Relatedness, Self-Definition and Mental Representation

Essays in honor of Sidney J. Blatt

John S. Auerbach, Kenneth N. Levy, Carrie E. Schaffer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135451936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

there are very few books on the market that take the position that psychoanalysis and empirical research can be combined and that provide examples of empirical research in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory all of the editors are published academics in the areas covered by the book. Furthermore, each of them has worked extensively with Sid Blatt.

Chapter 1
Introduction
The contributions of Sidney J. Blatt

John S. Auerbach, Kenneth N. Levy, and Carrie E. Schaffer

Within the field the field of clinical psychology, contributors who are both psychoanalysts and leading empirical researchers are, epidemiologically speaking, increasingly rare, and contributors who are analysts, researchers, and leading personality theorists are rarer still. Yet one figure who has made extensive contributions as an analytic clinician, as a researcher, and as a theoretician is Sidney J. Blatt, professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University and, for more than 35 years now, chief of the Psychology Section in Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry. In his long, distinguished career, Dr. Blatt (Sid, as we prefer to call him) has been a leading figure in both empirical psychology and psychoanalysis. In addition to being trained as a psychoanalyst, he has conducted extensive research on personality development, psychological assessment, psychopathology, and psychotherapeutic outcomes. He is considered an expert in the areas of mental representation (e.g., Blatt 1995b; Blatt, Auerbach and Levy 1997) and internalization (e.g., Behrends and Blatt 1985; Blatt and Behrends 1987), as well as on the Rorschach Inkblot Test (e.g, Allison, Blatt and Zimet 1968; Blatt 1990). He has studied extensively the differences between relational and self-definitional forms of depression (Blatt 1974; Blatt and Shichman 1983) and was doing so years before cognitive-behavioral theorist Aaron Beck (1983) proposed the similar distinction of sociotropy versus autonomy. Along with his many students and colleagues, he has developed several widely used measures, both self-report and projective, for assessing depressive style (i.e., relational versus self-definitional), self- and object representations, and boundary disturbances in thought disorder. Among these methods is a projective technique, the Object Relations Inventory (ORI), for collecting descriptions of self and significant others (Blatt et al. 1979).¹ Thus each year sees the completion of approximately 20 psychology dissertations in which his measures are used. A man of broad intellectual interests, he has also written a book on the implications of psychoanalytic and Piagetian developmental theories for art history (Blatt and Blatt 1984).In short, Sid has been a wide-ranging and productive scholar in a career of more than 40 years’ duration, and throughout this career, he has been committed to the proposition that it is not only possible but also essential to investigate psychoanalytically derived hypotheses through rigorous empirical science. Equally important is that, in those 40 years, he has been committed to training students who also hold to the perspective that psychoanalytic ideas can be validated and refined through empirical test, and we, as editors of this volume, constitute a testament to that commitment. Indeed, it is particularly important that one of the contributors to this book, Paul Wachtel, was Sid’s first dissertation student and that one of its editors, Carrie Schaffer, was his most recent.

For these many reasons, not least of which is his personal influence on all of us as a mentor and teacher, we believe that a volume honoring Sid Blatt’s many contributions to both psychoanalysis and clinical psychology is long overdue. The present Festschrift volume is our attempt not only to honor these contributions but also to disseminate them more broadly within both psychoanalysis, where empirical research is increasingly neglected, and clinical psychology, where psychoanalysis is increasingly ignored.

Sidney J. Blatt: a biography in brief

A Philadelphia native and the oldest of three children, Sid was born October 15, 1928, to Harry and Fannie Blatt. Sid was raised in modest circumstances. He grew up in a Jewish family in South Philadelphia, where his father owned a sweet shop and where his family lived in the apartment upstairs. But this statement does not fully capture the nature of Sid’s background. According to Sid, his father was the third child born to Sid’s grandmother, but this woman died, perhaps in childbirth, when Sid’s father was just three or four years old. Sid’s grandfather then married a woman who had three children of her own by a previous marriage, and the new marriage in turn produced three more children. In consequence, Sid’s father was raised in circumstances marked by maternal loss and economic poverty. He was forced, as the eldest son, to leave school after the sixth grade to help support his family, with its numerous half-siblings and step-siblings, although Sid recalls him as an intelligent man who worked hard, running his store seven days a week, 16 hours a day, and who read widely in the left-wing press.

