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Christopher Bollas | |
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| Born | 1943 (age 80–81) Washington D.C., United States |
| Citizenship | United States (birth), United Kingdom (2010) |
| Known for | Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known, Idiom Needs |
| Children | 1, Sacha Bollas |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Clinical Psychoanalysis |
Christopher Bollas (born 1943) [1] is a British psychoanalyst and writer. He is a leading figure in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. [2]
Bollas was born in the United States in Washington, DC. He grew up in Laguna Beach, California, and later graduated in history from UC Berkeley in 1967. As an undergraduate Bollas studied intellectual history with Carl Schorske, and psychoanalytical anthropology with Alan Dundes. From 1967 to 1969 he trained in child counselling at the East Bay Activity Center in Oakland, California and from 1969 to 1973 he was the first graduate of the Program in Adult Psychotherapy at the University of Buffalo. At the University of Buffalo he earned a PhD in English Literature and studied with Norman Holland, Leslie Fiedler, Murray Schwartz, Michel Foucault, René Girard and with the Heideggerian psychoanalyst Heinz Lichtenstein. While at Smith College, to earn an MSW, he visited the Austen Riggs Center (where he was to become Director of Education a decade later) and met Erik Erikson who became a mentor early on in his career and was to be of singular influence for the next twenty years. He qualified in psychoanalysis at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London in 1977 and in Adult Psychotherapy from the Tavistock Clinic in 1978. Those teachers and figures whom he knew and who helped diversify his thinking were Arnold Modell, John Bowlby, Marion Milner, André Green, Herbert Rosenfeld, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Joseph J. Sandler, J.-B. Pontalis, Nina Coltart, and Paula Heimann.
Bollas was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst [3] in the middle 1980s. Concordant with his career in literary and cultural studies, Bollas has worked as a psychotherapist since 1967. His early clinical career focused on children with autism and schizophrenia. He was the first Honorary Non Medical Consultant at the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, visiting professor in psychoanalysis at the Istituto di Neuropsichiatria Infantile of the University of Rome from 1978 to 1998, Director of Education at the Austen Riggs Center from 1985 to 1988 and one of the literary editors of the works of D.W. Winnicott. He became a British citizen in 2010. [4]
Bollas is most widely known for his psychoanalytical writings and some of his ideas have had a wide dissemination; indeed, he is one of the most widely read authors in the field of psychoanalysis. [5] His theory of "the unthought known" [6] [7] —that as infants we are informed by many ideas conveyed through action rather than thinking that become part of our unconscious—has been of particular significance, although other concepts "the transformational object", "violent innocence", "extractive introjection", "psychic genera and the receptive unconscious" and "human idiom" have been widely influential in the clinical field.
In the middle 1990s in Being A Character (1992) and Cracking Up (1995) Bollas turned back to Freud's early writing—especially The Interpretation of Dreams—and argued that Freud's writing implicitly assumed a theory of unconscious perception, organisation, and creativity that Bollas integrated and used in his own radical return to Freud, arguing that psychoanalysis is primarily efficacious due to entirely unconscious processes of change. In the 21st century, in Free Association, The Evocative Object World and The Infinite Question, Bollas revived Freud's marginalised theory of free association providing evidence of how and in what ways all people think associatively, revealing—as Freud argued—through the "chain of ideas", or simply how the way people move from one topic to another reveals unconscious processes of thought. In 2010 the journalist Or Ezrati, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz , remarked: "Some people see Christopher Bollas as one of the two most important living theoreticians in the world of psychoanalysis". [8]
In Being a Character, Bollas also argued that everybody had their own idiom for life—a blend between the psychic organisation which from birth forms the self's core, and the implied logic of the familial way of relating into which we are then raised. [9]
As adults, Bollas considered we spend our time looking for objects of interest—human or material—which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life—perpetually "meeting idiom needs by securing evocatively nourishing objects". [10] Being willing to risk exposure to such transformational objects was for Bollas an essential part of a healthy life: the readiness to be metamorphosed by one's interaction with the object world. [11]
The contrast was a refusal of development and self-invention, of open-endedness: the state of psychic stagnation. Bollas saw in what he called the anti-narcissist a willed refusal to use objects for the development of his/her own idiom, and a consequent foreclosure of the true self. [12] The result can lead to what Adam Phillips called "the core catastrophe in many of Bollas's powerful clinical vignettes ... being trapped in someone else's (usually the parents') dream or view of the world". [13]
Bollas was however well aware of the converse danger of expecting too much from the role of the transformational object, especially as found within the transference. [14]
Aside from his clinical writings, Bollas is also a cultural critic and his writings have earned the interests of people outside the world of psychoanalysis. [15] He has also written three comic novels: Dark at the End of the Tunnel, I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing and Mayhem - and five plays.
