Sidney J. Blatt, PhD, 2006

Sidney Blatt is a rare combination of talented clinical analyst, leading empirical researcher, and integrative personality theorist. His research in psychoanalytic theory making and clinical practice has been among the most illuminating and clinically relevant. He is considered an expert in the areas of mental representation and internalization, as well as on the Rorschach InkblotTest.

Dr. Blatt has made major contributions to our understanding of depression.  For many years he has studied extensively the differences between relational and self-definitional forms of depression.  Most recently he has extended his observations about two types of depression to articulate a dynamic structural developmental approach to personality development, psychopathology and the therapeutic process. He has demonstrated that the two fundamental developmental processes of interpersonal relatedness and self-definition (identity) establish conceptual continuity across all these areas of inquiry.  He has also developed several widely used measures, both self-report and projective, for assessing depressive style (i.e. relational versus self-definitional), self and object representation, and boundary disturbances in thought disorder. In his many years as professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University he has mentored a number of indivduals who are now major psychodynamically oriented clinical investigators.

Visit his website at Yale University.

Click here for Dr. Blatt’s CV including publications.