Kindle Notes & Highlights
How can psychoanalysis stop itself becoming a version of the very thing it seeks to cure? How can it avoid being a narrowing of the mind,
Adam Phillips on Bollas
‘the failure to comprehend the unconscious creativity of the analysand’.
#psychoanalysis struggles over knowing what it is at the cost and
the militant competence of the respective schools (‘the worse your art is’, the poet John Ashbury said in an interview, ‘the easier it is to talk about’). But psychoanalysis, as an account of how and why modern people were divided against themselves, was itself excessively divisive.
In its brief history, outsiders have always been sceptical or dismissive, insiders have always been territorial. Psychoanalysis, it seems, began as a panic from which no one has been able to recover.
Adam Phillips on Chris Bollas
We have to consider the possibility, as Christopher Bollas intimates, that it was not ‘infantile sexuality’, or the idea of the death drive, that was so explosive (or implausible) about psychoanalysis; it was the idea of people being encouraged to speak freely.
this involves, in Bollas’s view, all of the available psychoanalytic approaches, as points of view, perspectives, ways of seeing. It is only a more inclusive vision – not, it should be said, an eclectic one
‘the greater part of psychic change occurs unconsciously, and need not enter consciousness, either in the analyst or in the analysand’.
similar to Winniott, Bollas writes
Chapter Four in this volume was originally published as ‘The Destiny Drive’ (Chapter 2, pp. 23–49) in C. Bollas (1989), Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom. London: Free Association Books.
Relieved to leave the Nixon-era America behind, he looked forward to Europe as a potential space. He was struck initially by the differences he perceived between British and American analysts. ‘The English analysts were’, he says, ‘by comparison highly spontaneous, imaginative, freewheeling interpreters, and decidedly eccentric.’
his concept of ‘idiom’, which grew out of Winnicott’s theory of the ‘true self’. He also considers the ways in which the analysand uses the differing elements of the analyst’s personality, and he explores the idea that people live their lives governed either by ‘fate’, in reaction to an environment that fundamentally determines them, or by ‘destiny’, the free articulation of the self’s idiom through the creative use of objects.
In these dire, sometimes tragic, and hairraising experiences Bollas finds a dark and compelling existential humour. His five plays – ‘Theraplay’, ‘Old Friends’, ‘Apply Within’, ‘Your Object or Mine?’ and ‘Piecemeal’ – clearly hark back to the Theatre of the Absurd as the characters are presented with meaningless encounters and the precious themes of our lifetimes are presented on stage like mental props.
consider using these in class from hi book Theraplay
Bollas is currently completing China on the Mind, a book on how psychoanalysis bridges the Eastern and Western mind, and Catch Them Before They Fall, an account of his work with analysands in mental breakdown. He is also midway through a book on character analysis, and he is transcribing his notebooks, which now consist of twenty-four volumes spanning the period 1973 to the present.
It is closely linked with the idea of the Primary Process, and is, at the beginning, essentially not reactive to external stimuli, but primary.…
idiom or winnicott true self
Each individual is unique, and the true self is an idiom of organization that seeks its personal world through the use of an object
Forces of Destiny Bollas formulates a crucial difference between ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’. He links fate to the concept of the false self and reactive living and destiny to the fulfilling of one’s own inner potential.
Bollas expands the psychoanalytic understanding of object relations, contributing in particular an appreciation of what he calls ‘the integrity of the object’. By this he means the object’s intrinsic quality of being fundamentally itself, outside the sphere of projective mechanisms. There is an echo here of Winnicott’s seminal paper ‘The Use of an Object’ in which he describes the child’s joyful discovery of the object’s authentic realness, outside the realm of the child’s omnipotence, as a result of the object’s survival of ‘maximum destructiveness (object not protected)’ (1969: 91).
We may consciously search out such objects, but often we seek them intuitively, led by some unconscious idea or wish, and sometimes they arrive by chance.
With words such as ‘proto-nucleations’, ‘generative chaos’ and ‘psychic gravity’, Bollas conveys a picture of an unconscious, dynamic cosmos.