One memory of his father was particularly important to Sid. He recalls that every year he would accompany his father to the cemetery where his grandmother, his father’s mother, was buried, and there Sid would hold his father’s hand and attempt to console him as his father wept over the grave.
Sid also recalls that, at age 13, he accompanied his mother on a painful two-hour bus trip to New Jersey as she responded to an urgent phone call informing her that her father had just suffered a heart attack. He tried to reassure and console his mother during the trip while she, correctly anticipating her father’s death, grieved his loss. Regarding these memories of his childhood, Sid says that it is no surprise that he eventually was to become interested in studying depressive experiences that focus on separation and loss. Another interesting facet of Sid’s childhood is that, contrary to the (positive) stereotype about Jews and education, Sid was the only child of his parents to attend college. Sid was intellectually inclined from fairly early in life and recalls being moved when he saw Rodin’s sculpture, The Thinker, at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. Nevertheless, his postsecondary education was not a foregone conclusion, given his family’s difficult economic situation, but in addition, his parents were divided as to his academic ambitions. Sid recalls that his mother supported him in this goal but that his father was more skeptical. Indeed an emotional connection to his mother and a more distant relationship with his father may have been an important part of Sid’s childhood. He recalls that, at age 9, he became disillusioned with his father for failing to support him in what he describes as some minor but symbolically important matter. Sid decided to run away from home. He defiantly packed his bags and walked out of the house. He had gone no more than a few blocks when he became aware that he could not remember what his mother looked like; he ran home in a panic. Sid says that this terrifying memory may be one of the roots of his lifelong interest in the mental representation of the important people in one’s life.

Despite these childhood struggles, Sid eventually enrolled at the Pennsylvania State University in 1946. From that institution, he was to obtain both his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees. It was between his sophomore and junior years of college that he was introduced, by one of his fraternity brothers, to Ethel Shames, the woman who later became his wife. Sid recalls that his fraternity house provided cheap lodging and also a source of income; he washed dishes in the kitchen. In any case, he and Ethel dated for a few years and finally married on February 1, 1951, while he was in his master’s program. He and Ethel were eventually to have three children, Susan (b. 1952), Judy (b. 1959), and David (b. 1963). Regarding the role that Ethel has played in his life, Sid also says that all of his professional accomplishments would have been impossible without her. He specifically mentions that, when they married, Ethel had been attending Temple University on a Senatorial Scholarship (i.e., a special academic scholarship for residents of Pennsylvania). When they married, she resigned her scholarship, left school, and went to work to support him. After the birth of their first child, she earned money by taking in typing jobs. Sid observes that Ethel would say that, when it came to career choices, he has always picked the one with the greatest opportunity and the least remuneration; this, Sid adds, is how he wound up at Yale. In any case, Sid says that, without Ethel’s support, he never would have completed his Ph.D., and he adds that Ethel did not finish her own college education until 1976, when the children were finally old enough for her to return to school. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in art history at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) in Hamden, Connecticut, a suburb of New Haven. True to pattern, it was the discussions between Ethel and Sid regarding her college courses that led many years later to their book on cognitive-developmental theory and spatial representation in the history of art (Blatt and Blatt 1984).

Sid’s interest in psychoanalysis began in high school with his reading of Freud’s (1916–17) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Fascinated by Freud’s descriptions of unconscious processes, Sid decided to become a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and thus majored in chemistry and physics at Penn State, with a plan to apply to medical school. Unfortunately, Sid failed a double-credit organic chemistry course in his junior year at Penn State because of problems with a year-long laboratory project that he later learned, after he switched his major to psychology, were the result of red-green color blindness, a condition that, until then, he did not know he had.
As a result, he had misperceived the color of his laboratory results. Despite this setback, Sid excelled as a psychology major and received A grades in all of the psychology courses that he took during his senior year.

Not surprisingly, it was as a psychology major at Penn State that Sid extended his earlier interests in psychoanalysis to an emerging interest in projective testing. But unfortunately, these emerging interests led to con- flicts with some of the faculty there. For example, as an undergraduate, he took an abnormal psychology course taught by George Guthrie, a young faculty member who had recently earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. The professor gave a group Rorschach to the class with the intent of demonstrating how misguided the test was, but instead of rejecting the procedure, Sid was intrigued by how much his responses revealed about himself. Sid then had difficulty getting into the Penn State graduate program in psychology. While finishing his senior year, he applied twice for admission and twice was turned down. Then, with only a short time to go before the start of the 1950 academic year, he applied once again and this time was accepted. He surmises that a spot had come open at the last minute and that this was why the psychology department accepted him. In 1952, he was given a terminal master’s degree, although he received honors for his thesis, a paper that was later published in Archives of General Psychiatry (Blatt 1959).

