Dr. Auerbach noted that Sidney Blatt proposed another stage, mutuality vs competition or cooperation vs alienation, a relational stage, to go between initiative vs guilt and industry vs inferiority.  In terms of the original Freudian model, this would have been a late Oedipal stage to go between the early Oedipal stage and the latency stage."

Would encouraging cooperative rather than competitive activities for boys around this time facilitate their socialization in school, improve achievement, reduce behavioral problems? Are cooperative activities like cub scouts better than competitive activities like sports in mastering this stage?

Damon

I would agree with you.

This is essentially a relational formulation of the Oedipal situation, which is fundamentally about competition, rivalry, and jealousy, about who loves whom more than whom else.  It presents us with a devil’s bargain in that the worst outcome of this particular competition is to win—to be more important to one of your parents than your parents are to each other.  In well-functioning families, the generational boundary is flexible but maintained.

Competition in the peer group is a different matter of course, and humans are a competitive species.  Still, long-term success in life involves relatedness as well as individuation and therefore involves cooperation as well as competition.  It is clear how much we stress competition in the socialization of boys and cooperation in the socialization of girls.  

Thoughts of Dr. Auerbach

Damon,

Excellent question, and I agree that the answer does depend on what we mean by “liberalism.”  That is too long a post for me to undertake right now.  It would mean a dissection of a swath of history that starts with John Locke and continues to the present day.  But by liberalism, I mean something like the philosophy that privileges the individual and his—okay, historically speaking, usually his—rights over social institutions and the power of social institutions, these institutions being the things to which societies usually turn for morals, norms, rules, laws, shared traditions, etc.  Liberalism has many modern variants, in the same way that conservatism, socialism, authoritarianism, etc., do, from the classical liberalism that in the modern era is called libertarianism and that rests on a notion of an abstract individual with certain basic rights that are culturally invariant to the multiculturalism that embraces the rights of each and every identity group within a society—perhaps we might call this something like identitarianism, although I fear that my coinage may actually refer to some established position in political philosophy that I have never heard of.  This multicultural view would involve an individual’s right to have his, her, or their cultural background, not just the Lockean-Jeffersonian rights of life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness, recognized as part of his, her, or their individuality.  But since all forms of liberalism privilege the individual’s perspective over a perspective involving shared norms, moral relativism is always a danger and therefore the first thing that political and philosophical conservatives attack when attempting to debate liberals.  They have point, a point similarly made, interestingly enough also by socialists, that the abstract individual is a fiction, that humans always live within shared social contexts and traditions.  Meanwhile, liberals usually attack the moral certitude, if not absolutism, of conservatives, this particular attack on moral absolutism being the whole point of liberalism in all of its varieties.  

But it is absolutely possible for there to be a kind of liberal intolerance, a certain smugness about the rightness of one’s tolerance, that many conservatives, for good reason, find enraging and that can be as much a form of moral absolutism as any form of absolutism promulgated by any religious authority.  I hear told that I have even fallen prey to this kind of intolerance myself a time or two, even though, I will repeat, I am actually quite suspicious of unalloyed individualism and of moral relativism as intellectual and ethical positions, in large part because I do not believe that there are abstract individuals, independent of shared social context and also because I think moral relativism to be incoherent.  Nevertheless, in stereotypical liberal intolerance, anyone who disagrees with liberal tolerance is intolerantly suppressed.  The stereotype here is the liberal so concerned with the rights of every oppressed or marginalized group that he, she, or they forgets that religious conservatives, social conservatives, political conservatives, etc. have rights too.  Good luck on figuring how to assert what one perceives as the rightness of one’s moral and political views, a rightness that I am sure everyone feels regarding his, her, or their political and moral opinions, while respecting others with differing views, views that one finds not only wrong but even pernicious or reprehensible.  

