Biography
Sidney Blatt was the first of three children in a Jewish family in South Philadelphia. His parents, Harry and Fannie Blatt, owned a sweet shop and the family lived in the apartment upstairs. The family struggled financially, and this markedly shaped Blatt's life experience and ideological convictions. Blatt's first encountered psychoanalytic theory in high school through reading Freud's (1916-1917) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Fascinated with this book, he became determined to become a psychoanalyst.Career
After graduating South Philadelphia High School for Boys in 1946, Blatt began his university education at the Pennsylvania State University and, in 1952, completed his master's degree in clinical psychology, working under William Snyder. Blatt received honors for his thesis, Recall and recognition vocabulary: Implications for intellectual deterioration.Blatt, S. J. (1959). Recall and recognition vocabulary: implications for intellectual deteriorations.''Archives of General Psychiatry, 1'', 473-476. In 1951, Blatt married his wife Ethel Shames, with whom he has three children (Susan, Judith and David). In 1954, Blatt entered the PhD program in Personality Development and Psychopathology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Morris I. Stein. He completed his dissertation in 1957, An Experimental Study of the Problem Solving Process.Blatt, S. J., & Stein, M. I. (1959). Efficiency in problem solving. ''Journal of Psychology, 48,'' 192-213 His predoctoral internship in clinical psychology was with Carl Rogers, who had a profound influence on Blatt's psychotherapeutic approach and his identity as a therapist. As a graduate student, Blatt was strongly influenced by the work of David Rapaport, especially his Organization and Pathology of Thought, a volume that Blatt says served as his “intellectual Talmud and Torah” during graduate school. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois Medical School and at Michael Reese Hospital's Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Institute he was influenced by two psychologists, Mary Engel and Sarah Kennedy Polka, who had been trained at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, and introduced Blatt to Rapaport's approach to diagnostic psychological testing. Blatt joined the Department of Psychology at Yale University in 1960 as an assistant professor. Concurrently, he embarked on psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (WNEIP), supported by a grant from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry. During this training, Blatt worked with Roy Schafer, a psychoanalytic instructor and a Yale faculty colleague, who had worked extensively with Rapaport. This contact with Schafer enabled Blatt to consolidate his interest in Rapaport's work, especially the links between cognitive processes and personality organization and between representational development and psychopathology. In July 1963, Blatt was appointed chief of the psychology section in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale, a position that he held till his retirement in 2011. During his 51 years at Yale, 48 years as chief psychologist, Blatt was the teacher and mentor of many students and colleagues who then went on to develop distinguished careers of their own (in alphabetical order): John Auerbach, Beatrice Beebe, Rachel Blass, Ted Brodkin, Diana Diamond, Kenneth Levy, Howard Lerner, Suniya Luthar, Patrick Luyten, Thomas Odgen, Donald Quinlan, Barry Ritzler, Golan Shahar, Paul Wachtel, Steven Wein, and many distinguished others. His collaboration initially with Donald Quinlan at Yale and later with David Zuroff, then at Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Connecticut, and now at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, paved new grounds in the research and treatment of depression. In addition to directing and participating in pre and post doctoral clinical training for psychologists in the department of psychiatry, Blatt, for many years, offered a core seminar on personality development and psychopathology in the graduate clinical psychology training program in the department of psychology and supervised research of graduate and undergraduates, most notably the senior essay of David C. Cohen, “Characteristics of complex problem solving following the induction of success or failure”, that won the Angell Award in 1964 as the outstanding senior essay and the 1996 doctoral dissertation by Carrie Schaffer, “The role of attachment in the experience and regulation of affect” that was accepted with distinction, a rare honor at Yale, especially for a dissertation in the clinical area. Blatt was a visiting professor in many universities and clinical institutes through the world and received numerous professional honors. Among the institutions at which he has been a visiting scholar are the Hampstead Child Therapy and Tavistock Clinics, the Warburg Institute for Renaissance Studies, and University College London, all in London, England; the Austen Riggs Center, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; the Menninger Foundation, which was then in Topeka, Kansas; Nova Southeastern University, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; George Washington University, in Washington, District of Columbia; Catholic University of Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium; and several universities in Israel, including Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Bar Ilan