Eulogy for Sidney J. Blatt

I first met Sid when he interviewed me for a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale. As part of my application, I had submitted a paper that linked social theory and psychoanalytic perspectives. Sid told me that he liked the paper so much he wished he had written it himself. You can imagine what it meant to me – having just completed my internship and on the cusp of deciding how seriously to take myself as a professional – to hear this from a Renaissance man in our field: a distinguished theoretician, a prolific empirical researcher, a personality theorist, and an analytic clinician who wove seamlessly among practice, theory, and research.

That first dialogue introduced me to the spirit of generosity and generativity that characterized Sid’s role as mentor, and that is what I want to focus on today. Sid recognized that a true leader trains other leaders who will carry on one’s vision while becoming themselves. That interchange was my first experience of being “panim el panim” with Sid. Panim el panim is a phrase from the Torah “denoting … a presence to another presence without an intermediary, as is said: Come let us look one another in the face.”

Relatedness and self-definition – the two lines of development so fundamental to Sid’s life and work – also guided his relationship with his students, colleagues, and collaborators. When Joan Criccia, his devoted assistant, sent me his vita after his death, I noticed that he had listed not only the names of his dissertation students, but also the names of those he had mentored over the years, a number of whom are here today. He saw his work with us as fundamental to who he was just as his mentorship of us has been fundamental to who we have become.

Another transformative moment occurred when I told Sid with some trepidation that being in my mid 30s, I had to devote myself to starting a family, and therefore felt I should leave the research postdoc that followed the one-year clinical postdoc. He was very empathetic to m