On a different thread, Harris Friedman also raises the question of moral relativism, and if I have understood him correctly, something I am not sure I have done, he points out that certainty is much easier to come by in the physical sciences than it is in the social sciences, which are infiltrated with all kinds of value concerns, and therefore, even more so, in the matter of morals and ethics, which by definition are entirely about values.  I agree.  That is why moral relativism, despite its incoherence, has a point.  Once we have decided that there really is no objective way to know, for example, which set of (usually but not necessarily) religious or political beliefs is correct, and once we have decided that we do not want to kill each other because we cannot arrive at agreement here, then the main workable solution are philosophical liberalism, with its attendant moral relativism, and some form of procedural democracy that also protects individual rights.  Thus, for the last 200+ years, as an evolving project, for what was morally acceptable back then is not necessarily what is morally acceptable today, we govern by majority rule, but when it comes to individual beliefs and life practices, we try, often unsuccessfully, to allow a thousand flowers to bloom.  But almost everyone I have ever met believes, in his, her, or their heart of hearts, that his, her, or their moral, religious, political, etc. beliefs are correct. I would like to find an ethical position that is neither relativist, since it leads to incoherence, nor absolutist, since leads to tyranny.  If anyone has any solutions here, don’t be shy; please step up and share them.  

Some of these issues are discussed, with brilliance, by Charles Taylor in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, a book I strongly recommend, but I am afraid that, much though I agree with his Hegelian-intersubjectivist analysis,  he does not have the answer either.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

On Jan 24, 2019, at 7:58 PM, Damon LaBarbera <00000051867784e1-dmarc-request@LISTSERV.ICORS.ORG> wrote:

~Psychology Practice in Florida

Some excellent writing lately, jeesh…. 

One observation....

Dr. Auerbach notes that liberalism has an Achilles heel, which is moral relativism. But does liberalism in 2019, given the strident time we live in, have the same underlying moral relativity as in prior decades? Does moral relativism drop as people become more upset.  Is a shift towards moral certitude happening culturally? And if moral relativity becomes a bygone component of liberalism--does that alter the fundamental quality of liberal thought?

Damon L

Writing by John Auerbach

Discussion with John  Auerbach

It seems to me that the biggest predictor of support, either side of the aisle, is geographical location. The center of the country, for the most part, goes one way while coastal urban regions go another. Worldwide, the same is true for other beliefs--religion, preference of political system, what is the most exciting sport, sexual mores, beliefs about the origin of humankind and the universe, and so on. Proxmity to others of the same belief system is overwhelmingly powerful and predictive.

Damon

(Dr. Auerbach reply)

In the US, we have seen a slow shift from class-dominated politics to politics dominated by race, ethnicity, religion, and culture. I don’t mean this is an absolute statement because racism is our country’s original sin, and waves of nativism have overtaken our country before, most notably in the 1840s through 1860s, with the influx of the predominantly Catholic Irish, in the 1910s and 1920s, with the influx of Jews, Italians, and Slavs, and in the current age, with the influx of Latinos, Middle Easterners, South Asians, and East Asians.  However, the  politics of the 1930s, saw the formation of the New Deal Coalition, uniting four groups—organized labor, African Americans, poor White Southerners, and various liberals, progressives, and socialists, groups that sometimes hated each other—against a capitalist elite represented by the Republican Party.  This New Deal Coalition fractured in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as a result of the collapse of organized labor and the rise of the anti war movement and a cultural revolution that gave rise first to feminism and then to the gay rights movement and, finally, to multiculturalism. Although all the current handwringing about multiculturalism and identity politics in our country forgets that the original identity politics in the US was the  privileging of white males, the cultural and therefore political divergence in the US is clearly between the multicultural and increasingly secular city and the monocultural and still religious country. The reason that coastal cities will be more liberal than inland cities is that ports, almost by definition, are likely to have greater cultural diversity, people coming and going, than will cities comprising ethnically homogenous natives.  

The Trump phenomenon clearly partakes of this split between the country and the city, a split that has defined every election since Bush 43 v. Gore in 2000, but in my opinion, this phenomenon goes well beyond the urban-rural divide in three ways—its open racism, more blatant than expressed by any Presidential politician since the late  Bush 41’s Willie Horton ad, the recent bout of hagiography since his death to the contrary; its open misogyny; and its open authoritarianism, the worst since Nixon was President.  These three things reflect the personality of Trump himself, and he is shameless in his views, as he is in his cupidity, with his shamelessness giving of comfort to a basket of deplorables who hold similar beliefs, such that white supremacists and neo-Nazis, although they are on the fringe of his support, now feel safe to march in our streets.  

