The conversation will be conducted in English.

Rachel Blass is an internationally renowned author, teacher, and co-founder of the contemporary London-based Kleinian approach. In dozens of articles written over the past thirty years, Blass has illuminated many issues and concepts in Kleinian and Freudian theory, from the Oedipus complex and the right way to teach it, meaning and interpretation, unconscious fantasy, narcissism, the path of the death drive, love, creativity, separation, and attachment theory.

Blass believes that psychoanalysis may be considered a theory of the pursuit of truth and the power of truth to heal. She follows the path of Freud and Klein in believing that the kind of distress that psychoanalysis seeks to heal, namely pathological suffering, is distress caused by a refusal to know. Blass argues that other approaches to psychoanalysis have failed to understand the crucial role of truth in mental therapy and that as a result the development of psychoanalytic thought has been hampered. By standing behind "unfashionable" concepts, Blass challenges the spirit of the times and often outrages contemporary writers.

In her first book in Hebrew , Foundations of Psychoanalytic Thinking: Selected Essays on Freud and Klein, Bells reads the writings of Freud and Klein with great patience, which requires a combination of focused and empathetic reading, textual analysis, intuition, and respect and trust for the text. Like an archaeologist uncovering more and more layers in an ancient site covered in many layers, Bells makes fascinating discoveries in the writings of Freud and Klein in the book's seven chapters. Among the book's topics: a new reading of Dora's case and Leonardo da Vinci's childhood memory, the importance of the pursuit of truth in psychotherapy, Betty Joseph and the immediacy of unconscious truth, how analysts from different approaches can use Klein's concept of fantasy, and the importance of analytical neutrality.

In this meeting, we will talk with Rachel Blass about basic concepts in Klein's and Freud's theory: fantasy, projective identification, psychic truth, interpretation, the goals of clinical treatment, later developments in Klein's theory (Betty Joseph, Wilfred Bion, and others), and the state of psychoanalysis today.

Rachel Blass, who lives and works in Jerusalem, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with the Israeli and British Psychoanalytic Societies. She is one of the leading contemporary scholars of Freud's thought, and has an international reputation as an author, teacher, and co-founder of the contemporary London-based Kleinian approach. During her years in London, she was a mentor to Klein's students Hannah Segal and Betty Joseph, as well as to John Steiner and other prominent followers of Klein.