An American television sitcom, Cracking Up , derived its title from Bollas' book of that title and included a main character, "Dr Bollas", played by Henry Gibson. Bollas is also among the psychoanalysts mentioned in the first series of HBO's In Treatment .[ citation needed ]
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development relating to the practice of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the psyche, and on treatment using free association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theory its characteristics.
Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.
Donald Woods Winnicott was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory and developmental psychology. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytical Society, President of the British Psychoanalytical Society twice, and a close associate of Marion Milner.
Object relations theory is a school of thought in psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalysis centered around theories of stages of ego development. Its concerns include the relation of the psyche to others in childhood and the exploration of relationships between external people, as well as internal images and the relations found in them. Adherents to this school of thought maintain that the infant's relationship with the mother primarily determines the formation of their personality in adult life. Attachment is the bedrock of the development of the self, i.e. the psychic organization that creates one's sense of identity.
Relational psychoanalysis is a school of psychoanalysis in the United States that emphasizes the role of real and imagined relationships with others in mental disorder and psychotherapy. 'Relational psychoanalysis is a relatively new and evolving school of psychoanalytic thought considered by its founders to represent a "paradigm shift" in psychoanalysis'.
Adam Phillips is a British psychoanalytic psychotherapist and essayist.
André Green was a French psychoanalyst.
Robert Douglas Hinshelwood is an English psychiatrist and academic. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. He trained as a doctor and psychiatrist. He has taken an interest in the Therapeutic Community movement since 1974, and was founding editor of The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, having edited, with Nick Manning, Therapeutic Communities: Reflections and Progress.
Mohammed Masud Raza Khan was a Pakistani-British psychoanalyst. His training analyst was Donald Winnicott. Masud Raza Khan was a protege of Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna Freud, and a long-time collaborator with Donald Winnicott.
The Independent or Middle Group of British analysts represents one of the three distinct sub-schools of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and 'developed what is known as the British independent perspective, which argued that the primary motivation of the child is object-seeking rather than drive gratification'. The 'Independent group...is strongly associated with the concept of countertransference as well as with a seemingly pragmatic, anti-theoretical attitude to psychoanalysis'.
Didier Anzieu was a distinguished French psychoanalyst.
In psychology, narcissistic withdrawal is a stage in narcissism and a narcissistic defense characterized by "turning away from parental figures, and by the fantasy that essential needs can be satisfied by the individual alone". In adulthood, it is more likely to be an ego defense with repressed origins. Individuals feel obliged to withdraw from any relationship that threatens to be more than short-term, avoiding the risk of narcissistic injury, and will instead retreat into a comfort zone. The idea was first described by Melanie Klein in her psychoanalytic research on stages of narcissism in children.
Unthought known is a phrase coined by Christopher Bollas in the 1980s to represent those experiences in some way known to the individual, but about which the individual is unable to think.
Robert Joseph Langs was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than forty books on psychotherapy and human psychology. Over the course of more than fifty years, Langs developed a revised version of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, currently known as the "adaptive paradigm". This is a distinctive model of the mind, and particularly of the mind's unconscious component, significantly different from other forms of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system that explains the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lacanian perspectives contend that the human mind is structured by the world of language, known as the Symbolic. They stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as perpetual and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate among Lacanians.
Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist. His principle theoretical contributions have been in the philosophy of the unconscious, a critique of psychoanalysis, philosophical psychology, value inquiry, and the philosophy of culture. His clinical contributions are in the areas of attachment pathology, trauma, psychosis, and psychic structure.
Patrick Casement is a British psychoanalyst and author of multiple books and journal articles on contemporary psychoanalytic technique. He has been described as a pioneer in the relational approaches to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy by Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology. His book 'Learning from Our Mistakes' received a Gradiva award for its contribution to psychoanalysis, and his book 'Learning Along the Way: Further Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy' was listed in the top 100 psychotherapy books of all time by BookAuthority.
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