The psychoanalytic situation, with its open-ended and non-directive conscious and unconscious communication between analysand and analyst, enables the formation of new psychic genera. For this to happen, both participants need to be able to respond intuitively, to perceive subtle inner shifts and unexpected links in the flow of associations. It is significant that Bollas frequently compares these psychoanalytic processes with descriptions given by both artists and scientists of their experiences of creativity.
Thus, genera are the outcome of symbolic elaborations, while the effects of trauma are symbolic repetition and stagnation.
not so much the psychopathology of everyday life as the psychocreativity
the beginning of psychoanalysis. Only the passing of time will determine the value of any particular theory and some models which seemed assured of perpetuity … will be abandoned, even by their most avid supporters. What will not change is the deeply evocative effect of the psychoanalytic situation and its method.
‘Two Encyclopaedia Articles’, written in 1923, Freud issues instructions to both participants in what Bollas terms ‘the Freudian Pair’. Freud describes the task of the analysand thus: The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back any idea from communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is
...more
‘It is strange’, an analysand told me many years ago, ‘that so much can happen just because you lie down on a couch and talk.’
Freud continues with advice for the clinician: Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytic physician could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspended attention, to avoid so far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious expectations, not to try to fix anything he heard particularly in his memory, and by these means to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious. (1923: 239)
In the first, the analyst receives the analysand’s chains of associations, not knowing where they might lead, listening to them with dreamlike attentiveness. He may remain silent for a long time until something in the analysand’s communications alerts him: a word with a special ring, maybe, or a link to a dream from yesterday or from several months ago. The analyst does not have to be overly explicit: he may simply repeat the word (what Bollas calls the ‘Freudian echo’) or point to the link in order to facilitate the process.
A second and different way of listening focuses more directly on the relationship between analysand and analyst. The analyst listens with an ear tuned especially towards conscious and unconscious references to him/herself in the analysand’s narrative. In other words, he pays particular attention to transference material.
2nd type o listening transference conmjnicatjon
Bollas has developed his arguments on this issue in various texts, and most vigorously in ‘On Transference Interpretation as a Resistance to Free Association’ from The Freudian Moment (2007).
the] presence in contemporary literature and film of the human who is revealed to be a robot is a recognition of this personality type emerging in our culture. Such representations are less descriptive of the future of robots than they are accurate prognostications of a personality disorder that is already with us.’ This state of mind is characterised by a deadening of the complexity of inner life and a flight to material objects in the external world.
on narcissism
akin to the workings of the death instinct in Freud’s original sense: the drive to rid the psyche of tension and to undo psychically meaningful connections.
there is indeed a highly identifiable psychic profile for this personal state’ and at the end he describes ‘the genocide of everyday life’, where subtle distortions, caricature and denigration of opponents, groups or people might pave the way for Fascist movements.
Bollas’s works are not textbooks; he does not set out to teach. Instead he invites the reader to take part in a fascinating exploration of the mind, of the complexities of our interaction with the world around us, and of what it means to be a human being.
Winnicott (1963b) terms this comprehensive mother the ‘environment’ mother because, for the infant, she is the total environment. To this I would add that the mother is less significant and identifiable as an object than as a process that is identified with cumulative internal and external transformations. I wish to identify the infant’s first subjective experience of the object as a transformational object, and this chapter will address will address the trace in adult life of this early relationship.
it all start with infancy, and is libibinal satisfaction that lays roots (neurons) for future character
Winnicott (1963b) terms this comprehensive mother the ‘environment’ mother because, for the infant, she is the total environment. To this I would add that the mother is less significant and identifiable as an object than as a process that is identified with cumulative internal and external transformations. I wish to identify the infant’s first subjective experience of the object as a transformational object, and this chapter will address will address the trace in adult life of this early relationship.
note how its the process not object itself & based in the subjective #driveTheory v #objectRelation
It is an identification that emerges from symbiotic relating, where the first object is ‘known’ not so much by putting it into an object representation, but as a recurrent experience of being – a more existential as opposed to representational knowing.
in adult life, the quest is not to possess the object; rather the object is pursued in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self, where the subject-as-supplicant now feels himself to be the recipient of enviro-somatic caring, identified with metamorphoses of the self.
our search to b cared for is a search to be altered?
