The Christopher Bollas Reader

by Christopher Bollas

I believe that much of the time a patient’s passivity, wordlessness or expectation that the analyst knows what to do is not a resistance to any particular conscious or preconscious thought, but a recollection of the early pre-verbal world of the infant being with mother.

Unless we recognize that psychoanalysts share in the construction of this pre-verbal world through the analyst’s silence, empathic thought and the total absence of didactic instruction, we are being unfair to the patient and he may have reason to be perplexed and irritated.

Unless we can grasp that as psychoanalysts we are enacting this early paradigm, we continue to act out Freud’s blindness in the countertransference.

the psya sjtuation is where Freuds ct blindspot can b seen...

Transformation does not mean gratification. Growth is only partially promoted by gratification, and one of the mother’s transformative functions must be to frustrate the infant.

How do you find #OptimalFrustration to promote growth? Who grows more, child or caregiver?

Extractive introjection occurs when one person steals for a certain period of time (from a few seconds or minutes, to a lifetime) an element of another individual’s psychic life.

vs projective identification its opposite

B is a student in a class. This can be as either a five-year-old or a twenty-five-year-old. The teacher, A. is knowledgeable and intense. Ordinarily, B is quite capable of representing his views coherently. But A does not permit this. He continually finds flaws in B’s arguments and attempts to present a coherent point of view. B becomes rather confused and perplexed. He is less articulate. The less articulate B is, the more aggressively coherent and knowledgeable A is. Gradually A assumes the total function of critical thought, as B simply provides the material for A’s superior thinking. This procedure is in the nature of an extractive introjection, since A takes into himself what was partly B’s ability, the capacity to think clearly and to put thoughts into words.

post to google for nvchs

B is alone in his room mulling over certain private internal issues. A arrives in a euphoric mood. What is the matter, A inquires of B. B tells A something of what is on his mind. A extracts the elements of B’s concerns and with great speed and intensity organizes B’s private concerns into a false coherence. The more A organizes B’s state of mind into ‘meaning’ the less B feels in contact with himself and, if A is a manic personality, B may gradually begin to feel dulled and inert, since he is left to carry the split-off deadness that typifies the other aspect of A’s personality. In this example, we can see how extractive introjection and projective identification may work together. As A extracts B’s sense of inner workings, he deposits in its place a split-off element of his own personality: a deadness.

excelldnf examples for worksbeets

the intersubjective process which I have termed extractive introjection,

relational psya understanding

When the structure of guilt is removed by a critical parent, the person will feel anxiety but will have little sense of sorrow, empathy and reparation. He will never be able ‘to make good’.

who do not over time use what they steal to dominate or control a person. The theft is quick, fleeting and empty. I believe we can differentiate between four types of extractive introjection: the theft of mental content, the theft of the affective process, the theft of mental structure, and the theft of self.

vengefulness of this kind is a bitter and agitated despair that constitutes a form of unconscious mourning, as if the loss can only be undone by the law of talion:

We may distinguish the paranoia that develops as a result of parental extractions of the child’s psyche from the dynamically projective paranoia by examining the nature of the transference and the countertransference.

too relational as a topic but he is highlighting the t~ct matrix as a study of parallel process

The patient seeks to recover his mind and, as the analyst helps him to think and to repossess affects, mental processes and ultimately psychic structure, the analysand responds to the analyst’s transformational function with something like object hunger, and eventually love.

a particular drive to be normal, one that is typified by the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity in favour of a self that is conceived as a material object among other man-made products in the object world. We are attending an increasing number of disturbances in personality which may be characterized by partial deletions of the subjective factor. Therefore, we write of ‘blank selves’ (Giovacchini, 1972), ‘blank psychoses’ (Donnet and Green, 1973), and an ‘organizing personality’ (Hedges, 1983).

Normotic personality The fundamental identifying feature of this individual is a disinclination to entertain the subjective element in life,

if the evolution towards becoming a normotic personality is successful, he lives contentedly among material objects and phenomena.

In this sense, 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.

what bout zombies? R was different. bu general zombies

children be normal and they do not wish them to act in a way that could be construed as inappropriate or odd. So the child is rewarded for being good, where good means ordinary, and he is ignored or threatened for being imaginative, particularly if this is expressed in social settings.

