Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

175 Pages·2018·3.304 MB·English

by  Christopher Bollas

Meaning and
Melancholia
Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment
sees Christopher Bollas apply his creative and innovative
psychoanalytic thinking to various contemporary social,
cultural and political themes.
This book offers an incisive exploration of powerful trends
within, and between, nations in the West over the past two
hundred years. The author traces shifts in psychological forces
and “frames of mind” that have resulted in a crucial “intellec-
tual climate change”. He contends that recent decades have
seen rapid and significant transformations in how we define
our “selves”, as a new emphasis on instant connectedness has
come to replace reflectiveness and introspection.
Bollas argues that this trend has culminated in the
current rise of psychophobia; a fear of the mind and a rejec-
tion of depth psychologies that have paved the way for hate-
based solutions to world problems, such as the victory of
Trump in America and Brexit in the United Kingdom. He
maintains that, if we are to counter the threat to democracy
posed by these changes and re-find a more balanced concept
of the self within society, we must put psychological insight
at the heart of a new kind of analysis of culture and society.
This remarkable, thought-provoking book will appeal to
anyone interested in politics, social policy and cultural studies,
and in the gaining of insight into the ongoing challenges faced
by the global community.
Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst and former pro-
fessor of English. His last book was When the Sun Burst: The
Enigma of Schizophrenia.

Meaning and Melancholia
Life in the Age of
Bewilderment
Christopher Bollas
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Christopher Bollas
The right of Christopher Bollas to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-49742-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-49753-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-01850-0 (ebk)
Typeset in New Century Schoolbook
by Keystroke, Nevill Lodge, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton
The story I have to tell is the history of the next two
centuries . . .
For a long time now our whole civilization has been
driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade
to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly,
violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring
the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed
fearful of reflection . . . Where we live, soon nobody will
be able to exist.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xv
Prologue xvii
1 The search for meaning 1
2 The Great War and the manic moment 7
3 The crash 14
4 Human character changes 23
5 Fractured selves 30
6 Normopathy and the compound syndrome 41
7 Transmissive selves 48
8 New forms of thinking 58
9 Resuscitation 67
10 Anti-globalization 73
11 The democratic mind 79
12 “I hear that . . .” 93
13 Paranoia 99
14 Ideology 113
15 The pieces of the puzzle 119
References 131
Index 137
Preface
The disturbing victory of Donald Trump in America, the vote
for Brexit in the UK, and the rise of right-wing populism in
France and Germany and white nationalism in Poland have
confounded pundits of all stripes. Whilst “we” have known of
the growth of the right for decades – hidden in plain sight
in the USA through libertarian coalitions led by billionaires
like the Koch brothers, who openly advocate the dismantling of
all aspects of government except for the military – it seems
that the new “gilded age” has taken us by surprise. Simple
financial facts – that three billionaires in the USA own as much
as the bottom half of the country1 or that the world’s eight
richest people own half of the lower half of the world’s wealth2
– now strike the popular imagination as startling.
How do we understand this form of “splitting” – between
the billionaires and the rest of the world, between those
participating in democracy and those seeking to corrupt it,
between selves who have a social conscience and those who
do not – in a time when we can rightly celebrate remarkable
advances in the sciences and technology?
Freud wrote that the opposite of love was not hate, but
indifference. But if socially conscious selves of all classes
have become indifferent to flagrant violations of economic
and human rights – thus empowering a significant portion
of the world’s population to descend into an underworld of
greed, corruption and hate – is this lassitude in fact licensed
by a form of hate?
This trend – turning the other way in the face of open
violation of social justice – is not entirely new. We see it in
PREFACE ix
the nineteenth century, in the passive acceptance of the
poverty of the working classes or of colonized selves around
the world. However, by the 1980s it is clear that Western
leadership all but abandoned social justice in favour of un-
regulated capitalism and right-wing libertarianism. Reagan’s
“trickle-down” economics could just as well have been named
“trick-down” economics, and when Margaret Thatcher ann-
ounced “there is no such thing as society”,3 she tapped into a
“me first” culture that had abandoned a commitment to social
justice.
This work attempts to address aspects of our psychology
and the states of mind in which we find ourselves – why we
have got to this point, and what we can do about it – through
tracing the history of frames of mind in the West over the last
two hundred years. Inevitably, this focus on the changing
unconscious factors in group psychology will leave out much
else in our history, and this book will not attempt to summarize
the intellectual history of the West. It is, however, an attempt
to identify, trace and discuss the underlying psychological
issues that have contributed to this crisis in the West and
around the world. The aim is to offer a vocabulary and a set
of perspectives that may set the stage for different types of
conversation about our predicament.
The book therefore requests a negative capability on the
part of the reader, a willing suspension of disbelief perhaps,
as I write about cultural phenomena in a way that may often
seem removed from thorough and detailed historical consid-
erations. Broad intellectual histories tend to elicit a response
of “now wait a minute, what about x?”, and there are always
exceptions to any general statement. I must therefore ask
the reader to concentrate on the ideas that are presented,
and to forgive what is not included.
I shall refer now and then to how “we” – as members of
the Western world – have felt over generations. This may
seem to be a royal “we”, and of course no such being actually
exits. It is intended as a trope to address the Zeitgeist –
feelings generated in the population by the issues of life
within Western culture. I shall follow the view of the demo-
cratic process set out by John Stuart Mill in “On Liberty”, as
it applies to the world of “reflective persons”. This is a person