ABSTRACT
Sidney Blatt deserves several Festschrifts. His stature in the ®eld is almost unique. His capacity to bridge the world of Yale psychology (one of the most highly cited departments of psychology in the world) and the world of psychoanalysis leaves all of us with a brilliantly lighted path to follow. In this tribute to his work, we will look at some of our ideas on the nature of therapeutic change, a topic to which Sid devoted considerable attention throughout his career. His pivotal paper with Behrends (Blatt and Behrends 1987) has been a guiding inspiration in our pursuit of a developmental model of psychic change. His most recent writings with Ken Levy (Levy and Blatt 1999; Levy, Blatt, and Shaver 1998) on attachment and with John Auerbach on self-re¯exivity (Auerbach and Blatt 1996, 2001) have brought us particularly close. His paper with Blass on attachment and separateness (Blatt and Blass 1990) has helped many in the ®eld to organize their ideas about developmental psychoanalytic approaches and was one of the core in¯uences on our recent monograph (Fonagy and Target 2003). We have had the opportunity to work with Sid as a teacher, and his work in that context, as we suspect in the clinical, is a masterly bridging of the dialectic interaction between the two developmental lines, attachment and separateness, to which he has drawn attention. He is able at once to provide impetus for independence while offering himself as generously as any teacher ever has, as a resource, as an example, and as an ideal. We have learned an enormous amount from Sid Blatt, from his writings, but even more from his approach to his subject matter, characterized by commitment, dignity, enthusiasm, open-mindedness and generosity. He has given all of us so much and deserves so much more than we are able to give him in return.
