Discussion reflects on the notions of the constructionist viewpoint in development, of integration, and of individual uniqueness, by drawing on studies of mother-infant interaction, the development of 24-hour infant state organization and regulation, and life span development. The logic of construction by which an individual shapes his or her long-term developmental trajectory is summarized in five propositions: (1) the infant's initial inner experience consolidates around the experience of his or her own recurrent states; (2) the infant's own states, where coherent, recurrent, desired, or essential to key regulatory coordinations become the primary goals for behavior; (3) infant competence in initiating and organizing self-regulatory behaviors to achieve desired states as goals represents a systems competence which insures a sense of agency in the infant; (4) each infant-caregiver system constructs its own unique configuration of regulatory constraint on the infant's access to awareness of his or her own states, inner experience, and access to options to initiate the organization of schemes of self-regulatory behavior on the basis of the criterion of inner experience; and (5) a continuing differentiation of the individual's competence as agent to reconstruct the array of familiar states under widening and changing contextual circumstances is an ongoing life span process. (RH)