But to attribute all of these problems to Trump’s personality or to state that all, or even the majority, of his supporters are found in the basket of deplorables is to badly misunderstand the situation.  In the first place, if we consider a much more extreme case, that of Nazi Germany, many of Hitler’s supporters were not actually Nazis, bigots, or racists, just good Germans willing to overlook a few of Hitler’s “excesses" because he made Germany great again, kept foreigners out, brought back religion and morality, and the like.  Most of those folks would never knowingly support evil practices but would be willing to rationalize them away.  It is surprisingly easy, per the Milgram study, to be a collaborator.  And if anyone here thinks I am being hyperbolic, I think that this part of the historical analogy for Trumpism fits the situation precisely.  Another part that fits extremely well is that there is good social science research to suggest that there is often a rise in right-wing authoritarian nationalism after economic downturns, particularly those caused by fiscal crises.  The rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s would be the best example of that, and I am of half a mind to consider Stalin’s Soviet Union, officially a left-wing authoritarian regime, as consistent with the pattern.  But even without the inclusion of Stalin’s Russia, the rise of first Fascism and then Naziism in Europe during that particular period would be strong confirmatory evidence for the theory that fiscal crises produce authoritarianism in politics and government.  A contrary piece of evidence to this thesis in the current situation would be that the US experienced eight years of sustained economic growth under Barak Obama, but please also remember that this economic growth was extremely uneven, leaving many ethnically white rural areas that are likely to be Trump districts and where there is little contact with other ethnic, cultural, racial, and religious groups, behind.  Please also remember that other countries started seeing a rise in authoritarianism after the fiscal collapse of 2008 before we in the US did.  It would appear that this rise in right-wing authoritarian nationalism in certain regions of the country was just enough to push Trump over the top in the Electoral College, even as he lost the popular vote and lost it badly, by a far greater margin than Bush 43 did to Gore.

So what are the psychological factors involved in right-wing authoritarianism follows from financial crises?  I think many of the factors described in the Psychology Today post are relevant, most especially terror management and lack of exposure to people different from oneself.  Economic downturns from fiscal crises produce financial uncertainty and therefore mortality salience, with the decline in life expectancy in certain economically left-behind areas of the country contributing to this mortality salience, and increased mortality salience, per terror management theory, produces aggression, especially toward perceived outsiders, combined with submission toward those who seem to be more powerful, presumably because those who are more powerful provide the allure of protection from the perceived increased danger in the world. This particular rage at outsiders is the worst precisely where there are fewer outsiders—fewer racial and ethnic minorities—with which to come in contact so as to provide a dose of reality as to who The Other really is.  This kind of analysis was advanced by the Frankfurt School (most prominent members being Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm), in more classically Freudian language, to explain why the German working class, presumably socialist in political affiliation, voted against its class interest in support of the Nazi Party.  One essential piece of this analysis that should not be ignored is the combination of rage and submission toward ruling elites, the people who benefited the most from the fiscal crises of both the 1920s and the 2000s, and here the issue is that a significant proportion of the populace feels betrayed by policies that benefit the ruling elites above all else, an assertion that I believe to valid because of the growing income and wealth inequality in the US in the last 50 years.  So much of current-day “populist” politics involves a rage at these elites, but unlike the populist politics of 19th Century America, which was interested in income redistribution, the “populist" politics of today (note quotation marks) involves identification with, and therefore authoritarian submission to, the same betraying elites who benefited from the recent fiscal crises at the expense of those left behind.  In psychoanalytic terms, this phenomenon would be called identification with the aggressor.  Can I prove all of this?  No, but I knew a lot of people in East Tennessee who would willingly vote against their economic interests time after time, often out of genuine religious conviction, which I would have to respect, about cultural changes that they found unacceptable, but also often out of all kinds of fears of The Other—Blacks, Yankees, Gays and Lesbians, etc., groups seen as subverting the dominant order.  

My apologies for such a dark and opinionated piece of analysis, but I believe it to be correct.  There is one strange bright spot in the picture, however.  Trump is most certainly an authoritarian, but not all authoritarians are the same.  Just as, on the Left side of the spectrum, Lenin is not Stalin, Stalin is not Mao, and Mao is not Pol Pot, on the Right side of the spectrum, Trump is not Franco, Franco is not Mussolini, and Mussolini is not Hitler.  Alternatively, it is still a long walk from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, and Trump simply lacks the discipline, the ideological consistency, and the systematic racism to be a Fascist or a Nazi.  There is, therefore, a good chance that the US can survive him, but he can do a great deal of damage in the short term.  A case in point would be his decision to separate children from their parents at the Mexico border, a decision that was completely unnecessary and that will likely result in decades of psychological traumatization as a result.  I mention this one piece of damage because it is specifically psychological in nature, whereas things like, say, global warming are not.

