Rachel Blass: A View on Transference Interpretation from a Freudian–Kleinian Perspective — and Why Only This Can Bring About Change

In contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, transference interpretation remains both the most fundamental and the most contested of analytic techniques. While much of the field has expanded toward relational, intersubjective, and mentalization-based models, Rachel Blass insists on returning to the classical question: what is the specific agent of transformation in analysis? Her answer — grounded in the Freudian–Kleinian lineage — is both simple and radical: only the interpretation of transference can bring about genuine analytic change, because only it addresses the unconscious mode of relating that sustains the patient’s suffering.

Transference as the Repetition of an Internal World

Freud’s insight that the patient “does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out” (Remembering, Repeating and Working Through, 1914g) finds its clinical continuation in the Kleinian understanding of the transference as the externalization of internal object relations. Melanie Klein (1952) saw the analytic situation as the stage upon which the patient’s internal world is re-enacted in the here-and-now of the analytic relationship.

Rachel Blass, building on this tradition, emphasizes that transference is not merely an interpersonal phenomenon or a repetition of past attachment patterns — it is the manifestation of unconscious phantasy, of the patient’s psychic reality. To interpret transference is therefore not to describe relational patterns but to illuminate the unconscious meanings and anxieties that structure those patterns.

“Transference interpretation is not about interpersonal understanding. It is the uncovering of the unconscious meaning that organizes the patient’s relation to the analyst, and through this, his relation to reality.”
(Blass, 2015, p. 88)

The Freudian–Kleinian Perspective on Change

From this standpoint, psychoanalytic change is not achieved through empathy, insight, or relational repair alone. For Blass, understanding in analysis is not the patient’s intellectual grasp of motives but a deeper reorganization of unconscious fantasy. The analytic interpretation, particularly of transference, confronts the patient with the psychic reality that sustains his suffering.

Freud had already described this dynamic: “The transference… becomes the battlefield on which all the forces struggling with one another in the patient’s mind will come to cross swords.” (Freud, 1912b). Klein radicalized this by demonstrating that in analysis, primitive anxieties and phantasies are re-experienced and can be transformed only when interpreted in their living immediacy.

Blass therefore argues that the analytic situation is unique precisely because it allows for the transformation of these unconscious object relations through interpretation. Other forms of therapy may promote self-understanding, but they do not touch the unconscious level of psychic life that is reactivated in transference.

“What distinguishes psychoanalysis is not the interpretation of meaning in general, but the interpretation of meaning as it emerges in the transference — that is, meaning that expresses the unconscious relation to the analyst as object.”
(Blass, 2010, p. 104)

The Ethical Dimension of Transference Interpretation

For Blass, this position is not merely technical but ethical. To interpret transference is to take the unconscious seriously as the locus of subjectivity. It is to affirm that the patient’s suffering is not reducible to social roles, developmental deficits, or attachment patterns, but arises from the internal dramas of love, hate, guilt, and reparation that define psychic life.

This view also guards against what she sees as the dilution of psychoanalysis into relational psychology. When the analyst shifts focus from the unconscious to the interpersonal, something essential is lost — the transformative encounter with what Klein called “the depressive position,” where love and destruction, guilt and reparation, can be experienced in their full ambivalence.

Blass (2019) thus writes:

“The aim of analysis is not simply to establish new ways of relating, but to bring into consciousness the unconscious meanings that have determined one’s relation to others and to oneself. Only in this confrontation does change become analytic rather than adaptive.”
(Blass, 2019, p. 67)

Why Only Transference Interpretation Can Transform

From the Freudian–Kleinian viewpoint, the transference interpretation is the only route to true transformation because it directly addresses the unconscious logic of the patient’s psychic life. While supportive, behavioral, or even relational interventions may produce adaptation or symptom relief, only the interpretation of unconscious meaning as enacted in transference reconfigures the patient’s inner world — their unconscious relation to love, loss, and the object.

In this sense, transference interpretation does not correct the transference but allows it to unfold to its full unconscious depth, so that the patient may experience and think it anew. It is the process through which psychic reality becomes symbolically represented rather than acted.

This is why Blass, echoing both Freud and Klein, defends a rigorously interpretive stance: the analyst must not flee from the transference into empathy or shared understanding, but stay with it until its unconscious meaning emerges. Only then can the patient come to recognize the repetition as repetition — and thereby begin to live differently.

References

• Blass, R. (2010). The Role of the Unconscious in Psychoanalytic Change: A View from a Freudian–Kleinian Perspective. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91(1), 97–111.

• Blass, R. (2015). On the Specificity of Psychoanalysis: The Centrality of the Transference Interpretation.Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 35(1), 79–95.

• Blass, R. (2019). Psychoanalytic Change and the Concept of Truth. In: Psychoanalysis and the Mind: Unconscious Processes and their Manifestations. London: Routledge.

• Freud, S. (1912b). The Dynamics of Transference. SE 12.

• Freud, S. (1914g). Remembering, Repeating and Working Through. SE 12.

• Klein, M. (1952). The Origins of Transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33, 433–438.