The Christopher Bollas Reader

313 Pages·2011·2.977 MB·English

by  Christopher Bollas, Adam Phillips

1 The Christopher Bollas Reader
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3 This reader brings together a selection of seminal papers by Christopher Bollas.
4 Essays such as ‘The Fascist state of mind’, ‘The structure of evil’ and ‘The
5 functions of history’ have established his position as one of the most signifi cant
6 cultural critics of our time. Also included are examples of his psychoanalytical
7 writings, such as ‘The transformational object’ and ‘Psychic genera’, that deepen
8 and renew interest in unconscious creative processes. Two recent essays,
9 ‘Character and interformality’ and ‘The wisdom of the dream’ extend his work on
0 aesthetics and the role of form in everyday life.
1 This is a collection of papers that will appeal to anyone interested in human
2 experience and subjectivity.
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4 Christopher Bollas PhD is a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the
5 Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and Honorary
6 Member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in
7 New York.
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9 Arne Jemstedt MD is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Stockholm. He is a
0 member and training analyst of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association and its
1 current President.
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1 The Christopher Bollas
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Reader
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7 Christopher Bollas
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0 Introduction by Arne Jemstedt
1 Foreword by Adam Phillips
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First published 2011
by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
© 2011 Christopher Bollas and Arne Jemstedt
Typeset in Times by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
Cover design by Andrew Ward
Cover image: Venice 2 , painting by the author
Cover photography by Suzanne Bollas
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 identifi cation 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
Bollas, Christopher.
The Christopher Bollas Reader / by Christopher Bollas ; introduction
by Arne Jemstedt; foreword by Adam Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–415–66460–8 (hbk.: alk. paper)—
ISBN 978–0–415–66461–5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Subconsciousness. I. Title.
BF173.B6354 2011
150.19'5—dc22
2010053802
ISBN: 978–0–415–66460–8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–415–66461–5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–58107–0 (ebk)
Contents
A bout the authors vii
F oreword viii
ADAM PHILLIPS
A cknowledgements and permissions acknowledgements x
I ntroduction xii
ARNE JEMSTEDT
1 The transformational object 1
2 Extractive introjection 13
3 Normotic illness 22
4 The destiny drive 37
5 Psychic genera 57
6 The Fascist state of mind 79
7 Why Oedipus? 94
8 The functions of history 112
9 Cracking up 135
10 The structure of evil 155
11 Mental interference 178
vi Contents
12 Creativity and psychoanalysis 194 1
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13 Architecture and the unconscious 207 3
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14 What is theory? 228 5
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15 Character and interformality 238 7
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16 The wisdom of the dream 249
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B ibliography of works by Christopher Bollas 259 1
P ublications on the work of Christopher Bollas 261 1
R eferences 262 1
I ndex 267 1
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1 About the authors
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3 Arne Jemstedt MD is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Stockholm. He is a
4 member and training analyst of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association and its
5 current President. He edited the Swedish translation of Christopher Bollas’s book
6 Being a Character and has published articles and chapters on Bollas’s work in
7 Swedish and international psychoanalytic journals and books. He is a member of
8 the International Editorial Panel for the C omplete Works of D. W. Winnicott and
9 editor of Swedish translations of Winnicott’s work. He is a member of the ‘nomen-
0 clature group’ for the Swedish translation of Freud’s S tandard Edition .
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2 Christopher Bollas PhD is a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and
3 of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, and Honorary
4 Member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in
5 New York.
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Foreword 1
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Adam Phillips 4
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How can psychoanalysis stop itself becoming a version of the very thing it seeks 1
to cure? How can it avoid being a narrowing of the mind, a simplifying of the self, 1
when each of the psychoanalytic schools has an essentialist story to tell about 1
what a person is, and what a person should be? Psychoanalysis is ‘about’ the 1
unconscious, and yet psychoanalysts themselves seem to be all too conscious of 1
what they are supposed to be doing. The cost of such knowingness has been what 1
Christopher Bollas called in an interview ‘the devastating failure’ of psycho- 1
analysis, ‘the failure to comprehend the unconscious creativity of the analysand’. 2
This is the predicament addressed in these inspired and inspiring essays. 2
Once Freud encouraged people to freely associate he was so daunted by the 2
prospects opening up – by what people were able to say, by the glimpses he was 2
getting of what people were alive to, by the sheer complexity of psychic life – that 2
a great deal of theoretical containment was mobilised both in himself and his 2
followers. Over time the inevitable uncertainties of the treatment were apparently 2
resolved in the stated aims and the militant competence of the respective schools 2
(‘the worse your art is’, the poet John Ashbury said in an interview, ‘the easier it 2
is to talk about’). But psychoanalysis, as an account of how and why modern 2
people were divided against themselves, was itself excessively divisive. In its 3
brief history, outsiders have always been sceptical or dismissive, insiders have 3
always been territorial. Psychoanalysis, it seems, began as a panic from which no 3
one has been able to recover. 3
W e have to consider the possibility, as Christopher Bollas intimates, that it was 3
not ‘infantile sexuality’, or the idea of the death drive, that was so explosive (or 3
implausible) about psychoanalysis; it was the idea of people being encouraged to 3
speak freely. The essentialisms of psychoanalysis – the concepts of cure, the 3
accounts of human nature, the developmental theories – have been an attempted 3
self-cure for what the ‘method’ of free association keeps revealing: our unfathom- 3
able unconsciousness of ourselves – what Bollas refers to, alluding to King Lear 4
in one of his many winning titles, as the mystery of things. To speak freely, with 4
someone freely listening, is a radical act, at once historically unprecedented and 4
uncanny, and by defi nition unpredictable (when it comes to the unconscious, one 4
might say, outcome studies are unpromising). As Freud discovered and resisted 4
Foreword ix
1 acknowledging, free association – ‘free’ as an adjective and a verb – was the eye
2 of the storm.
3 S o it is not exactly a return to Freud that Christopher Bollas proposes in these
4 extraordinary papers – though in virtually every one he has written something
5 original and often slightly startling about Freud – but a return to free association.
6 That is, to the unfolding unconsciousness of the psychoanalytic opportunity, to
7 what he calls ‘the fact of living as an unconscious being’. And this involves, in
8 Bollas’s view, all of the available psychoanalytic approaches, as points of view,
9 perspectives, ways of seeing. It is only a more inclusive vision – not, it should be
0 said, an eclectic one – that can do justice, so to speak, to the unconscious (the
1 unconscious refers to all possible language-games). But writing in ‘the American
2 Grain’, rooted in the ordinary and the everyday – in the tradition of Emerson,
3 Melville and Whitman – Bollas never takes refuge in earnestness, in the mandarin
4 or the dogmatic; nor, indeed, in the portentous moralism that psychoanalytic
5 writing is prone to. It is what he has called ‘the surprisingly widespread disinterest
6 on the part of therapists and analysts about what the analysand is actually saying’
7 that has absorbed him. And kept him humorous.
8 The last thing analysts have wanted to think about, Bollas suggests in his
9 unusually eloquent and evocative writing, is the unconsciousness of the psycho-
0 analytic process itself; that, as he puts it, ‘the greater part of psychic change occurs
1 unconsciously, and need not enter consciousness, either in the analyst or in the
2 analysand’. Ironically, analysts have gone on wanting to know too much what
3 they are doing, when it is precisely this knowledge that pre-empts the possibilities
4 of psychoanalysis. Bollas’s work shows us that when it comes to psychoanalysis
5 there may be other things to want. ‘We hate’, Keats wrote in a famous letter,
6 ‘poetry that has a palpable design upon us.’ After reading Bollas it is clear why a
7 psychoanalysis that has a palpable design on us is a contradiction in terms. And
8 why we might hate it.
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