16/11/2017
בתאריך 8/11/2017 התקיים בתל אביב כנס בהשתתפות Dr. Otto Kernberg. להלן דברי הפתיחה של ד"ר יוסי טריאסט, בעלים במשותף של מכון טריאסט שריג המציין 32 שנים להווסדו.
מוזמנים לקרוא:
Opening Statement for Kernberg Conference
Joseph Triest
Bar-Shira Auditorium, 8.11.17
I am both glad and moved to open this conference with our guest, Dr. Otto Kernberg and welcome you and your wife, Catherine Haran, who is accompanying you. Welcome to Israel.
Your signature – which adorns my psychoanalyst’s certificate, has been hanging on the walls of my office as a source of pride for many years – and, truth be told, at the time I did not even dream of ever having the opportunity to host the owner of that signature in such an event. This conference has a short history: we first discussed the possibility of your coming here in Boston, at the international IPA conference, held when I was still residing as the Chair of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. The idea became a reality thanks to a meeting between Boaz Gesthalter (a board-member of the Triest-Sarig Institute) and one of your colleagues, Dr. Frank Yeomans in New York and we are very happy about it.
I wanted to say a few words about our guest as well as our hosts – The Triest-Sarig Institute and the Winnicott Center, before clearing the stage for what is truly important – but I believe that the hundreds of Israeli mental-health professionals who are crowding the Bar-Shira Auditorium tonight are as a thousand witnesses, attesting to the fact that Dr. Kernberg needs no introduction – moreover, Prof. Rachel Blass, who will chair the present panel will do so right away and more elaborately, but one cannot make do with nothing at all. I will therefore say only this:
Dr. Kernberg is probably between the most influential psychoanalysts of our generation. I think it is safe to say that an entire generation of case presentations is marked by the interest his writing has evoked in the subject of the borderline patient. His contribution goes far beyond the criteria he developed for describing and diagnosing the borderline personality disorder; it would be more accurate to say that throughout his many fruitful years of work, Dr. Kernberg has put himself on boundary space – both clinically, by making the required adaptations to psychoanalytic technique in order to facilitate work with patients that early psychoanalysis deemed beyond its capabilities and –much more than that – theoretically, by building bridges between Kleinian thinking and American Ego Psychology and by enriching both these traditions with the contributions of French psychoanalysis (Andre Green and others) – without at any point foregoing his extensive erudition and the depth of his thinking. Sitting together with the other planners and producers of this event, we thought that whatever subject you - Dr. Kernberg - chose for your lecture here – it would be fascinating to hear ‘Kernberg discussing Kernberg Today’.
With your permission, I will allow myself another word about the hosts of this event – The Triest-Sarig Institute, which together with the Winnicott Center, directed by Michal Rick and Dr. Meir Steinbock, both training analysts in the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, made all this happen. The Triest-Sarig Institute was founded in 1985 by my partner, Irit Sarig, and myself and is now celebrating its 32nd birthday. All those years Irit and I are working side by side, somehow surviving each other, and continuing to do the work for better and for worth. We would like to believe that this conference is part of our thirty-year anniversary celebrations. (Why are we celebrating our thirtieth anniversary at 32? Because no one has time for celebrations with the trials of everyday life...) The Institute was founded in order to enable ‘combined treatment’ – simultaneous individual and group therapies – and has since developed into a multi-disciplinary center that offers community psychotherapy and mental-health services to various populations and sectors of Israeli society. The clinic offers nowadays individual therapy, work with children in boarding schools, and diagnosis services in the difficult and thankless field of parental competence and legal decisions. It is a good time to mention that Dr. Kernberg’s writings span many areas that interface with this kind of work – namely, groups, organizations and social processes. The Triest-Sarig Institute is proud to have trained many generations of clinical psychology candidates who have successfully completed their internship in our institute. Today, the Institute has some 60 therapists, at different stages of their professional training, a staff whose composition is representative of the pluralistic fabric of Israeli society. It is only thanks to the devoted efforts of the director, Eyal Komornik, and the management, including Tami Nir – our chief clinical psychologist; Yael Zohar – head of the children department; Boaz Gesthalter who is in charge of diagnoses, and the institute’s supervisors, who are qualified to supervise our therapists and interns – that we have been able to meet all kinds of professional challenges - and survive the taxing financial and administrative constraints of running a private institute that offers in-depth psychodynamic internships and that has been operating all these years without any scholarships or government support – when most of its position holders are working practically as volunteers. This is an opportunity to thank each and every one of you. And I wish to add special thanks go to Rutie Ben Efrat, who will present - in the second part of the evening - a case study that we will all discuss together.
