis on projective identification. The role of this latter defence mechanism is linked with the theoretical constructs of transference and countertransference. There is a section on the narcissistic constellation in order to help the reader negotiate later sections in the book. Finally the chapter concludes with an introduction to theories as to how change is effected in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

This chapter reviews the literature on the origins of cities and states. We argue that purely agricultural societies are unlikely to have cities because population dispersal reduces travel costs for farmers and herders. But incentives for agglomeration could arise from the productivity of urban manufacturing, the need for collective defense, or cultural factors. We supplement our study of Mesopotamia with archaeological data on state formation in Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. All of these cases had highly productive food technologies, pre-existing stratification, and close links with urbanization. Based on our models in Chapters 6, 8, and 10, we suggest three pathways to a state. In the “property rights hypothesis,” improving food technology and long-run population growth lead to the creation of elite property rights over the best sites, a shrinking commons, and falling commoner wages. This eventually triggers urban manufacturing and city-state formation. In the “elite warfare hypothesis,” warfare among elites over land rents causes defensive agglomeration in cities and territorial expansion by successful elites. In the “environmental shift hypothesis,” commoner populations migrate toward refuge sites (often river valleys) controlled by local elites, again leading to falling commoner wages, urbanization, and state formation.

The political economy of crime and harm is a vast topic covering diverse issues and, as with many approaches to crime, cannot be neatly categorised according to one or another theory (Reiner 2017). This chapter focuses on how critical criminology understands the political economic framing of crime, in particular as it relates to the powerful. It examines a range of approaches based largely, though not exclusively, on Marxist-related theories and their various interpretations, to include radical criminology (Taylor et al. 1973), left realism (Young & Lea 1984), subcultural conflict theory emerging from research conducted by members of the British Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Hall et al. 1978) and the emergence of theories of crimes of the powerful developed from the 1970s onwards by scholars such as Pearce (1976), Box (1983) and Reiman (1979). As these approaches interrogate the structures of power, they also question how crime is defined, and in whose interests. Hence a common feature in the study of crimes of the powerful is the inclusion of acts which are not legally proscribed but rather constitute ‘social harms’.