Sidney Blatt's extensive theoretical and research contributions have articulated continuities between variations in adaptive personality development with various forms of maladaptive personality development (psychopathology), thereby providing a theoretically coherent, empirically validated alternative to the dominant, but extensively criticized (e.g.,Blatt, S. J., & Levy, K. N. (1998). A psychodynamic approach to the diagnosis of psychopathology. In J. W. Barron (Ed. ), Making diagnosis meaningful (pp. 73-109). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.) Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) categorical, symptom-based, disease model of psychopathology (e.g.,Blatt, S. J. & Luyten, P. (2010). Reactivating the psychodynamic approach to the classification of psychopathology. In T. Millon & R. E. Krueger (Eds.), Contemporary Directions in Psychopathology (2nd Ed), pp. 483-514. New York: Guilford.). Blatt has also demonstrated the importance of looking beyond the symptomatic expression of various disorders to identify and understand the basic personality organization as it is expressed in the content and cognitive organizational structure of representations of self and of significant others. Blatt and colleagues have demonstrated that these representations or cognitive-affective interpersonal schemas are the basis foundations of various forms of adaptive and maladaptive personality organization and are also central in the treatment process and to sustained therapeutic change.