The child might perhaps be encouraged to become an athlete, and the father could decide that throwing a football is the way to go about it. Exercising such ritualized and available activities is another example of the child accommodating to a preexisting form set up by others. They do not depend on the child’s imaginative life, although children may still endeavour to imagine themselves being football heroes, or the like. Such children, although they may engage in sundry outdoor activities, all of which are quite physically and educationally stirring, participate in a life that becomes an alternative to living from the core of the self.

The child’s creative invention of life is not encouraged.

Discharges of mental life are favoured over articulated elaborations that require symbolic processes and real communication.

could also be used to talk about the problem of dischsrg

Sexual promiscuity amongst homosexuals has the character of a material phenomenon, and is in part an inverted representation of the normotic illness.

In the clinical situation, some of the more common forms of ex-corporation are the occasions when a patient coughs, or yawns, or taps the couch or sighs.

abnormally normal.

In time, however, the patient not only accustoms himself to this dismantling of his discourse, but soon joins in the process. Analyst and patient then engage in a mutual destruction of manifest texts to voice the latent thoughts of the repressed unconscious.

does it have to b so harsh a process?

If the dismantling of the dream’s manifest text illuminates the analytical side of the psychoanalytic process, the articulating of the transference exemplifies the elaborative factor.

Winnicott wrote of a ‘natural evolution of the transference’ and suggested that this process should not be disrupted by the ‘making of interpretations’. He did not mean that the analyst should not interpret: he meant that the analyst should not be engaged in making interpretations.

By stressing the making of interpretation as disruptive, he acknowledged that sometimes we feel obliged to make an interpretation because we imagine this to be our task as analysts. And the ‘making’ of an interpretation may preoccupy the analyst for the better part of a session, interfering with his more receptive frame of mind.

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The analyst’s task here, at least as Winnicott viewed it, is to give the patient time to establish and articulate his internal world.

The true self and the use of the object By allowing the patient to use him as an object in the transference, Winnicott facilitated the establishment of self states, many of which had only been a possibility. He understood the analytic situation to be a potential space. Its potential was largely the analyst’s creation. If the analyst was inattentive to the patient’s need to create his own transference object, then analytic practice, of sorts, existed, but one could not speak of potential space.

There is a difference between talking about the mother, the father, and former child selves, and being the mother or father or a child self. Only by being someone or something is the patient able to establish elements of the self in psychoanalysis.

In lovemaking, foreplay begins as a act of relating. Lovers attend to mutual erotic interests. As the economic factor increases, this element of love-making will recede somewhat (though not disappear) as the lovers surrender to that ruthlessness inherent in erotic excitement. This ruthlessness has something to do with a joint loss of consciousness, a thoughtlessness which is incremental to erotic intensity. It is a necessary ruthlessness as both lovers destroy the relationship in order to plunge into reciprocal orgasmic use. Indeed the destruction of relationship is itself pleasurable and the conversion of relating to using transforms ego libido into increased erotic drive.

If we view this from a certain perspective, then it’s possible to say that through my willingness to be used as an object, announced in some respects through a very slight though different playfulness in my orientation to his presence, the patient was able to invent me anew in the sessions. As I desisted from interpreting the content of his imagining and instead simply took pleasure in his inventions, I believe I created a certain freedom for him to play without such activity being prematurely moved into the domain of analytical reflection.

great example of modern psyhoanalysis

The analytic process, then, becomes a procedure for the establishment and elaboration of one’s idiom rather than simply the deconstruction of material or the analytic mapping of mental processes and the fate of internal objects.

