Eulogy for Sidney J. Blatt

Sid Blatt was my teacher, mentor, and friend for over 30 years. I first met Sid when I moved from Austin to New Haven in 1986 to spend one year in the Yale predoctoral psychology training program that Sid led for almost 50 years. I never returned to Texas as I had planned, and Sid had a lot to do with that. Sid’s intellect was so vibrant that, although he died at 85, I think we were all left feeling that his life was cut short. There was something larger-than-life about Sid, be it his outsized accomplishments, his extraordinary intellect, or his voracious appetite for learning across many fields. I benefited from all of these aspects of him. But he was also a big-hearted man, which is what I carry with me most of all.

One of my earliest memories of Sid was in a course on clinical inference he taught at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. On the first day of class, Sid showed us the cover page of a patient’s chart. This form conveyed straightforward information: name, address, date of birth, date of admission, and chief complaint. It was the kind of page you would read quickly and turn over to get to the pages with the real story – the patient’s history, evaluations, case notes, and psychological testing.

We never got past that first page. Sid took that basic form and unpacked it line by line. He elaborated a series of hypotheses about the patient’s history, personality, and psychopathology based only on this bare-bones information. From the simplest data, a three-dimensional person appeared before our eyes, and a nuanced and sympathetic understanding of that person came with it. I couldn’t figure out how he had done it. It was like watching a magic show.

Sid said he would teach us how to make these kinds of clinical inferences, the psychoanalytic theories to support them, and the means to test our original hypotheses so we could have the same sensitive understanding of our patients he had just demonstrated. I was hooked. I knew then I wanted to stay in New Haven to learn a