Psykoanalysens stora tänkare – Melanie Klein

– Tickets for the full day (12.30-21.00) are 500 kr or 300 kr (students, members of psykoterapicentrum)

– Tickets for evening lecture only are 90 kr

Rachel Blass is a psychoanalyst and member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and the British Psychoanalytical Society. Formerly a professor of psychoanalysis in leading universities both in the UK and in Israel. On the Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She has published a book and over 80 articles primarily focused on Kleinian thinking and practice. In recent years a special focus of her writing and teaching has been on making what is unique to London Kleinian thinking and practice more accessible to analysts from other traditions. She has lectured, taught and offered clinical seminars in many countries and her writings have been translated into 15 languages.

13.00 – A Kleinian approach to transference interpretation and why only it can bring about analytic change (Blass)

In this lecture I discuss the nature of transference interpretation as understood from a Kleinian perspective through its comparison with other kinds of interventions that some analysts offer within the analytic situation, some of which relate to the transference or make use of it, but do not in fact constitute a transference interpretation per se. I then explain why only this kind of transference interpretation can bring about analytic change. That is, I argue that not only does a certain approach to transference interpretation characterize Kleinian psychoanalysis but based on a certain understanding of the essence of analytic change, it becomes clear that this approach is necessary for such change to occur. Throughout the presentation of these ideas brief clinical illustrations are offered. The implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice are discussed.

The development of Klein’s work has created concepts that have made it possible to reach and work with deeper levels of the personality, this by understanding how basic internal object relation patterns are organized into structures that unconsciously shape our subjective experience of ourselves and others. The presentation describes the further development of these concepts that made it possible to revolutionize psychoanalytic work by exploring how the psychotic part of the personality is expressed in intensive treatment processes. The understanding of how these processes are staged in transference and countertransference has created conditions for confronting and working with blockages in the inner communication between different layers of the personality. In this way, the intensive work in the relationship with the psychoanalyst can stimulate the ability to handle life without denying or misrepresenting inner and outer reality.
Concepts like Projective Identification, Psychotic and Non-psychotic parts of the personality and Transformation in O is presented.

The notion that coming to know repressed truth cures lies at the very foundation of psychoanalytic thinking and practice. In this lecture I will present the view that this foundational idea put forward by Freud is complex and not easy to justify and that consequently has been subject to the criticism that transformative cure requires something other than gaining inner knowledge, (e.g., that within analysis some developmental process based on fostering a new positive relationship is needed). This has resulted in a contemporary move away from what has traditionally defined psychoanalysis. Through the study of some of Kleinian concepts (especially on phantasy and the life and death instincts) I will go on to show how Kleinian thinking articulates, grounds and enriches psychoanalysis’ foundational notion of truth and its curative potential. It thus preserves what is essentially psychoanalytic.