Relatedness and Self-Definition: From Typology to Dialectics to Living-in-the-World

This article explores the work of Sid Blatt on relatedness and self-definition as it moved from a typology to a dialectical account of 2 parallel lines of development to the beginnings of a focus on living-in-the-world. It explores the tensions in Blatt's own work between relatedness to the psychoanalytic community and its mainstream and the simultaneous efforts at self-definition that extended and reworked those mainstream ideas. In doing so, it explores the values and limits of a psychology rooted in the concept of representations and contrasts them with the contribution of an approach that focuses on the way the person actually lives in the world.