A symposium at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel has been named for the late Sidney J. Blatt, PhD, Emeritus Professor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry.
The first Sidney J. Blatt Symposium on Depression Research & Treatment will be held Jan. 6, 2016. Blatt served as a visiting fellow and professor at several universities during a career that spanned 50 years, including at Ben-Gurion.
Blatt died in 2014. At Yale, he joined the Department of Psychiatry in 1963, and served as professor of psychiatry and of psychology, and chief of the Psychology Section of the Department of Psychiatry for almost 50 years.
He was a beloved teacher and mentor, and distinguished himself as an analytic clinician, empirical researcher, and personality theorist.
He was author or coauthor of more than 220 published articles and approximately 17 books, and conducted extensive research on personality development, psychological assessment, psychopathology, and psychotherapeutic outcomes.
Blatt supervised or advised more than 40 doctoral dissertations at Yale and other universities. In 2002, former students organized a Festschrift in his honor at the Division 39 meetings of the American Psychological Association, which resulted in a 2005 volume, "Relatedness, Self-definition, and Mental Representation: Essays in Honor of Sidney J. Blatt."