Sid then moved to Chicago, where he had taken a position as a counselor with the Jewish Vocational Service (JVS). At JVS, the facility director, William Gelman, who was attending the University of Chicago, thought that Sid would be a good student for the doctoral program. Sid called the psychology department and spoke to Charlotte Ellis, the graduate student adviser. He explained that he would be an atypical student who needed to work a few days a week, and she helped him to put together a schedule.
From 1952 through 1954, Sid worked without vacation and accrued 66 days of leave. In 1954–5, therefore, he was able to take off two days each week, Tuesday and Thursday, from his job so that he could attend classes. Unfortunately, in making this plan, he had not considered the cost of the tuition at the University of Chicago; whereas the cost of attending Penn State had been $40 for the year, it was $1000, a considerable sum of money in those days, to attend the University of Chicago. Sid recalls that he had to take a loan from the university that then took him years to repay. In 1955, he took his preliminary examination and earned a high enough score on the exam that he was awarded a fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). With this fellowship and a research assistantship with Morris I. Stein, he was able to leave his job at JVS and go to school full time. His parents, he recalled, were furious that he, a married man with a child, had left his job to go to school full time, but with his fellowship and his research assistantship, Sid was able to complete his Ph.D. in 1957.

As regards his academic and intellectual development at the University of Chicago, Sid found the “U of C an intellectual paradise” where he maintained an ever increasing list of “must read books and articles.” He did his predoctoral internship, in 1955 and 1956, under the supervision of Carl Rogers, whom he still describes 40 years later, even after his analytic training, as a profound influence on his psychotherapeutic approach. From Rogers, he learned the crucial importance of empathy – of understanding how his patients experienced the world and of framing his therapeutic interventions from the patient’s standpoint. He also worked, as noted, as research assistant for Morris I. Stein, who had been a student of Henry Murray’s at Harvard. Stein, who emphasized projective techniques in his research on creativity, eventually served as the chair of Sid’s dissertation (“An Experimental Study of the Problem Solving Process”), completed in 1957 and eventually published in the Journal of Psychology (Blatt and Stein 1959). Additionally, Sid had the opportunity there to take testing courses from Samuel Beck. Sid’s recollection was that Beck’s knowledge of the Rorschach was in fact brilliant but that Beck often could not articulate the rationale for his conclusions and, when challenged about them, would eventually appeal simply to his clinical experience. These appeals to clinical experience left Sid distinctly unsatisfied because, as a beginner, he could not learn how to arrive at the same inferences himself.

In 1957, Sid began a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois Medical School and at Michael Reese Hospital’s Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Institute (PPI), then headed by Roy Grinker, Sr. At the University of Illinois, Sid fell under the tutelage of Alan Rosenwald, a Sullivanian whom he considered a brilliant Rorschacher, and at PPI, he worked with Mary Engel and Sarah Kennedy Polka, both of whom had been trained in the Rapaport system at the Menninger Clinic, and also with Sheldon Korchin, who was chief psychologist. It was the Rapaport system that gave Sid the theoretical understanding of the Rorschach that Beck, only a few years earlier, simply could not give him at the University of Chicago, and it was Rapaport’s ideas in general that gave Sid his first theoretical understanding of the workings of the mind, a way of linking motivation and cognition. Sid says that thoughout his graduate training he regarded Rapaport’s (1951) Organization and Pathology of Thought as his academic Torah and Talmud.

After having finished his postdoctoral training, Sid worked as a staff psychologist at Michael Reese for a year, and then, when Sheldon Korchin left to go to NIMH, he was offered the job of chief psychologist. This was an offer that Sid decided he could not accept because it would mean supervising people who a year earlier had been his teachers. Instead, in 1960, he decided to leave Chicago and to join the Department of Psychology at Yale University as an assistant professor; he was also accepted for analytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (WNEIP). Situated nowadays mainly in New Haven, the WNEIP at that time was centered in both Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and New Haven, and Sid hoped to have a chance to work directly with Rapaport, who had in 1948 moved east from the Menninger Clinic to the Austen Riggs Center and whose intellectual contributions Sid had come to admire enormously. Rapaport died suddenly on December 14, 1960. Although crestfallen at the loss of this opportunity, Sid had already established a relationship with Roy Schafer, his Yale faculty colleague, who in 1961 had completed his own analytic training at the WNEIP. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: The Contributions of Sidney J. Blatt
• Part I: Personality Development
• Part II: Psychopathology
• Part III: Assessment
• Part IV: Psychotherapy and the Treatment Process
• Part V: Applied Psychoanalysis