ABSTRACT
Within the ®eld the ®eld 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 ®gure 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 ®gure 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-de®nitional 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-de®nitional), 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 signi®cant 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 re®ned 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 ®rst dissertation student and that one of its editors, Carrie Schaffer, was his most recent.
