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This memorial issue entitled Internalization, Self-Other Differentiation, and Relatedness: The Enduring Legacy of Sidney J. Blatt is an issue of remembrance and appreciation that includes scholarly and research papers as well as personal reflections by the contributors on the ways that Sid influenced their professional and personal development. The issue features papers by several generations of Sid’s colleagues and mentees that reflect key aspects of his work. In the spirit of Sid’s international work and collaboration during his career, the contributors are a global group representing Israel, Belgium, the UK, as well as North America.
This issue commemorates the 10th anniversary of Sid’s death. In the past 10 years Sid’s work has only become more relevant and central for the fields of developmental and clinical psychology and psychoanalysis. His legacy lives on in numerous areas of contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, including 1) the articulation and expansion of object relations theory to encompass findings from social, cognitive, and attachment perspectives; 2) the idea that personality development evolves through the hierarchical synergistic interaction of the two vectors of self-definition and relatedness, with increasingly mature relatedness fostering increasing self-definition over the life span (the two-configurations model); 3) the idea that psychopathology involves distortions in self-and object representations stemming from hypertrophy of one developmental line at the expense of the other; 4) the development of empirical methods to assess the developmental quality and structural characteristics of mental representations both conscious and unconscious and the way they change over the course of treatment; 5) the conceptualization and treatment of depression beyond narrow DSM5 or ICD diagnostic approaches; and 6) the understanding of internalization as a core process in early development and in psychotherapeutic change. Given these colossal contributions,