I expect to receive some critical feedback on this post.

John S. Auerbach, PhD

On Jan 6, 2019, at 3:01 PM, Damon LaBarbera <00000051867784e1-dmarc-request@listserv.icors.org> wrote:

~Psychology Practice in Florida

Good essay, I agree.

Reflections of Dr. Auerbach

John,

You remarked that "getting fed" was the motive underlying drives in orthodox psychoanalytic theory. However, the essential task for the child is the Oedipal Complex, which is psychosocial. Further, in "3 Essays..." didn't Freud speak of the drive for curiosity and knowledge in children.  ...On another topic, stage theories must have had their day. With the vituperativeness in our current society, why is Erikson's work not more criticized--with his boys building towers and girls building enclosed spaces experiments. --Damon

(response by Dr. Auerbach)

In my previous post, I quoted—and re-quote here—Freud’s famous statement from the Three Essays:  “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.”  Alternatively, we keep repeating childhood relationships in adulthood, so it is a blessing to have had responsive parents who facilitated secure attachments and a curse to have had poorly responsive parents who repeated their childhoods and created insecure attachments.  One way of understanding one the central problems in Freud is that there is the clinical Freud, who usually but not always (see his views on women) makes a great deal of sense, and the theoretical or metapsychological Freud, who usually has things all wrong.  That is an oversimplification of course, but Freud the clinician understood that connections to other were central to human life.  The concept of transference depends crucially on the idea that the finding of an object is a refinding of it.  Freud even says in “On Narcissism” that love is an illness but that we must love in order not to fall ill.  For those who think that Freud is an irrelevance—that “it just doesn’t matter—good luck finding an insight like that, or for that matter like “the finding of an object is a refinding of it,”  in any modern therapy manual.  But Freud the theorist built a brilliant model based on the idea that the mind is an energy transformation system that attempts to bring the level of energy system to zero or as close as possible to zero while still remaining alive.  Just remember that it was based on the best science available at the time, but also remember that, if you start with a false premise, you can prove anything to be true.  Freud the theorist also tried to shoehorn all of human behavior into two drives—sex and self-preservation in the early model, sex and aggression in the later one—even though Freud the clinician and the keen observer of human behavior knew full well that children (and adults as well, I here) have a drive called curiosity.  It is also a reasonable argument that, as regards his own psychodynamics, Freud was himself very uncomfortable with relatedness and much more comfortable with individuation that his theoretical choices are almost always in favor of the latter than the former.  We have enough biographical information to be confident in this inference. 

As for Erikson, he has been subjected, and appropriately so, to rigorous feminist critique because of how much of his theory is about individuation, rather than relatedness.  One major sociological reason for the rise of relational thinking in psychoanalysis—let’s forget about the empirical literature on attachment for now—has been the shift within psychology, psychoanalysis included, from majority male to majority female. In general, because there are many exceptions (think of Fairbairn, Winnicott, Balint, and Bowlby), for men, life is about individuation; for women, life is about relationship.  Hence, also Carol Giligan’s critique of her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg.  One major exception among female psychoanalytic theorists, however, as regards a relational emphasis would be Margaret Mahler, whose theory is almost entirely about the separation-individuation process.  It would not be too far wrong to say that she wanted to play with the boys instead of with the girls.

