Sidney J. Blatt (October 15, 1928 – May 11, 2014) was a professor emeritus of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University's Department of psychiatry. Blatt was a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, empirical researcher and personality theoretician, who made enormous contributions to the understanding of personality development and psychopathology. His wide-ranging areas of scholarship and expertise included clinical assessment, psychoanalysis, cognitive schemas, mental representation, psychopathology, depression, schizophrenia, and the therapeutic process, as well as the history of art. During a long and productive academic career, Blatt published 16 books and nearly 250 articles and developed several extensively used assessment procedures. Blatt died on May 11, 2014, in Hamden, Conn. He was 85.
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.