All the mentioned above, together with Meir Steinbock. Michal Rickand Rachel Blass, have been staying awake at night to make this conference a reality - but all these efforts would not have been enough if it wasn’t for the dedicated labors of Ziva Isekovitch our office manager and Or (her talented violinist daughter) who was her right hand in handling, registering and organizing the hundreds of submissions we have received. I am grateful to you all.
I now invite Dr. Meir Steinbock to briefly present the Winnicott center and we can begin:
Rachel Blass
Rachel Blass is a Training Analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Professor of Psychoanalysis at the University of London and formerly a professor at the Hebrew University where she also headed the Clinical Psychology program. She is among the editors of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and heads its Controversies Section. (She is active in the International Psychoanalytic Association and has served on its committees.)
Her writing and research, published in over 80 articles and translated into 15 languages, comes from a London-Kleinian perspective, grounded in Freud’s thinking. In her work Rachel elucidates what’s unique to the traditional psychoanalytic understanding of the person and of the therapeutic process and argues for the validity and value of this perspectives, especially in the face of contemporary challenges.
Rachel teaches, lectures and supervises extensively both in Israel and in many countries abroad.
Having lived 8 years in London, where she became actively part of the Kleinian group there (and received ongoing supervision from Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph and John Steiner), she has returned a couple of years ago to live and practice in Jerusalem.
Here are her latest publications:
Blass, R. B. (2015). Conceptualizing splitting: On the different meanings of splitting and their implications for the understanding of the person and the analytic process. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 96: 123-139.
Blass, R. B. and Carmeli, Z. (2015). Further evidence for the case against neuropsychoanalysis: How Yovell, Solms, and Fotopoulou's response to our critique confirms the irrelevance and harmfulness to psychoanalysis of the contemporary neuroscientific trend. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 96: 1555–1573.
Blass, R.B. (2015). Psychoanalytic theories as efforts to grasp the true (not fictional) nature of human reality: Commentary on Greenberg. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 63:47-63.
Blass, R. B. (2015) Introduction to “How and why unconscious phantasy and transference are the defining features of psychoanalytic practice”.International Journal of Psychoanalysis.95: 1e- 7e.
Blass, R. B. (2016) Understanding Freud’s conflicted view of the object-relatedness of sexuality and its implications for contemporary psychoanalysis: A re-examination of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 97:591-613.
Blass, R. B. (2016). Introduction to “Is the nature of psychoanalytic thinking and practice (e.g., in regard to sexuality) determined by extra-analytic social and cultural developments?” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 97:811-821.
Blass, R. B. (2016). The quest for truth as the foundation of psychoanalytic practice: A traditional, Freudian-Kleinian perspective. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 85:305-337.
Blass, R. B. (2017). The teaching of Klein: Some guidelines for opening students to the heart of Kleinian thinking and practice. In K. Long and P. Garvey (eds). The Kleinian Tradition. London: Karnac Press.
Blass, R. B. (2017). Bion as a Kleinian: An elaboration of the phantasy of the mind in “Attacks on linking”. In E. O’Shaughnessy and C. Bronstein (eds) Attacks on Linking Revisited. London: Karnac Press.
Blass, R. B. (2017). Du fantasme de séduction à la foi : la lutte de Freud avec le doute et la conviction au sujet de la vérité de ses idées comme prémisse d’une approche psychanalytique de la connaissance. In A. Abella & G. Dejussel (eds.) Conviction, Suggestion, Séduction. Paris : PUF.
Blass, R. B. (2017). Reflections on Klein’s radical notion of phantasy and its implications for analytic practice. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Blass, R. B. (in press). Psychoanalytic thinking on religious truth and conviction. In M. Lacewing & R. Gipps (eds). Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Blass, R. B. (in press). The analytic denial of Freud’s struggle with the understanding of Dora: Simplifying the Oedipus complex and the process of its adoption. In H. Westerink & D. Finzi (eds). Dora-Gender-Hysteria. Vienna: Freud Museum.
Blass, R. B. (in press). Committed to a single model and open to reality. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