Although the child’s first response to a severe environmental impingement is an important part of the formation of a trauma, it is with its ‘second’ occurrence, upon a reawakening in consciousness, that its truly disturbing nature is revealed. Not only burdened by memories of the actual event, the person now feels inhabited by it from within the psyche–soma. Originally an externally sponsored shock, it becomes intrapsychically organized and incessantly reasserts itself. Intrapsychically sponsored eruptions of emotional turbulence emphasize the true helplessness, confusion, and isolation of the traumatized, echoing something of the child’s original aloneness.

great example of trauma

In this chapter I shall allow the work of repression to become part of a broadened view of trauma, insofar as repressed contents denude the self of representational freedom, bind unwanted ideas, and feel endangering to the self.

great definition o trauma

The clinician working with the analysand’s receptive unconscious activity will sense that the patient is withdrawing ideas, feelings, or memories from narrative representation and selectively from consciousness in order to work upon them from within the unconscious, without the premature expression in consciousness

Poincaré would not have reached his discovery without many hours of labor. Nor would he have achieved this breakthrough if he had not tolerated his ignorance, which I liken in the psychoanalytic situation to the capacity to tolerate not knowing what one is doing, so that uncertainty becomes a useful feature to the private work of the receptive process.4

Certain analysands are for a long time only traumatized by psychoanalysis, a fact which must be respected and which inevitably invites us to continuously rethink technique.

book

The patient understood the interpretation and spoke of his inclination to damage his relationships by isolating features of the other person or by remembering only unpleasant experiences, thus collecting part experiences into a traumatic gestalt.

I think it is highly likely, however, that such introjective epiphanies are the outcome of substantial unconscious work that preceded them.

Derived from the Latin intuitus, the past participle of intueor, to look at, its root suggests that intuition is a looking at or viewing of a phenomenon. Webster defines it as ‘the direct knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning; immediate apprehension or understanding.’

I would argue that intuition is a form of desire associated with the ego’s notion of what to look at, what to look for, and how to do both beneficially.

Unlike the patient, who is often dynamically driven not to discover such latent thoughts, the analyst is professionally motivated to find them, which in some respects he will do by collaborating with the analysand’s wishes and defenses through concordant internal associations which allow him to internally ‘feel’ the outlines of the patient’s emotions, internal objects, ego defenses, and unconscious ideas.

How do we know such moments which Dennis Duncan (1990) calls ‘the feel of the session’? Is it possible to gain this understanding through psychoanalytic training? Certainly it helps when we learn how to be quiet and listen. Is knowledge of this ability to be found in the texts on ego psychology or object relations or theories of the subject? How could it be? And yet, knowing how to follow the analysand’s moods in the session – dispositions that punctuate the hour with significance – is one of the most important clinical skills the analyst can possess. I think the ability to move into the

Kleinian psychoanalysts frequently refer in their literature to the ‘killing off’ of those parts of the self, thereby emphasizing the factor of murder as an ordinary feature of intrapsychic life.

When Michael Dukakis tried to introduce complex issues in the American presidential campaign of 1988, George Bush made the word ‘liberal’ a sign of weakness visited upon the certain mind by doubt and complexity. To supplement his destruction of the symbolic order Bush made the American flag the sign of the difference between Dukakis and himself; sadly, it signified the end of discourse and the presence of an emergent Fascist frame of mind.

Gaia was the founding god of all the gods and mankind. She was a kind of primordial element who gave birth to Uranus without coupling with a male, and then coupled with Uranus to propagate the gods. Greek mythology is in large part the saga of conflict between men and women.

The audience also knew of a legend that Tiresias had once seen two snakes coupling and had intervened to kill the female. He was immediately turned into a woman and could only regain his masculinity some seven years later when he returned to kill the male serpent. Indeed, he was responsible for a small war between Hera and Zeus, who were quarreling over which sex gained the greater pleasure in intercourse. They called for Tiresias to settle the matter, as he had been both a man and a woman. He infuriated Hera by claiming that the woman had the greater pleasure,

The adolescent feels the anguish of the shifting internal representations of self and other, just as he or she also lives inside a peer group that vividly announces the precarious nature of group dynamics. At a time of psychobiological growth, there is a re-emergence of transformed regressions, as the adolescent seeks deep first loves that provide sexual and emotional gratification, just as finding some way to be liked, to become one of the group, is an effort to overcome the anxiety generated by group life. By transforming the intrinsic nature of the group into a falsely organized peer culture, adolescent groups are like gangs congregated to fight the anxieties of groups themselves! As time passes, as anxieties diminish, as the fruits of complexity are appreciated – particularly the value of diverse perspectives – the need for group bonding wanes, as does the urge for intense symbiotic puppy loves.