University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where, in 1988-89, he was simultaneously the Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis, the Ayala and Sam Zacks Professor of Art History, Director of the Freud Center for Psychoanalytic Study and Research, and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow. Blatt made frequent visits to Israel to lecture and consult with colleagues. Blatt received awards for Distinguished Contributions to Research from Division 12 (Clinical Psychology) and Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association, the Bruno Klopfer and Marguerite Hertz Awards of the Society for Personality Assessment for Distinguished Contributions to Personality Assessment, the Hans H. Strupp and the Otto Weininger Awards for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalysis, the 1995 Outstanding Scientific Paper Award (with Golan Shahar) from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Founder's Distinguished Teaching Prize from the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, the Distinguished Contributions Award from the Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Exceptional Research Award (with P. Luyten, N. Vielgen, and B. Van Houdenhave) from the International Psychoanalytic Association, and the Mary S, Sigourney Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalytic Theory and Research.Theory
Two Configurations Approach to Depression
Blatt began to develop his two configurations model of depression and, later, more broadly, of personality functioning, during his psychoanalytic training, when he noticed that two of his psychoanalytic control cases shared the same diagnosis, depression, but were very different with regard to their outward behavior and their predominant motivations or psychodynamics. The first patient was preoccupied with issues of interpersonal relatedness; she felt unloved and feared being abandoned. Her behavioral style could be characterized as dependent. The second patient had profound feelings of guilt and worthlessness despite a history of significant professional accomplishment. He was deeply self-critical. Blatt labeled these two types of depression anaclitic and introjective, respectively. The term anaclitic refers to the basic need to lean upon others and to form interpersonal bonds and relationships with them. The term introjective refers to the excessive harshness of superego introjects in individuals with self-critical depression. At about the same time, Blatt, with a graduate student Joseph D’Afflitti, developed the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ),Blatt, S. J., D'Afflitti, J. P., & Quinlan, D. M. (1976). Experience of depression in normal young adults. ''Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85'', 383-389. a self-report measure that assesses the daily life experiences, rather than the overt symptomatology, of depressed people. Analysis of the DEQ revealed three factors, the first two matching Blatt's theoretical understanding of anaclitic and introjective dimensions in depression. A third factor representing competency, strength, and belief in oneself, was termed efficacy. The DEQ has been used extensively not only to study aspects of clinical depression but also to explore nonclinical depressive experiences. Blatt and colleagues subsequently realized that the two depressive experiences, anaclitic (or dependent) and introjective (or self-critical), could be linked to two fundamental developmental pathways, relatedness and self-definition, that occur in both normality and psychopathology and that mature or develop in complex interaction with each other.Blatt, S. J. (1974). Levels of object representations in anaclitic and intojective depression. ''Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 29'', 107-157.Blatt, S. J., & Blass, R. B. (1992). Relatedness and self definition: two primary dimensions in personality development, psychopathology and psychotherapy. In .J. Barron. M. Eagle. and D. Wolitsky (eds). ''Interface of' Psychoanalysis and Psychology''. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 399- 428.Blatt, S. J., & Blass, R. B. (1996). Relatedness and self definition: a dialectic model of personality development. In G. G. Noam and K. W. Fischer (eds). ''Development and Vulnerability in Close Relationships''. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pp. 309-338.Blatt, S. J., & Shichman, S. (1983). Two primary configurations of psychopathology. ''Psychoanalyses and contemporary thought, 6'', 187-254. Blatt proposed that not just psychopathology but indeed normal psychological development and functioning could be understood as reflective of these fundamental developmental lines, relational and self-definitional. Thus, normal personality or character styles, clinical personality dysfunctions, and psychopathological symptoms and syndromes could all be classified with respect to their varying manifestations, whether adaptive or maladaptive, of relational and self-definitional needs. Blatt's recognition of the psychological centrality of these two fundamental personality dimensions structured his extensive examination, over the next 40 years, of the etiology, clinical characteristics, and treatment of depression,Blatt, S. J. (2004). ''Experience of depression'', Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. as well as of adaptive and maladaptive personality development more broadly Blatt, S. J. (2008). ''Polarities of experience''. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. in evolutionary, neurobiological, and sociocultural perspectives.Guisinger, S., & Blatt, S. J. (1994). Individuality and relatedness: Evolution of a fundamental dialectic. ''American Psychologist, 49'', 104-111.Luyten, P., & Blatt, S. J. (2013). Interpersonal relatedness and self-definition in normal and disrupted personality development: Retrospect and prospect. ''American Psychologist, 68'', 172-183 Studies based on these two personality dimensions have called attention to the need to consider the effects of personality in multiple areas of research and intervention. For example, two aspects of self- definition, self-criticism and efficacy, were found to affect academic achievement among mid-school students,Shahar, G., Henrich, C. C., Winokur, A., Blatt, S. J., Kuperminc, G. P. & Leadbeater, B.J. (2006). Self-criticism and depressive symptoms interact to predict middle school academic achievement. J''ournal of Clinical Psychology, 62'', 147-155. maternal self-criticism and dependency were found to affect mother-child communication Beebe, B., Jaffe, J., Buck, K., Chen, H., Cohen, P., Blatt, S., Kaminer, T., Feldstein, S. & Andrews, H.(2007). Six-week postpartum maternal self-criticism and dependency and 4-month other-infant self- and interactive contingencies. ''Developmental Psychology, 43,'' 1360-1376. and self-criticism was found to affect goal construction in young adulthood Shahar, G., Kalnitzki, E., Shulman, S., & Blatt, S. J. (2006). Personality, motivation, and the construction of goals during the transition to adulthood. ''Personality and Individual Differences, 40'', 53-63.Representational Theory and Adaptive and Maladaptive Personality Development
Integrating concepts from cognitive developmental psychology (i.e., ideas from Jean Piaget and Heinz Werner), psychoanalytic developmental theory (i.e., ideas from Beatrice Beebe, Anna Freud, Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, and Daniel Stern) and attachment theory and research (i.e., ideas from Mary Ainsworth, John Bowlby, and Mary Main), Blatt Blatt, S. J. (1991). A cognitive morphology of psychopathology. J''ournal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 179'', 449-458.Blatt, S. J. (1995). Representational structure in psychopathology. In D. Ciccetti and Toth (eds). ''Rochester symposium on developmental psychopathology, vol 6, emotion, cognition and representation'', Rochester, NY: University of Rochester press, pp. 1-33. proposed a model of personality development focusing on the development of cognitive-affective schemas of self and others, schemas that in the psychoanalytic literature are termed object relations, internalizations of relationships with emotionally significant others or objects. He posited that these schemas emerge from the interaction between basic biological or temperamental predispositions and the matrix of early caregiving relationships in which one is raised and, despite the centrality of early relational experiences in constituting them, continue to develop across the lifespan. By structuring the perception and experience of self and others, these cognitive-affective-experiential schemas guide an individual's eventual identity formation and intimate relationship choices. Disrupted caregiving and environmental demands that exceed the child's biological capacities can disrupt the development of these schemas and can result in psychopathology, usually in the form of either an exaggerated emphasis on relational needs at the expense of autonomy and individuation or an exaggerated emphasis on self-definition at the expense of relationship, attachment, and intimacy, although some persons have disruptions in both relational and self-definitional schemas and therefore manifest both relational and self-definitional disturbances in behavior. According to Blatt, the severity of psychopathology is associated with the developmental level or levels at which disruptions in the cognitive structural organization of these schemas of self and other occurred. In early development, a sensorimotor-enactive stage, relationships are dominated by concerns with need gratification and frustration. This stage, assumed to take place in the early months of life, results in the formation of boundary constancy, the awareness of a distinction between self and other, between self and nonself. According to Blatt, disruption in the representational boundary between self and other is a predominant feature of schizophrenia Blatt, S. J. & Wild, C. M. (1976). ''Schizophrenia: A developmental analysis.'' New York: Academic Press. and is expressed in cognitive, perceptual, and interpersonal disturbances including thought disorder, affective flattening, and interpersonal withdrawal. A second developmental achievement in this sensorimotor period occurs around 6 to 9 months of age, as the infant begins to establish recognition constancy by becoming emotionally attached to a particular person whom he or she recognizes as his or her most important emotional caregiver. Interpersonal schemas at this phase are based primarily on the predominant perceptual features of the person in question. The third achievement, evocative or object constancy, begins in the second year of life and is coincident with a concrete-perceptual stage, in which thinking is dominated by perceptual features and resemblances. Evocative or object constancy therefore involves the ability to maintain positive affective relationships with significant others during their absence (i.e., when they are not perceptually available) or during moments of