Polarities of Experience

"This book presents a groundbreaking approach that establishes conceptual continuities among normal and pathological personality development, the classification of psychopathology, and the therapeutic process. Sidney J. Blatt proposes that psychological development is a lifelong personal negotiation between two fundamental dimensions in human affairs, relatedness, and self-definition. Psychological development, from youth to old age, occurs as a synergistic interaction between these two polarities, with most individuals favoring to varying degrees either the relatedness (anaclitic) dimension or self-definition (introjective) dimension, and with the two polarities existing in dynamic tension in normal functioning. Exaggerated emphasis on one developmental dimension at the expense of the other, however, is expressed at different developmental levels in a variety of psychological disorders. A broad array of empirical research supports this view of psychopathology, not as clusters of present or absent symptoms as in the current DSM diagnostic system, but rather as compensatory exaggerations of the normal polarities of relatedness and self-definition. This conceptualization has clear therapeutic implications. Anaclitic and introjective persons respond differently to specific dimensions of the therapeutic process and express therapeutic progress in different ways in a wide variety of therapeutic approaches. Thus, clinical researchers as well as therapists, psychiatrists, and graduate students will find this book to be a rich source of new ideas for research and practice"--Jacket. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).