ABSTRACT
It is an honor and a pleasure to contribute to this volume dedicated to Sidney J. Blatt, one of the true pioneers of the empirical investigation of personality development and psychopathology within psychoanalytic theory. The study of personality development has inevitably led Blatt and colleagues (Behrends and Blatt 1985; Blatt, Auerbach and Levy 1997; Blatt, Brenneis, Schimek and Glick 1976; Blatt and Lerner 1983) to a concern with how patterns of relatedness with caregivers affect the individual's own capacities for interpersonal relationships and how these are further transformed into self-regulating capacities and behavior. These issues have been studied also from attachment (Bowlby 1973; Bretherton and Munholland 1999) and social cognition (Baldwin 1992; Damon and Hart 1988) perspectives. Investigations using object relations and social cognition frameworks have been focused mainly on adolescence and adulthood while attachment research centered initially on infancy and early childhood. Little is known about the transformations of patterns of relatedness into self-regulating capacities during middle childhood. This striking gap is consistent with the lack, until very recently, of studies of personality among school-aged children (Shiner 1998). This chapter's aim is to describe the application among school-aged children of Blatt and colleagues' empirical approach to the study of the transformations of early interpersonal relationships into personality structures. In the ®rst part of the chapter, I present this theoretical approach, underscoring the dialogical perspective that has guided this line of research. Then I discuss the research pertaining to these ideas.
