E-Book Overview
Each person invests many of the objects in his life with his or her own unconscious meaning, each person subsequently voyages through an environment that constantly evokes the self's psychic history. Taking Freud's model of dreamwork as a model for all unconscious thinking, Christopher Bollas argues that we dreamwork ourselves into becoming who we are, and illustrates how the analyst and the patient use such unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this foundation, he goes on to describe some very special forms of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and bathes and the demented ferocity of the facist state of mind. An original interpreter of classical theory and clinical issues, in <EM>Being a Character Christopher Bollas takes the reader into the very texture of the psychoanalytic process.
E-Book Content
BEING A CHARACTER Being a Character shows how each person unconsciously invests the ordinary objects of life with very particular and private meaning. As each person subsequently voyages through the environment he or she encounters objects that are already laden with previously invested meaning and in this sense the individual is evoked by encounters with objects. Taking Freud's theory of the dream work as a model for all unconscious thinking, Bollas argues that we dream work ourselves into becoming who we are, and he illustrates how the analyst and the patient use unconscious processes to develop new psychic structures that the patient can use to alter his or her self experience. Building on this ground, the latter part of the book describes very special kinds of self experience, including the tragic madness of women cutting themselves, the odd experience of a cruising homosexual in bars and baths, the demented ferocity of the Fascist state of mind, and every person's self experience as a member of his or her historical epoch. He includes a seminal chapter on the Oedipus Complex, arguing that Sophocles and Freud point to an entirely different "resolution" to this complex than heretofore argued in any of the schools of psychoanalytic thought. The main purpose of Being a Character is to rethink the nature of the individual's creation of a lived environment. The author draws on his clinical experience as well as the notebooks and writings of poets, scientists, painters, sculptors and anthropologists to support his view that each person dreams him- or herself into existence and walks about henceforth in his or her own private dream.
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"In this extraordinary book, Bollas depicts how the unconscious enters into the experience of self and structures the meaning of our inanimate and human environments. For Bollas, the self can be a generative asylum that allows the individual to play with and sample aspects of reality. With great skill and charm Bollas brings a fresh perspective to many central issues in psychoanalysis such as character formation and the creative process. Being a Character demonstrates again that Bollas is among the most original of contemporary psychoanalytic authors." Arnold H. Modell, M.D. "Being a Character is an extraordinarily rich and original book about what human subjectivity feels like, how it makes a world, how the world makes it... Christopher Bollas is one of the most stimulating and useful writers about psychology working in the English language today." Robert Hass "An original interpreter of the Winnicottian legacy, Christopher Bollas brilliantly illuminates the realm of psychic creativity - the individual making of meaning. Few other psychoanalytic writers have been able to range so widely between conscious and unconscious, theory and subjective experience, reflection and emotion." Jessica Ben