Polarities of Experience: Relatedness and Self-Definition in Personality Development, Psychopathology, and the Therapeutic Process

In this groundbreaking book, Sidney J. Blatt proposes that psychological development is a lifelong personal negotiation between the two fundamental dimensions of relatedness and self-definition. Psychological development, from youth to old age, is a synergistic balancing act between these two polarities, with most individuals favoring to varying degrees either the anaclitic (relatedness) dimension or the introjective (self-definition) dimension. Exaggerated emphasis on one developmental line …