negative affect. And as this capacity matures, it comes to involve the ability to maintain these same emotional ties in an environment involving significant emotional relationships with multiple figures. In the third year of life, as self-reflective capacity consolidates, as indexed by the capacity to recognize oneself in the mirror and therefore to regard oneself as an object who can be perceived by others, evocative constancy expands to include constancy of the self—that is, the maintenance of a consistent and coherent self-representation through time, space, and varying emotional states. Severe relational disturbances in evocative constancy, both of others and of self, are associated with borderline personality organization, with prominent dependence in anaclitically oriented individuals and with prominent paranoia and counterdependence in more introjective persons. Less severe disturbance during this concrete-perceptual developmental stage is often reflected in empty, rather than self-critical, depression or in a dependent personality style in anaclitic persons or in moderate to severe obsessive-compulsive disturbance, both symptom-focused and characterological, in more introjective individuals. At approximately age five, around the same time that a child begins to develop a theory of mind, as indexed by such signs of early intersubjectivity as the ability to understand false beliefs and to appreciate the relativity of others’ physical perspectives, the external-iconic developmental stage begins, in which cognitive-affective schemas are based primarily on others’ actions, rather than on their perceptual appearance—on what they do, rather than on what they look like. This developmental stage is also approximately coincident with the concrete operational capacity to coordinate two physical dimensions (e.g., height and width) at once and, in the relational world, to coordinate relationships with two significant figures (e.g., mother and father, a parent and a sibling, two friends), rather than with only one at a time (e.g., with mother only or with father only), as is the case in the concrete-perceptual phase. Relationships at this point therefore become primarily triadic, rather than primarily dyadic, and issues of rivalry and competition, rather than just of loss, separation, or abandonment, become prominent, with well-functioning individuals beginning to form relationships that are mutual or cooperative, even when competition is also present. Higher-level neurotic organizations (e.g., histrionic personalities, higher-level obsessional and self-critical personalities) are often associated with disturbances at this phase. Toward late childhood or early adolescence, internal-iconic representation, in which relational schema are based primarily on characteristic ways that self or others think and feel, emerges, and with this achievement, coincident with the emergence of formal operation thought, comes the capacity to understand significant figures as unique individuals with complex, sometimes conflicting thoughts, emotions, and motives. The capacity for higher levels of intersubjectivity—that is, the ability to understand others’ psychological, rather than just physical, perspectives—also emerges here, in consequence, this stage is associated with identity formation and the beginnings of adult intimate relationships. At this stage, the ability to integrate complexities and conflicts is not yet fully consolidated, however, so the individual remains vulnerable, usually to excessive but more focused depressive states, in response to relational loss if anaclitic or to achievement failures or moral transgressions if introjective. And finally, in late adolescence and early adulthood, individuals begin to develop conceptual schemas, in which one integrates all previous representational levels into complex, coherent understandings of self and significant others that take into account conflicts and contradictions in a person's character. The fullest expressions of intersubjectivity, in which one recognizes that the psychological perspectives of both self and other are relationally constructed, require a conceptual level of representation. At this level of functioning, psychological disturbances are still possible in response to losses, failures, and moral transgressions but are likely, unless the psychological injuries in question are severe or traumatic, to be mild or transient.Psychological assessment
Blatt and colleagues have developed various unstructured procedures and rating scales for the systematic assessment of the thematic content and cognitive structural organization of representation of self and significant others and have also developed a self-report instrument for the measurement of depressive experiences, anaclitic or dependent versus introjective or self-critical.Representational Processes
