This article, based on experiences within the Maastricht 24 hour emergency service for psychiatric and psychosocial problems, describes how a time- en developmental perspective can be integrated in the practice and theory of psychiatric crisisintervention. On the basis of some reflections on the course of schizophrenic disorders will be gone into the importance that crisisintervention should have for the evaluation and the steering of a patient career and the significance the actual crisis and the intervention can have within the life history of a patient. The authors deliniate the consequences that such a form of crisisintervention has for the organizational setting, in which a gross integration of psychiatric service, including the psychiatric hospital, is a condition for crisisintervention that tries to describe psychiatric illness in a time perspective. Next to that, a strategy of analysis and negotiation is described that gives an important contribution to the diagnosis of the multiple factors that constitute a crisis and the intervention that links up as good as possible to the actual crisis. In the end some notions about the functioning of a crisisteam are taken in consideration.