Sidney Blatt's contributions to the assessment of object representations

The construct of object representation is the cornerstone of object relations theory. Its importance is not limited to this speci®c theory, but extends to all psychodynamic theories because of its origins in Freud's writings (1914) and subsequent extensions by Rapaport (1950), Schafer (1968), and others (e.g., Fairbairn 1963). Cognitive behaviorists might also ®nd object representations to be a useful construct (Blatt and Auerbach 2000) if they were not so biased by its association with psychoanalysis.