The Concept of the Object on the Rorschach Scale (COR Blatt, S. J., Brenneis, C. B., Schimek, J. G., & Glick, M. (1976a). A developmental analysis of the concept of the object on the Rorschach. Unpublished manualBlatt, S. J., Brenneis, C. B., Schimek, J. G., & Glick, M. (1976b). The normal development and the psychopathological impairment of the concept of the object on Rorschach. ''Journal of Abnormal Psychology'', 85, 364-373.) is a coding system Blatt and colleagues developed to assess the quality of human responses on the Rorschach. On the basis of cognitive developmental and object relations theory, the scale assesses human responses across six categories: differentiation, articulation, degree of internal motivation attributed to the figure's action, degree of integration of the object and its action, content of the action, and nature of interactions between figures. A developmental index and developmental mean across the six categories are computed separately for accurately perceived human figures and for inaccurately perceived human figures. The developmental mean and index for accurately perceived human figures assess investment in appropriate relationships while these variables for inaccurately perceived figures represent investment in inappropriate relationships, as expressed, for example, in unrealistic or autistic fantasies that seemed to serve an adaptive function in psychosis.Blatt, S. J., Schimek, J. & Brenneis, C. B. (1980). The nature of the psychotic experience and its implications for the therapeutic process. In J. Strauss, M. Bowers, T. W. Downey, S. Fleck, S. Jackson & I. Levine (Eds.). ''The Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia'' (pp. 101-114). New York: Plenum. The Object Relations Inventory (ORI Blatt, S. J., Wein, S. J., Chevron, E. S., & Quinlan, D. M. (1979). Parental representations and depression in normal young adults. ''Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88,'' 388-397.Diamond, D., Kaslow, N., Coonerty, S. & Blatt, S. J. (1990). Change in separation individuation and intersubjectivity in long-term treatment. ''Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7'', 363-397.Gruen, R. & Blatt, S. J. (1990). Change in self and object representation during longterm dynamically oriented treatment. ''Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7,'' 399-422.) is an open-ended technique for the assessment of qualitative (thematic) features and the cognitive-structural organization of self and object representations. Spontaneously descriptions of self and significant others (i.e., parents, therapist or close friend) are scored for Conceptual Level (CL, with sensorimotor, concrete-perceptual, external and internal iconic, and conceptual levels, per the above developmental sequence), which is considered a structural variable reflecting degree of psychological organization of significant-figure descriptions, as well as for three content factors (Benevolent, Punitive and Striving). Blatt and colleagues Diamond, D., Blatt, S. J., Stayner, D., & Kaslow, N. (1991).Boundary Disturbances and Thought Disorder
Blatt and Ritzler Blatt, S. J. & Ritzler, B. A. (1974b). Thought disorder and boundary disturbances in psychosis.Psychotherapy research
In the last two decades of his 50 years of research, Blatt, and colleagues, have investigated aspects of the psychotherapeutic process and the effects of psychoanalysis as compared to supportive expressive psychotherapy, as well as the impact of patients' pretreatment personality organization on therapeutic process and outcome in brief treatments for depression. They found that patients in each of the two personality configurations (anaclitic and introjective) react differently to expressive-supportive therapy and to psychoanalysis. Patients with introjective personality organization are more responsive to psychoanalysis while anaclitic patients are more responsive to psychotherapy. Blatt and colleagues (e.g. ) also found that anaclitic and introjective patients express therapeutic change in different ways—in ways congruent with their basic personality organizations, such that anaclitic patients become more relationally stable and such that introjective patients display an increase in cognitive efficiency As noted earlier, Blatt, Besser and Ford found that therapeutic progress among seriously disturbed anaclitic patients is expressed in a decline in more serious forms of thought disorder — those indicating more serious forms of boundary disturbance, which introjective patients change primarily on less serious forms of thought disorder. Shahar, Blatt and Ford also found that "mixed-type" inpatients (anaclitic-introjective), compared to the "pure" type patients, though initially more symptomatic, were more likely to improve in long-term, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy. In research into the therapeutic process, Blatt and colleagues (e.g.,), using representational, cognitive-affective, schemas to assess therapeutic outcome in the inpatient treatment of serious disturbed young adults, found that therapeutic gain was correlated with this changes in both the content and cognitive organizational structure of representations of self and of significant others. Blatt and colleagues,Blatt, S. J., Zuroff, D. C., Hawley, L. L., & Auerbach, J. S. (2010). Predictors of sustained therapeutic change.Summary
Sidney Blatt's extensive theoretical and research contributions have articulated continuities between variations in adaptive personality development with various forms of maladaptive personality development (psychopathology), thereby providing a theoretically coherent, empirically validated alternative to the dominant, but extensively criticized (e.g.,) Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) categorical, symptom-based, disease model of psychopathology (e.g.,Blatt, S. J. & Luyten, P. (2010). Reactivating the psychodynamic approach to the classification of psychopathology. In T. Millon & R. E. Krueger (Eds.),References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Blatt, Sidney American psychotherapists 1928 births 2014 deaths Yale University faculty Pennsylvania State University alumni University of Chicago alumni