Sidney J. Blatt’s contributions to psychoanalytic psychology: Introduction to the special section.

Abstract

This special section honors the 5-decade career of Sidney J. Blatt and his multiple contributions to psychoanalytic theory, research, and practice. Each of the 6 contributions to this section was authored or coauthored by mentees and colleagues of Sid Blatt. Together, they speak to the wide range of his intellect and to his vision of psychoanalysis as a theory capable of capturing both the breadth and the depth of human experience. It is also proposed in this context that the power of Sid Blatt's contributions depended in significant part on his recognition of the importance of collecting intersubjectively shareable findings that could be subjected to public critique.

Review of Minding emotions: Cultivating mentalization in psychotherapy.

“…Following Loewald, Jurist therefore proposes that truth and truthfulness, themselves difficult concepts in our postmodern age, are also essential to psychotherapy precisely because no trusting relationship can occur without them, and I agree with Jurist that truth is an intersubjective concept (Auerbach, 2019b). Jurist understands truthfulness, the love of truth, as related to concepts like sincerity, authenticity, and accuracy, and his comments here, especially in an age that increasingly seems to be posttruth, constitute the moral center of this book.…”

“…Jurist closes this volume with a discussion of psychology in light of C. P. Snow's (1959Snow's ( /1993 two cultures in academia, the sciences and the humanities, and as the integrative thinker that he is, he advocates, as do I (Auerbach, 2014(Auerbach, , 2019b, for the integration of scientific research with a hermeneutic perspective in psychoanalysis. As always, his discussion is illuminating.…”

“…The book’s final chapter discusses mentalizing in light of recent developments in psychoanalysis, mainly post-Bionian theory and relational theory, and here I will simply get to the point. I see very little value in psychoanalytic views that cannot be harmonized with modern developments in related scientific and scholarly fields (Auerbach, 2014, 2019b), and only semifacetiously, my Gainesville colleague Peter Rudnytsky (1991, 2002, 2019) and I have started calling ourselves the “Gainesville School” because of our similar views on that psychoanalysis is a hybrid discipline, incorporating elements of hermeneutics and empirical sciences. This is a view that Jurist, who also wants to maintain the tension between science and hermeneutics in this hybrid discipline, shares, so I am at a loss as to how an exploration of Bionian and post-Bionian views, which are largely divorced from modern developments in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and affective neuroscience (e.g., Bucci, 1997; Weinberger & Stoycheva, 2019), could possibly help us in understanding mentalizing and mentalized affectivity.…”