Meaning and Melancholia Quotes

“Unfortunately, paranoid retreat from complexity fates the paranoid to live within an increasingly isolated enclave, even if they are joined by millions of fellow recluses. In retreat from all who do not share the paranoid’s vision of reality, he regards others as “aliens” who threaten the hegemony of paranoia. Indeed, anyone with other ideas is a migrant seeking to cross the borders of the mind. They must be kept out at all costs because they threaten the paranoid’s construction of a defensive identity. This has been effective in providing the paranoid self with a powerful and pleasurable sense of cohesion in a world that otherwise seems contaminated by its opposite: by plurality.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“Sight replaces insight. Visual experiences are sought as truths-in-themselves in a world that displaces language with images. The production, transmission and consumption of images are all accomplished with remarkable speed: a form of thinking I am terming sightophilia.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“In the absence of sufficient stimulating and novel experiences, the self gradually loses interest in seeking the spice of life because it cannot remember what this felt like. With nothing enriching to recall, memory itself becomes atrophied; with loss of memory other intellectual capacities dwindle, and eventually there arrives a new matrix of existential psychic positions: a general impoverishment of the ego that is accompanied by a deep and widespread depression. Their fellow compound selves may serve as a group that provides mutual admiration, but with the lack of fresh blood and fresh thinking, in the end the euphorias of success and glitter wear off. Although still surrounded by conspicuous wealth and provision, these now serve to objectify their alienation.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“The fast pace of social media and globalized interconnections and networking meant that a human response time to fast-breaking news was now redundant. With alarming political and environmental conflicts on the horizon, the fear of our inadequacy left us bewildered, and many sought refuge in identification with the system, as transmissive selves. The psychology of the millennial generation aimed to shield the self from the disturbing mental contents of national and world events by becoming part of the machinery that delivered the content.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“Eventually the sense of seeking, and being looked after by, a caretaking other permeates the relationship of our self to our mind. We look to our mind to help us sort out an infinity of problems, guiding our self (consciousness) through the complex matrix of everyday life and its transcendental spin-offs – reveries, inspirations, and the dreams to follow that night. This suggests that the search for meaning has always been connected with the renewing rediscovery,throughout our existence, of a form of love – the loved self –that was there in the beginning of our lives.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“There is a collective mourning currently endemic in Western cultures, and further afield, and this involves a loss of belief in cherished values and standards. When societies have been strongly identified with lost beliefs, this can cause a collective loss of sense of self. It seems that the catastrophes of the twentieth century may have left much of the world in the ideological equivalent of a clinical depression.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“The late twentieth century has been characterized as witness to the death of language (“linguisticide”), giving way to sign-systems of shared emotiveness, platitudes, clichés, and so forth. In this era of anodyne speech, to re-find more sophisticated uses of language is to empower the self as it turns towards the tasks of introspection. To discover, or rediscover, the pleasure of language constitutes an important emotional experience; verbal articulation releases suffocated affects and emotions that have been buried, foreclosed and compromised by degraded forms of thinking and a loss of interest in speech itself.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“It seems we are being asked to assume a role as part of the function of the network, indeed, to identify with it in order to reverse our initial passive position into an active one. If the constant presentation of new transmissive objects makes us anxious, one solution is to reverse the anxiety proactively, by eagerly awaiting the new transmissive object so that we can be “ahead of the game”. Indeed, if our next role is announced to us some months ahead of time, with the prospect of new technological inventions already providing a heads-up as to expected functional changes, we can be in role as soon as the commodity appears.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“We distinguish, then, between our substantive self, a content that we transmit to others, and our formative self, who is the communicator, the vehicle of such dissemination. We may not like to think of ourselves as equivalent to iPads, smartphones and the like, but we have become extensions of these objects as much as they are extensions of us. In this respect we are now vital parts of the form-world of transmissive devices: indeed, when we upgrade these devices we also upgrade ourselves.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“We distinguish, then, between our substantive self, a content that we transmit to others, and our formative self, who is the communicator, the vehicle of such dissemination. We may not like to think of ourselves as equivalent to iPads, smartphones and the like, but we have become extensions of these objects as much as they are extensions of us. In this respect we are now vital parts of the form-world of trans- missive devices: indeed, when we upgrade these devices we also upgrade ourselves.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“Although the rest of the population came nowhere near this standard of luxury, the ethos of life in the compound spread insidiously across the upper middle class. It was no longer necessary to visit retail outlets; now anything people desired for material comfort could be simply ordered and delivered. Professionals would provide in-home visits: there was rarely a need to venture into the outside world. When people dined out or visited the theatre or cinema, they remained inside an unconscious envelope derived from the compound culture. They walked amongst the ordinary folks of their cities like tourists who found the lives of the locals “interesting” or “amusing” or “sad”; a sort of moral compensation for dissociated indifference.
In time, however, some of these compound selves began to suffer from a paradoxical internal situation: they had everything, yet it gave them little.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“The repressed refers to specific mental contents that have been banished from consciousness; the oppressed refers to human thinking that has been forced to become suspended or distorted. Whereas a repressed thought can return to consciousness through the re-routing of ideas, the oppressed involves an alteration, not in the contents of the mind, but in its capacities; it compromises the mental process that would have constructed the thought to begin with, producing a cumulative degradation of perception, thinking and communication. The repressed, therefore, re- sides in the unconscious as the successful work of censorship; the oppressed is also to be found in the unconscious but as a failed effort, bearing the trace of what might have been ideationally created.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment

“Live in fragments no longer” alludes to a psychological catastrophe in selves who no longer feel internally integrated. Their inner life – as opposed to what they may say to others –is fragmented because a psychic division has occurred between feeling and speech. It is a rift felt most acutely in our inner narratives as we speak lived experience to our self.”
― Christopher Bollas, Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment