Remembering Sidney Blatt

Yesterday (April 13, 2019) the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society’s own John Auerbach, PhD gave tribute to the late psychoanalyst Sidney Blatt. Blatt put forth some interesting ideas such as that of two developmental lines, relatedness and self-definition which were linked to two types of depression, anaclitic (Greek for leaning against) and introjective depression, respectively. Those with anaclitic seemed dependent on others to love them while those with introjective were self-critical and riddled with guilt. Rather than seeing these two developmental lines as sequential, one more mature than the other -- as Blatt and other traditional psychoanalysts had originally conceived -- Blatt came to understand that relatedness (once considered infantile and hysterical personalities) and self-definition (paranoid or obsessive personalities) develop in parallel, one co-defining the other, opposites only relative to each other. Auerbach noted that, of Erickson’s eight developmental stages, only two (Trust v. mistrust and Intimacy v. isolation) were about relatedness, while the rest were about self definition (autonomy, initiative, industry, generativity, etc).

The personality develops in is a continuous dialectic between relatedness and self definition. Deficits in or over emphasis of either developmental line leads to psychopathology. These polarities of relatedness and self definition were applied by Blatt et al to attachment theory and separation, respectively, where avoidant attachment presumably correlated with introjective depression, and such patients better utilize the couch, while ambivalent-resistant were tied to anaclitic depression, and may benefit more from face to face treatment. [Consider that one patient may, in different self states, exhibit both polarities. Blatt actually posited impairment was initially greater with mixed type in-patients (they also improved more). Perhaps this is because of greater dissociation at work?]

Blatt et al integrated mental representations with Bowlby’s concept of  internal working models to better explicate insecure attachments and developed a number of research tools. The Object Relations Inventory asks the patient to describe mother, father, significant other, self, and their therapist at different points in time over the treatment. This inventory apparently allowed clinicians to measure therapeutic change in patients in the [Austin]Riggs-Yale Project study by measuring changes in the developmental organization of their mental representations of self and other. Blatt et al also developed the Differentiation-Relatedness Scale to rank where a patient, at any time in the treatment process, stood in her/his capacity to be both separate and attached, based, in part, on reflective capacity.