The Christopher Bollas Reader Quotes

“There is an ethics of perception. Theories are not simply forms of perception. When practised they become ethical decisions.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images,’ wrote Cocteau.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“Throughout, the analysand’s speech undermines his authority; the mere fact of free association deconstructs any tragic hero’s destiny. Indeed, a patient well into analysis knows that each session has an ironic fate: one begins with a notion of what one is going to talk about, only to discover that speaking dismantles intentions and brings up unexpected material. The self that wants to master its narration is continuously slipping up in its intentions. This aspect of psychoanalysis is an entirely different world from the tragic world where blindness meets up with insight. Here the parapraxal self speaks in an absurd space, and psychoanalysis is a comic structure; the analysand is turned upside down by the intrinsic subversions of unconsciously driven speech. A patient in analysis is straight man to his unconscious, and it is a long time, if ever, before he comes to enjoy the comedy. This is true of life in general.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“By transforming the past into a history, the psychoanalyst creates a series of densely symbolic stories that will serve as ever-present dream material in the patient’s life, generating constant and continuous associations. Unlike the past, which as a signifier sits in the self as a kind of lead weight, history requires work, and when the work is done the history is sufficiently polysemous to energize many unconscious elaborations. The work of recollecting seemingly insignificant details from the past symbolically brings prior selves contained in these mnemic objects back to life – and in this way transforms debris into meaningful presence – and thus is the work of a life instinct, but ironically it also puts these past lives into a new place of destruction, for the unconscious work has a dismantling effect, as historical texts of reconstruction give birth to other ideas and contrary reflective theories, which destroy the placid aim of creating commemorative plaques to one’s new discoveries. Historical construction collects in order to retrieve the self from its many meaningless deaths – the amnesial ‘gone’ – and then it generatively destroys these details and saturates them with new meaning created through the very act of retrieval, which has given them the imaginative and symbolic energy to make this past available for the self’s future.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“Historian and psychoanalyst are experienced in the discovery of things done in the past. They know how to find hidden details, but once they are brought into the light of day, these details, although of course subject to interpretation, are too polysemous to stay in any one subjectivity’s perspective. The discoveries – when true ones – displace the finder.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader

“It is of interest that from the seventeenth century the word ‘vicious’ was used to describe a fault in logic, when a conclusion was realized by false means of reasoning. Webster’s third definition of the vicious circle cites this fault in logic: ‘an argument which is invalid because its conclusion rests upon a premise which itself depends on the conclusion.”
― Christopher Bollas, The Christopher Bollas Reader