Polarities of Experience: Relatedness and Self-Definition in Personality Development, Psychopathology, and the Therapeutic Process by Sidney J. Blatt  American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, 2008;  404 pp. £53.50

Sid Blatt is a Professor of Psychology at Yale and a renowned psychoanalyst. His numerous books on different subjects (such as the history of art) attest to his broad background.

Blatt's psychoanalytic contributions began in 1974 with his seminal contribution on depression in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, in which he distinguished between two types of depression-anaclitic depression involving feelings of loneliness and abandonment, and introjective depression involving feelings of failure, worthlessness and guilt. In 1983, he broadened this distinction between issues of relatedness and self-definition to a broad range of psychopathology beyond depression. In this contribution he also noted that these two dimensions are in dynamic interaction with personality development generally. It was then that he realized, in his own words, that: “It felt like having a theoretical tiger by the tail” (p. 10).

He dedicated many years of theoretical and clinical-empirical research to this insight and refined it into an overarching theory of psychological development, personality organization, psychopathology and psychotherapy. For this contribution he received the Sigourney Lifetime Achievement award. The book we are discussing is an integrative summary of Blatt's contribution. In his preface to this volume, Fonagy calls Blatt's work a paradigm shift and puts it at the same level as Bowlby's work on attachment. It combines clinical insight and wisdom with a thorough empirical grounding. This is rare in psychoanalysis but it is the kind of gold that we need to keep our discipline going. In our psychoanalytic services at the University Psychiatric Hospital in Leuven, we use Blatt's ideas in daily practice and research projects (Vermote et al., 2009). His overarching model became a guiding principle in research, supervision, teaching and the organization of our therapeutic settings.

Let me now present the book in more detail. In the opening chapters, Blatt explains the distincti