As for stage models, I have to agree with you that they have problems and greatly oversimplify the complexity of development, but development is so complex that most of us have difficulty understanding it without a reliance on stage models.  My mentor, Sidney Blatt, was so heavily influenced by both Freud and Piaget, that he could not do without them, but they inevitably simplify a much more complex reality.  Sid did come up with an interesting relational revision of Erikson, however.  Erikson’s stages are as follows:  trust vs mistrust (relationship), autonomy vs shame and doubt (individuation), initiative vs guilt (individuation), industry vs inferiority (individuation), identity vs role diffusion (individuation), intimacy vs isolation (relationship), generativity vs stagnation (individuation), and integrity vs despair (individuation).  You can easily see the model’s self-definitional weighting.  Sid proposed another stage, mutuality vs competition or cooperation vs alienation, a relational stage, to go between initiative vs guilt and industry vs inferiority.  In terms of the original Freudian model, this would have been a late Oedipal stage to go between the early Oedipal stage and the latency stage.  Regardless, its inclusion would make Erikson’s model much better balanced between relatedness and individuation since the alternation of stages would now be relational (trust), self-definitional (autonomy), self-definitional (initiative), relational (mutuality or cooperation), self-definitional (industry), self-definitional (identity), relational (intimacy), self-definitional (generativity), self-definitional (integrity), with a repeating rhythm of one relational stage followed by two self-definitional stages.   

Discussion with Dr. Auerbach

Discussion with Dr. Auerbach

Damon,

When Freud says that an object is the most variable part of a drive, he means that that the other three components of the drive—source, aim, and impetus (or pressure)—are more or less fixed by biology, but that substantial environmental interaction (i.e., learning) shapes (behavioral language chosen here explicitly to indicate that there are surprising convergences between Freud’s theories and Skinner's) the nature of the object chosen.  So, if the drive is hunger, this drive arises from the digestive system (its source), is satisfied only by eating (its aim), and is more or less intense on the basis of multiple factors, both biological and psychological (its impetus or pressure), but it can be satisfied by a wide range of foods, including things that are delicacies in some cultures but arouse disgust or revulsion in others.  Now it can easily be argued that aims, the activities through which drives are satisfied, are more variable than Freud considered, so there are all kinds of ways in which we might consume food, but there are still many, many more things that are food (the object of hunger) than there ways of eating (the aim of hunger).  This particular relationship—that objects of drives are more variable than are drive aims—of course holds true for sex and sexuality, the main, ahem, object of Freud’s curiosity.  Specifically, there are more ways than, please pardon the use of a gastronomic trope, vanilla to engage in sex and sexuality, but there are many more potential objects of our sexual interests than there are sexual practices to engage in with said objects.

Although it was one of Freud’s great arguments to point out that the objects of our libidos are complex and are deeply determined by our childhood histories, such that, to quote the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it,” a major weakness of his position was the failure to recognize that, for a whole host of reasons, humans are programmed to seek specifically human objects, even if the specific features of those human objects are constructed from early attachment experiences.  That is, in trying to account for why some people have what was then called perverse sexuality (i.e., sexuality focused on something other than a consenting adult human), he developed a theory that had a hard time explaining why it is that the vast majority of humans seek other consenting adult humans.  Also, as the term “object” suggests, a significant weakness of his view was that it had difficulty in explaining that what humans also desire is someone to love us back—in other words, not just an object but another philosophical subject, with her or his own agency and desire.  The various object relations theories in psychoanalysis (e.g., those of Fairbairn, Sullivan, Winnicott, Balint, Bowlby, and even Lacan) were and are attempts at correcting this problem.  Nevertheless, one fascinating aspect of Freud’s theory is that it holds that all adult sexualities, even normative heterosexuality, are in fact constructed, the result of conflict and compromise, and from an an intrapsychic point of view—as opposed to how that sexual expression is received in the world around—no one sexuality, including normative heterosexuality, is superior to any other sexuality.  More concretely, both a heterosexual object choice and homosexual object choice, in Freud’s view, involve compromises based on childhood conflicts.  Accordingly, for all of his many retrograde ideas, Freud’s position with regard to same-sex sexual orientations, even though filled with biases that would nowadays be considered unacceptable, is way in advance of that of anyone else writing about these issues in the early 20th century.  As for his ideas on women, well, not so much.

As for object constancy, that is a crucial issue in object relations theory.  By object constancy, I mean something like an ability to maintain a constant or stable tie to someone I love even in that person’s absence or even when that relationship is undergoing conflict.  The notion therefore derives from Piaget’s object permanence, but here what is at stake is not whether a tree in the forest is really still there if I cease to look at it but whether I still feel that my significant other (Harry Stack Sullivan’s term, by the way) still loves me even if she is away visiting family this week or even if we have just had an argument.  And crucial in my development of object constancy is whether I had secure attachment in childhood, in turn the result of having had parents who were not only constant or consistent but also emotionally responsive and sensitive.