With the infant’s creation of the transitional object, the transformational process is displaced from the mother-environment (where it originated) into countless subjective-objects, so that the transitional phase is heir to the transformational period, as the infant evolves from experience of the process to articulation of the experience.
The search for such an experience may generate hope, even a sense of confidence and vision, but although it seems to be grounded in the future tense, in finding something in the future to transform the present, it is an object-seeking that recurrently enacts a pre-verbal ego memory. It is usually on the occasion of an aesthetic moment, that an individual feels a deep subjective rapport with an object (a painting, a poem, an aria or symphony, or a natural landscape) and experiences an uncanny fusion with the object, an event that re-evokes an ego state that prevailed during early psychic life.
Its intensity as an object relation is not due to the fact that this is an object of desire, but to the object being identified with such powerful metamorphoses of being.
i enjoy his thought that it is a search for transformatiin could transformation be an underlying issue for trannies
We develop faith in a deity whose absence, ironically, is held to be as important a test of man’s being as his presence. We go to the theatre, to the museum, to the landscapes of our choice, to search for aesthetic experiences. We may imagine the self as the transformational facilitator, and we may invest ourselves with capacities to alter the environment that are not only impossible but embarrassing on reflection. In such daydreams the self as transformational object lies somewhere in the future tense, and even ruminative planning about the future (what to do, where to go, etc.) is often a
...more
#Bollas is a poet
The gambler’s game is that transformational object which is to metamorphose his entire internal and external world. A criminal seeks the perfect crime to transform the self internally (repairing ego defects and fulfilling id needs) and externally (bringing wealth and happiness). Some forms of erotomania may be efforts to establish the other as the transformational object.
Outstanding examples.
He was to remain the golden larva, the unborn hero, who, if he did not shatter mythic function with personal needs, would soon be delivered into a world of riches and fame beyond his imagination.
In the transference Peter spoke of himself as an object in need of care: ‘my stomach hurts’, ‘I have a pain in my neck’, ‘I have a cold’, ‘I don’t feel well’. He spoke to me in the language of sighs, groans, and a haunting laughter which served his need to be emptied of agitated desire and to elicit my acute attention. He rubbed his hands, looked at his fingers, flopped his body around as if it were a sack. As I came to realize that this was not obsessive rumination which served as a resistance, but a secret discourse recalled from the culture of his earliest relations to his mother, he found
...more
Such a good example of seeing the action in the session.
Peter’s language, which I shared in the beginning of the analysis, reflected the terms of a minimally transformative mother. Later, when Peter would invite me to become a simple accomplice in the mother’s transformational idiom, I would refuse such transformations (such as the golden larva myth) in favour of achievable transformations.
wkuld you?
In analysis this can result in the patient’s almost total inability to relate to the analyst as a real person, while at the same time maintaining an intense relation to the analyst as a transformational object. What is the patient trying to establish?
they can become enchanted by it, and may appear oblivious to the actual content of the interpretation so long as the song of the analytic voice remains constant.
Some clinicians might regard this use of the analyst as a resistance, but if so, I think we overlook the undeniably unique atmosphere we create for relating. The very offer of treatment invites regressive longings in many patients. Placing the patient on the couch further induces a sense of anxious expectation and dependency. Our reliability, our unintrusiveness, our use of empathic thought to meet the requirements of the analysand, are often more maternal than was the actual mother’s care.
In the treatment of the narcissistic, borderline and schizoid characters, this phase of the analysis is both necessary and inevitable.
regression to pre Oedipal
He was waiting for an eventual session when I would suddenly emerge with the proper solution for him, and in an instant remedy his life. I have come to regard this part of his analysis as that kind of regression which is a re-enactment of the earliest object experience, and I think it is folly for an analyst to deny that the culture of the analytic space does indeed facilitate such recollections.
the patient is relating to the transformational object, that is, experiencing the analyst as the environment-mother, a pre-verbal memory that cannot be cognized into speech that recalls the experience, but only into speech that demands its terms be met: unintrusiveness, ‘holding’, ‘provision’, insistence on a kind of symbiotic or telepathic knowing, and facilitation from thought to thought or from affect to thought. In these sessions, then, the primary form of discourse is a clarification which the patient experiences as a transformative event. Interpretations which require reflective thought
...more
