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The Freudian Moment is the sort of sliver of a book that invites us to read it in an afternoon, and return to it again and again, each time unfolding a deeper layer of meaning. It is written as an interview between Christopher Bollas and Vincenzo Bonaminio, and is the result of various lectures at the Italian Psychoanalytic group in Rome, as well as several international conferences. What begins as a conversation between Bollas and Bonaminio gives way to a series of essays meant to deepen the ideas presented in their dialogue. This format is easy on the reader, and it involves us into a similar conversation with the author throughout its five chapters.
Bollas's intent in this book is to revisit Freud, and psychoanalysis at its most basic and profound logic. He asks us to revisit what is unique, and ultimately therapeutic about psychoanalysis: the power of free association, the conditions which allow for it, and the necessity for a theory which is strong enough to be pluralistic in its perception and in its weaving together of various schools of thought without losing the “psychoanalytic” in it. This is the Freud that none of us can or should forget regardless of our allegiance to other orientations.
Bollas begins by explaining the “Freudian Moment” as the arrival of psychoanalysis to answer a phylogenetic need: to provide a needed explanation of human motivation and human relations. Psychoanalysis is heralded as the (only) means to analyze our destructive mental processes, and is thus born of necessity in order to prevent our self-extinction. This is quite a claim, and aside from getting our attention, it squarely situates psychoanalysis as one of the most important ideological developments of the century.