Sidney J. Blatt (October 15, 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – May 11, 2014, Hamden, Connecticut) was a professor emeritus of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University's Department of psychiatry. Blatt was a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, empirical researcher and personality theoretician, who made enormous contributions to the understanding of personality development and psychopathology. His wide-ranging areas of scholarship and expertise included clinical assessment, psychoanalysis, cognitive schemas, mental representation, psychopathology, depression, schizophrenia, and the therapeutic process, as well as the history of art. During a long and productive academic career, Blatt published 16 books and nearly 250 articles and developed several extensively used assessment procedures. Blatt died on May 11, 2014, in Hamden, Conn. He was 85.
Biography
Sidney Blatt was the first of three children in a Jewish family in South Philadelphia. His parents, Harry and Fannie Blatt, owned a sweet shop and the family lived in the apartment upstairs. The family struggled financially, and this markedly shaped Blatt's life experience and ideological convictions. Blatt's first encountered psychoanalytic theory in high school through reading Freud's (1916-1917) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Fascinated with this book, he became determined to become a psychoanalyst.
Career
After graduating South Philadelphia High School for Boys in 1946, Blatt began his university education at the Pennsylvania State University and, in 1952, completed his master's degree in clinical psychology, working under William Snyder. Blatt received honors for his thesis, Recall and recognition vocabulary: Implications for intellectual deterioration. In 1951, Blatt married his wife Ethel Shames, with whom he has three children (Susan, Judith and David). In 1954, Blatt entered the PhD program in Personality Development and Psychopathology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Morris I. Stein. He completed his dissertation in 1957, An Experimental Study of the Problem Solving Process. His predoctoral internship in clinical psychology was with Carl Rogers, who had a profound influence on Blatt's psychotherapeutic approach and his identity as a therapist. As a graduate student, Blatt was strongly influenced by the work of David Rapaport, especially his Organization and Pathology of Thought, a volume that Blatt says served as his “intellectual Talmud and Torah” during graduate school.
During his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois Medical School and at Michael Reese Hospital's Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Institute he was influenced by two psychologists, Mary Engel and Sarah Kennedy Polka, who had been trained at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, and introduced Blatt to Rapaport's approach to diagnostic psychological testing. Blatt joined the Department of Psychology at Yale University in 1960 as an assistant professor. Concurrently, he embarked on psychoanalytic training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (WNEIP), supported by a grant from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry. During this training, Blatt worked with Roy Schafer, a psychoanalytic instructor and a Yale faculty colleague, who had worked extensively with Rapaport. This contact with Schafer enabled Blatt to consolidate his interest in Rapaport's work, especially the links between cognitive processes and personality organization and between representational development and psychopathology.
In July 1963, Blatt was appointed chief of the psychology section in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale, a position that he held till his retirement in 2011. During his 51 years at Yale, 48 years as chief psychologist, Blatt was the teacher and mentor of many students and colleagues who then went on to develop distinguished careers of their own (in alphabetical order): John Auerbach, Beatrice Beebe, Rachel Blass, Ted Brodkin, Diana Diamond, Kenneth Levy, Howard Lerner, Suniya Luthar, Patrick Luyten, Thomas Odgen, Donald Quinlan, Barry Ritzler, Golan Shahar, Paul Wachtel, Steven Wein, and many distinguished others. His collaboration initially with Donald Quinlan at Yale and later with David Zuroff, then at Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Connecticut, and now at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, paved new grounds in the research and treatment of depression.