As for Freud’s theory of depression, the simplified account is that depression is anger turned inward on the self.  The actual model is much more subtle than that.  In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud proposed that anger is turned inward because that is a psychologically safer option than feeling that anger toward an ambivalently loved object for fear of loss of that object.  In other words, it may be safer to for me to hate myself than to be angry toward a loved one if I fear that said loved one will reject or abandon or even criticize or disapprove of me, a fear that I would definitely have if I were raised under conditions of insecure attachment, in which was actually unsafe for me to feel anger toward caregivers.  The conscious experience, per this model, is therefore largely about self-criticism and guilt, and the idea that one fears being rejected or abandoned or criticized by loved ones is a long time in coming.  Sidney Blatt’s great innovation in the theory of depression was therefore to differentiate self-critical depressives, who in the main fit the model that Freud proposes (please believe me when I say I know all about these issues), from dependent depressives, for whom direct experiences of abandonment and loss are primary.  He published this distinction about a decade before Aaron Beck proposed the autonomy-sociotropy distinction in depression.

One of Freud’s theories that definitely belongs in the dustbin of history is the idea that the mind is an energy transformation or hydraulic system, but remember that, when he created this energy model, he was relying on the most up-to-date science available.

As for your colleague and his theory about unmet dependency needs, all I can say is that if the only tool you have is hammer, everything looks like a nail.  

John

ReL Freud (1905), in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,

Hi John

Interesting thoughts. I recall that Freud mentions the waters of the war parting, or similar phrase, so I had thought the essay must have been written after WWI. It seemed a particularly Moses like metaphor

You say Freud thought the object the most variable component of the drive. By variable, do you mean weakest. There is a footnote in there that previous epochs emphasize the drive, while modern cultures (for Freud) emphasize the object in the formation of the drive.  We externalize the source of our motives.

Finding an oject that unites the tender and the sensual currents of the libido seems still a modern dating dilemma. A libidinous individualo may have much animal attraction, but the excesses of libido, including the agressive component, can be noxious in day to day interactions.

I'll take a look at Blatt's questionnaire. Personally, I would wonder whether "consistent" objects are important. Objects contaminated by aggression and abuse, or which are distant and fantasy based, or the most discordant. And has anyone addressed when objects collided? What happens with  introjections of both of your spouse and their obnoxious parent. Do they stay on oppositves corner of the unconscious.

I was taught by one psychologist a long time ago that unmet dependency needs lead to anger. That was his mantra, and he was lucky enough to get every single client on the campus who had that particular dynamic at the root of their problems. His idea was a hydraulic system of human behavior. The object leaves or dies, the person becomes angry at the desertion. There is a breech in a closed system of emotion. Anger spouts, and then, because irrational, becomes internalized in the form of negative self regard. Its an interesing engineering way to think of depression though I doubt it would pass modern scrutiny for most.

Damon,

A thought in return.  Freud (1905), in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, considered an object to be the most variable component of a drive, the other three components being the source, the aim, and the impetus or pressure, and he was concerned to explain how difficult it is for a person to find an object that unites the tender and sensual currents of the libido, what in modern terms would be called attachment and sexuality.  Increasingly, therefore, the psychoanalytic tradition has focused on human objects—and on why some objects are more important than others.  That is why Freud’s (1917) great paper on depression, “Mourning and Melancholia," is also about object loss.  My research, with Sidney Blatt, on the Object Relations Inventory (ORI), is precisely about this question—about how we come to understand and invest in the significant others in our lives, as well as about which object representations are more differentiated than others.  Here are some references that speak to the matter:

Auerbach, J. S., & Diamond, D. (2017).  Mental representation in the thought of Sidney J. Blatt: Developmental processes. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65, 509-523.

Auerbach, J. S. (2017).  The contributions of Sidney J. Blatt:  A personal and intellectual biography.  Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 20, 3-11.

Huprich, S. K., Auerbach, J. S., Porcerelli, J. H., & Bupp, L. L. (2016). Sidney Blatt’s Object Relations Inventory: Contributions and future directions. Journal of Personality Assessment, 98, 30-43.

But far more important than these articles are any pieces written by John Bowlby when it comes to understanding which losses matter the most.

Best,

John